100 Things I love

Here are 100 Things I love in no particular order. Maybe we will connect on a few.

I love wearing a scarf with my pj’s Diane Keaton-style. It began on a lingering vacation day or snow day, but now can be any number of days.

I love how my dad says, “Way good deal”, and “First, you make a roux”. I love how he wears a Cross pen and pencil set along with his to-do list in his shirt pocket and writes with his left hand.

I love that moment of first light when my world opens her sleepy eye and I realize that light is already shining somehow and God never went to sleep. I love how Sweet Pea thought that of her own parents.

I love hoop earrings, dark roast coffee swirled with cream in a thrifted pottery mug, cloth napkins, deckle edge book pages, and flossing my teeth.

I love the way autumn fog winds through the horizon like a thick scarf making me feel cozy, melancholy and hopeful all at the same time. But not the blanket of fog that makes me blind and afraid.

I love bread heels, leftover thick pizza crusts, crunchy roasted vegetables, but the very center of a pan of brownies and monster cookie dough.

I love how Mike wakes up with a song in his head that must be played while he makes his morning coffee and empties the dishwasher. I love how he whistles around the house and taught me, who could not whistle when we met, to whistle with four fingers in my mouth.

I love synchronicities of all kinds. How my mama made me a velvet dress when I was sixteen. It was midnight blue with short sleeves and a sweetheart neckline, slim, floor length, and tied behind my back. I remembered that recently along with velvet drapes in an old Holland house I lived in as a kid. All of that came ringing back to me clear as a bell as I was buying a midnight blue velvet sofa from Facebook Marketplace for our backyard chapel.

I love the smell of juniper in the woods.

I love the way my heart opens up after reluctance in the kitchen. I love how it happens when I make a mirepoix or a roux, feed my sourdough starter, smell garlic, cumin or cilantro on my fingers from the chopping, hear the sizzle of anything in a cast iron skillet, or feel our old wooden ladle in my hand.

I love the sad cry of harmonica, violin, and steel guitar reminding me I have loved and lost, and will still love and lose again.

I love the phases, names, and wonder of the moon, how I am always looking for her, always thrilled to see her, and miss her when she is absent. How she always seems to be looking for me. Like any of my kids or grandkids. Like an old friend. Like God.

I love thick peanut butter on toast. And licking it at the corners of my mouth. I love tiny pickles. I love how I have never forgotten that first moment I had pickles and peanut butter together on homemade bread at a table in the middle of my friend Natalie’s well-worn kitchen.

I love the surprise and magic of snow falling outside my window which just happened as I wrote this. I love it when Mike builds me a fire and I stoke it all day while I write.

I love Mama Mayerle’s shaky handwriting on her recipe cards and how she raised her grandson (my Daddy) to be so generous he always takes the smaller slice of cake and his own earnings. But also how he smoked Lucky Strikes and rode a motorcycle with his dog on the gas tank, things she did not teach him.

I love Job 38-39.

I love everything about striking matches to light candles - the friction of the strike plate, the pffft sound and quick burst of flame, the sizzle as wick catches flame, twisty smoke when I snuff it out with a flick of my wrist just before it burns my finger and thumb. I love what that means - birthday cake, power outage, Lent, or just the start of day.

I love going to bed early (not because I’m sick) and the world of possibilities when I’m the first one up coffee in hand, scarf with my pj’s.

I love bookcases, book lists, books on my doorsteps, campus libraries, my local library, and Meg Ryan’s Little Bookshop Around the Corner. And the smell of a bouquet of freshly sharpened yellow #2 pencils.

I love how Christmas lights reveal the shape of the storefronts, house gables, and trees and how they make me want to see the shapes of things more often.

I love the way one of my kids calls to talk when I know he hates to talk on the phone, another calls every day to see what I’m doing and share the details of her life, another rarely calls but when he does its deeply good. And the way my youngest calls and I know how she’s doing just by how she says, “Hi Mama”.

I love how our scars tell part of our story. For me, when I ran into a BBQ pit and cut my eyebrow open, broke my finger, moved away from a place I loved kicking and screaming, had 4 babies, lost two, met autism, hit my forehead on the steering wheel, lost a friendship.

I love searching for and discovering stuff by thrifting, foraging, reading, listening, praying, and friendship. I love the wonder of being completely gobsmacked by my beautiful Savior when I am not looking, but he always is.

I love all the shades of denim, old patched jeans, cutoffs with fringe or ones I can turn up to any length, heathery jean jackets (plain and with my own embroidery), and dark wide-legged jeans that sweep the floor. Each one has laughter and heartache stitched in.

I love writing in journals with inky pens and adding doodles that seem like nothing and sometimes turn out to mean something. I love wide-plank hardwood floors, earbuds, poetry, porches, dormers, and old barn shapes in open fields.

I love noticing the light through window mullions, filtering through the curtains, on the floorboards, shining in the Wonders’ eyes, splashed across their little faces, and highlighting their dimpled knuckles.

I love fresh blueberries, warm, thick-in-the-middle, chocolate chip cookies, elbow patches, and wildflowers in a pickle jar. I love bringing flowers to Sabbath.

I love the afters: the smell after a rain, the feeling after a run or the garage is cleaned out, the smile after a wink, the moment after I come home again.

I love lists of any kind.

I am following my friend Katie Blackburn and the creativity of Ashlee Gaad who began the writing prompt #theiloveprompt. I already cannot wait to do this again. I wonder what your 100 things would say to you and to me?