Happiness and the daily details of a humble life

There is a play called OUR TOWN, written by Thornton Wilder, and one of the themes is the immense magic and joy in the most ordinary details of daily life and how people go through them blind and unaware. That play had a huge impact on me from the first time I read it and all the times I saw it acted including the modern version which I think was called The Fantastics.

It has made me aware of those small, humble, ordinary things and moments that stay with us forever and for which we sometimes long. I think so so very often of the mornings in my mother's dining room on Roland Ave. when the other kids were at school and I was somehow home (playing sick perhaps) and the moms, Mary Armstrong, Pat Gilbreath, (the regulars) and one or two others would gather in their housedresses and slippers, menthol cigarettes in their pockets, and drink coffee made in my mother's cheerfully perking away tall gleaming rocket ship of a percolator. Steve the breadman brought the donuts, white powdered, chocolate covered, and the women sat around the coffee table and talked to one another. I can't remember their conversations, and, to be honest, it was the ambiance, the setting, that returns to me now, and I can smell the coffee aroma mixed with the menthol cigarette smoke, and I can feel the off-duty, relaxed freedom that the women friends were enjoying - the magic of it.

There are many such similar settings that I remember in a glow of magic, just like the one I mentioned in a previous post about my brother and I sitting on the carpet in the living room waiting for the magic and mystery of the Shock Theater with Roland on a dark, late night well beyond our bedtime.

And there are more recent moments of magic that I can draw up and smell the fragrance of that brief time, and feel the sense of happiness, the Pakim Pond trail in the pine woods! And I want to go there and feel it again. But I can't. The past is over, despite what FAulkner said about the past never being past. We can't go back, we can only dip into the magic of the current moment.

This morning I did the routine homely things, rinsed and re-filled the pets water bowls, made my coffee, and an egg sandwich for breakfast. I put the final flea treatment of the year on the pets - a task I hate and they hate. I hate to put poison on them, but the fleas are bad this year and they were tormented by them, so we had to do it one more month, but this should be the last time for this year and we only had to do 3 treatments this year. The fleas were so bad, I had them in the sofa and they were biting me! Once I put the Advantage flea treatment on them, within a 24 hour period or two days, the fleas are gone.

Anyhow, to get back to cozy, , my house is puposefully cozy. I am decorated for autumn with lights on the bannister and across the kitchen doorway, hand painted decorative DAy of the Dead skulls are on the bannister for Halloween, and a big grinning pumpkin is on the door of the cabinet facing the sofa. I have a scented candle ready to light and I am drinking a hot chocolate! I LOVE my house, as I have written many times in this blog. It is small, humble, with all the old wood on the door frames and the old windows, and we are embraced by the trees. Snoozing pets fill the atmosphere with their sleep and the moment has magic. I am happy.