Some days just beg to be pressed in a scrapbook.  Today has been such a day, with its cool air and blue skies.

We started out with breakfast, meeting my husband’s sister Virginia McCoskrie.  Oh, the food didn’t do much for me; but I’m not complaining.  Our conversation made dragging myself out of bed, stumbiing down the steep stairs holding onto Jim’s shoulder to minimize the effect of my dizzy spells, worth the effort even though, truth be told, we had forgotten about daylight savings time.  I kept thinking, I should be asleep….It’s still 7:00 a.m.  But the hour spent with Virginia chased the cobwebs from my brain and left me smiling.

Eventually, we headed west to Lawrence and lunch at Free State Brewery.  Jim drove while I chattered, watching the passing farmland and ruminating about life and everything.  We found ourselves holding hands like a couple of fifteen-year-olds; thinking about our approaching three-year anniversary and how easily we might lose our love if we do not nurture it.  Days like this give us that chance.

Eventually, we made our way back to Kansas City, and now, in the quiet of our home, with my son making a pot of tea and Jim upstairs reading the Sunday paper, I feel again the surge of motivation that compels me forward in this odd journey.

In the breakfast nook just beyond where I sit, a collection of life’s bric-a-bracs clutters a ledge that we call The Keeping Shelf.  There are three baby cups — one given at my son’s birth by a member of Congress; the brass dinner bell which my mother used to summon her eight children; a Christmas ornament that hung on my father’s childhood trees; and four clay handprints made by children –one by my brother, one by my son, and two by Jennie Taggart Wandfluh’s children.  A row of tiny saucers spanning the back came from my mother’s vanity dresser.  On top of a little wooden treasure chest from my son’s boyhood sits a car that my mother found in her garden and wrote about for Organic Gardening magazine, chronicling her life as a parent by the trinkets unearthed in her turning of the dirt each planting season.   Three little jars hold layers of colored sand carefully poured in the narrow necks by some foster kids that lived with us years ago.  Behind a vase stands a coke bottle filled with oil-tinged water from my husband’s fledgling oil wells.  And on and on.

Nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened today.  But this day will stand on the keeping shelf as one of the golden gifts of this year of not complaining.  Nothing has happened to even tempt me.  I am well content.