1. Peony season. Mine are blooming, and there are so many blooms! This year was also a good one for my roses.

2. Strawberry season. In these first weeks of that harvest, we can barely eat them fast enough. So far we’ve also made Strawberries and Cream Biscuits and Strawberry Cream Pie.

3. Morning walks. Ringo cracked one of his pads, so he had to walk for about a week with a sock boot his dad made him — so cute! At Sam’s vet appointment, we found out he’d lost FIVE pounds — when we had to restrict how much he walked because of his back injury, he’d put on a little extra weight, so we cut his food back, but then he also got back to his regular exercise, and now he’s down to his young man fighting weight. He also on the regular weirdly loses 3-4 pounds every summer and then gains it back over the winter.

4. Colorado sky. This was the view from our front porch yesterday morning.

5. My tiny family. It’s been really nice to be with just them, lazy like summer, taking walks and naps and hanging out in the backyard.

Bonus joy: Hanging out and writing with Mikalina, finally making some progress cleaning and decluttering the house, being almost over my cold, watching TV shows about tiny homes with Eric, knowing it’s okay to go slow, teaching yoga, aqua aerobics, sitting with Eric in the sauna, working out really hard and having my knees actually feel better as a result, good TV, knowing that even if I don’t actually sleep I’m allowed to go into a dark and quiet room and just hang out by myself for a bit taking a “nap,” that Ringo is the kind of dog who is fearful but totally compliant at the vet (because a lot of Heelers can be pretty grumpy and mean under those conditions) and how much his vet loves him (she has three Heelers herself), hearing back that his blood work results look “perfect,” clean sheets.

1. Hanna Farm. It’s the name of our neighborhood, which in the 1800s was a farm where they raised rye and something else I can’t remember. This picture is the field at the end of our street. I love living here — so close to all the good parks and hiking, only about a mile from Old Town, only six blocks from one of my favorite humans, just down the road from Beaver’s Market, and super close to CSU (which doesn’t matter anymore since I don’t work there!).

2. Things that give me hope. I try to practice the Buddhist principle of letting go of both hope and fear, one pulling you into some imagined experience you believe will be exactly what you want and the other causing you to run away from something you think will be bad, both states pulling you out of the current moment, distracting you from what’s really going on, taking you out of your actual experience. That said, sometimes I need to hope. I read a line in a story in The Sun magazine yesterday that said, “just because it is all so very, very unfair does not mean there is not still great hope in the world” and it made me feel better about the state of things. Then there was a report of a swarm of ladybugs so big it registered on the National Weather Service radar, and then this morning in one of the ponds, this waterlily that typically produces 1-3 flowers has 11 blooms.

3. Morning walks. This morning will be our last along the river. It is rising because of snow melt and the flooding is predicted to be some of the worst this time around, but the real reason we’ll have to avoid this area until much later this summer is because of the mosquitoes.

4. The light this morning was extra special.

5. My tiny family. For some reason, I didn’t take many pictures of them this week.

Bonus joy: bird song in the morning, hummingbirds flying over our yard, my peonies getting ready to bloom, long naps, strawberries from our garden, hanging out with Mikalina and Chloe’, good TV, good books, good music, clean sheets, having nothing on my schedule so I can do whatever I want.