An enduring joy of my life has been close relationships with many of my cousins. Thankfully, my daughter has similar relationships with several of her cousins and second cousins (Right to left: Lara, Tessa, Anne, Caitlyn, and Lauren). Both the post and the picture make me grateful that these young ladies have one another in their ordinary, everyday lives on this Fantastic Friday.
Life Is Good When…
For the past month and a half, my cousin has been forwarding emails from her daughter, Lara, who is studying in Spain this semester. Lara is four days older than my daughter, and like Anne, she’s a junior in college.
Reading Lara’s adventures has been pure delight. She’s learned to live with cold showers, cook with butane fuel and purchase new fuel when the tank runs dry. She’s been befriended by a family of Bolivian immigrants, eats weekend meals and goes to church with them, and bakes them banana bread. She’s climbed mountains, ridden trains, taken taxies, and to make the most of this opportunity, forces herself to speak Spanish instead of English to fellow students to improve her language skills.
The wisdom of a comment she made in a recent email makes me smile whenever it comes to mind. After Lara describing a busy weekend with the Bolivian family, washing laundry and cooking meals together, she said this. “You know life is good when doing mundane, everyday activities is nice.”
Her insight delighted but didn’t surprise me. She’s part of the pack of girl cousins (Anne, my brother’s two girls, Lara and two of her cousins) who were born in a span of four years. They spend as much time as possible crammed together like puppies, playing games, talking, sharing clothes, writing stories. When they aren’t together in body, they connect on Facebook, joyfully sharing their “mundane, everyday activities.”
I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t predict the joys and sorrows in Lara’s future or those of her pack of puppy cousins. But these young women already know what Dorothy had to learn over the rainbow and what many people spend their whole life never learn: life’s greatest pleasures are the small things, the ordinary days, and the people who experience them. They have what they need to appreciate the joys and weather the sorrows sure to come.
They’re ready to face the world.
