Slice of Life: I Love

I follow Andrea Gibson’s substack “Things That Don’t Suck” and I saved her recent post “A List of Things I Love” but made sure I didn’t read it for awhile before I started my own list. I actually kind of forgot about it until yesterday, when I was scrolling for a minute on IG and ran across @harrybakerpoet’s list of things that bring me joy (part two here). So here’s my mostly unedited free-association list of Things I Love.

I love.
I love making lists.
I love crossing things I’ve done off my to-do lists.
I love adding things to my to-do lists simply so I can cross them off.
I love grocery lists.
I love trying not to backtrack in the grocery store as I work through the grocery list.
I love recipes.
I love prepping the pans and gathering all the ingredients before I start the mixing and making.
I love making rules for myself, like, you have to stretch before you have your morning tea.
I love when I almost break my own rules but I don’t let myself.
I love the randomness of my garden.
I love welcoming back each perennial as they appear in spring. (“Well, hello, Bluebells! Welcome back!”)
I love knowing individual trees around the city — Grandmother Oak on Selby, the enormous gingkoes at the topiary park, the white-blooming redbud on Park Avenue, the yellow magnolia at the corner of the strip mall parking lot.
I love getting everything ready to visit the tax lady. (Not really. I’m trying to convince myself.)
I love homemade caramels and sauerkraut cooked with beer.
I love fresh uncooked green beans (same with sweetcorn), and cherry tomatoes warm off the vine.
I love Cheetos and I love Lays with homemade sour cream and dry onion soup mix dip.
I love the idea that most of the cells in my body (except the ones in my brain) are not the same ones I started out with.
I love wearing my dad’s stick-out ears and holding fabric and needles with my mom’s knobby fingers.
I love that once, when my students met my brother, they asked if we were twins.
I love having two desks; three if you count the standing table in my “studio;” four if you count the sewing machine table; five if you count the kitchen table; six if you count my lap.
I love the sound and feel of writing on paper with pencil (the same not-made-anymore-so-you-better-last kind of mechanical pencil I’ve been using for decades).
And I love making lists.