What Brings You Joy?

Boston had a sleepover at Grandma's "house" last night. When he woke up this morning, he looked over at me and said, "Grandma, sometimes I miss Tucson." "Me, too," I replied. He said, "I had a really good friend across the street I used to ride bikes with." "I know, Boston, I had lots of good friends, too, and now I hardly have any friends."

Tomorrow he starts school and in a week he'll have tons of friends. I'm so happy and hopeful for him.

As I fight my daily feelings of overwhelming sadness, I seek ways to break out, to feel better. Today I'm choosing to list some of the things that give me temporary respite from the dreeriness of my aloneness (and I think that's way too much -ness for one sentence!).

• puzzles
  
  • crosswords
    
  • Sudoku
    
  • jigsaw/picture puzzles
    
  • find-a-word, find-an-item, however juvenile—anything to challenge my brain
  
  
• walks around the 'hood, with or without the grandbabes
  
• settling down with a good book, the kind that the end of a chapter makes me want to start the next chapter (and if you're unfamiliar with Youngstown's Chris Barzak, One for Sorrow is just that kind of book. Run! Buy! Read! you'll thank me.)
  
• digging into my fabric inventory and dreaming of projects to sew
  
• yes, and actually making a dent in that inventory!
  
• doing things with the grandbabes, both to take a bit of the burden off their parents to give their parents time to be adults, and to get to know the babes as people while building memories for them to carry to their adulthood
  
• writing—I'm working on a piece for a Real Simple magazine contest that's due in a week; I'm working on a book about the horrors of dating over age 50; and the daily exercise of writing in this blog always brings me joy and satisfaction.
  

Note: An average of 23 people read this blog each day. Some have been reading since day one, over two years ago. Some are dear friends who read from Tucson to keep track of what's going on since my move, even though we're all too busy to talk as often as we did when we were in the same time zone. Some link in from other blogs in the Youngstown Blogosphere. Some click in by Googling for this or that obscure set of words. One of the oddest, to me, was when someone at USAA started reading after I wrote about my dealings with USAA while shaking the trees for money in preparation for my real estate closings. Someone in San Antonio at USAA must have had a Google alert set for "USAA" and my blog popped up. He or she must have been intrigued by what I wrote, and returned several times to keep reading. You never know what people will find interesting! Whatever brings you here, thank you for reading.

And now I'll return to my daily Washington Post crossword, after asking you: What brings you joy?