Small Wonders

A man was meowing in the cheese aisle at Ideal Grocery yesterday.  I backed up to get a look at him and, sure enough, there he was, howling and hunched over the gouda,  his back arched like a tom cat ready for a fight. 

The world is filled with strange wonders.  And, while some concern me, most leave me feeling both lighter and more connected.  Invariably, I can't believe I was lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time.

I try to collect pieces of these wonders, when I can.   Some, like the meowing man, require words written or told in order to preserve them in my memory.  Others, though, are scattered throughout my house, tiny reminders of this amazing, magical world I live in. 

What would be a coin or key dish in most households is one of the go-to wonder collectors in my home.  Sitting atop the desk in our library, this tiny dish is filled with tiny treasures--a cottonwood twig no more than an inch long, with its five-pointed star sitting perfectly on its stub end; a tiny green-and-black compass earned in the pine-covered Sandhills at an outdoorswoman camp this fall; a black-and-white rocked washed up on an Italian shoreline; a ruddy, vein-laced rock I polished in elementary school that has always brought comfort to my thumb.

Atop the piano in our basement sits a cornucopia of memories collected by simply showing up each day.  Most are blanketed in a thin layer of dust, not from neglect so much as from a lack of motivation to run a cleaner household.  One jar holds a rainbow of rocks lovingly collected in the Oglala National Grasslands, each nudged there by ancient seismic shifts of our moveable planet.  Another glass container reminds me of the shoreline, intricate and beautiful shells gathered from numerous visits to ocean-side beaches.  I am certain that, if I were to lick that tiny, perfect cat's paw seashell, I could taste the salt of ancient seas.  There, too, atop that piano we paid $25 for,  sit numerous bones our family has collected from area streams, bones from long-gone animals seeking a cool drink on a hot day.

This house is a living museum to things that bring me joy, not all of them from the natural world, either.  There are books filled with stories that have changed me and  handwritten notes from friends and family, tucked safely in a file marked "Happy Things."  Our walls, too, are proof of wonder-- adorned with framed butterflies and cidadas, Georgia O'Keeffe paintings of yawning rivers, oil paintings made lovingly by my mother and grandmother.  There, too, hang broken ice-cream parlor clocks, old pinball games and an arched stain-glass window from a rural Nebraska church. 


There are a thousand reasons I love to spend time in my home, each one of them a happy reminder of  some wondrous moment that I was lucky enough to be there for. 

This week, of all weeks--when the urge to outdo or overspend is sometimes too powerful to ignore--it would do us good to wander our dwellings, and rediscover the happy reminders of all of the strange and magical wonders we've come across in our lives. Serendipitous moments remembered by a small token we tucked into our pockets.

Merry Christmas, indeed.