One Sudden, Happy Moment

There are few feelings that compare with going about your life and in one sudden, happy moment — maybe you are on a sunny park bench or sharing a glass of wine with someone who delights you or falling asleep on a beach towel — you realize you are exactly where you want to be, living exactly as you always hoped.
This happened to me twice in the past two days: once, sharing a scoop of vanilla ice cream with someone I love and laughing our way down the street while the breeze blew hair into my eyes. The second time it happened, more mundanely, while walking up and down the aisles at Trader Joe’s, deciding between Spanish and Italian olive oils, a bouquet of cheap yellow flowers already in my basket. And then again, riding the bus home and staring out the window at the brewing rain clouds, the day and my movements in it seemed right. I wasn’t hosting a party, I wasn’t wearing a pretty dress. I was simply on the way back from the doctor in jeans, and bursting through the bus’s rear doors, onto the sidewalk and into pre-thunderstorm sunshine.
Is it a matter of eating well? Have all these good vibes in my brain come from all the good food in my life lately? Is it that the weather has finally turned hot and sunny here and that there is something delightfully miserable about the heavy, humid air and dewy skin? Is it having a nip of wine with lunch now and then, or that I have been seeing lots of the women in my life who make me think hard and laugh harder?
















