This past Sunday evening, I watched my daughter raise her arm and swing her tennis racket, hoping her energy landed in the right place. The breezy air made the yellow ball look like a meteor streaking across the sky. I felt a little coolness as the wind rearranged my hair. It was an out-of-character moment for the desert summer. As she continued to play, I interchanged my focus between my phone and journal.
My 5-year-journal sat in my lap. When I encounter some down time, I try to jot down a sentence or two to commemorate the key and mundane seconds of my days. With my pen, I chronicled some of the events over the past weekend. We had a festive dinner with friends on Friday evening, where our kids enjoyed playing with one another. We watched fireworks. The younger kids still love the lights in the sky, while the older kids had fun swinging their sparklers around in a circle. On Saturday, we lounged around the house, filling our time with sleeping in, reading books and catching a family movie during the day. In the afternoon, we went to a friend’s house where my daughter mingled with new children and enjoyed tossing water balloons in the pool, loving the bounce, pop and the splatter of the water. We rounded out the weekend with a Sunday brunch at our home. Kids raced around and played tag, while the adults enjoyed French toast and Bloody Mary’s.
I reflected on how all of these threaded moments didn’t appear to amount to anything dazzling on their own. We were just like most families in the country. Spending our time with friends, laughing, eating, watching fireworks and squeezing in wholly ordinary moments in between these outtakes. The weekend consisted of other everyday glimmers: washing dishes, doing laundry, driving to the grocery store and vacuuming around the house. I know that this kind of normalcy isn’t to be taken for granted. This is the backbone that keeps my life moving forward.
Just as my daughter’s tennis ball landed near the baseline, she yelled, “Momma, look behind you.” I stood up, shifted my gaze to the sky, and caught the yellow, pink and blue hues of the sunset. I grabbed my phone and snapped the shot.
A thought crossed my mind about this life – paying homage to the ordinary is spectacular.
Welcome! I am a lawyer turned freelance writer, essayist, and editor. On staff at Literary Mama and the co-founder and co-editor of the literary journal, The Sunlight Press, my essays and reported work have appeared in The Washington Post, The Lily, Saveur, Civil Eats, Brain, Child, ESPN and elsewhere. I am currently at work on a memoir on grief and culture and how it provides perspective on life’s ordinary graces. I invite you to appreciate the ordinary with me. I hope my daily practice of seeing the magic in the mundane helps you celebrate and find more of these moments in your life too.
It is a beautiful shot.
And honestly this sounds like my perfect weekend – I love those weekends with flow and wonder, ordinary and extraordinary.
Thanks, Tamara ( high praise coming from you given your awesome photography skills).
These kind of weekends are ones that I mourn when they are over.
Yes, paying homage to the ordinary is indeed spectacular! Glad you found these moments. I had a weekend filled with these.
I am glad you had the same kind of weekend, Susan. These moments really do resonate and I am lucky that my awareness is such that I know to appreciate these pockets of time.
When our ordinary is threatened that is when we realize how spectacular life can be. A great reminder and a great way to live.
Apt analogy, Ayala. So much of this is true and I know you capture this sentiment well in your poetry. I think this viewpoint takes birth when one experiences crisis – the ordinary and boredom gain a different appeal.
I love what Ayala wrote. I really agree. I’ve often been humbled by how happy my parents are with their lives, lives that growing up I had considered rather simple and actually still quite difficult. But they had immigrated from much harsher environments and to this day the simplest pleasures – a ripe banana, sunlight filling their porch – gives them so much pleasure. And as I get older I find myself truly appreciating the simple ordinary things. It’s a privilege to have this life, to see sun, to be able to walk and write and raise a child.
Cecilia,
I love how you drew a comparison to your parents and the hardships that they faced as immigrants. I remember my father took pleasure in purchasing a new pair of shoes because for so many years he walked many miles to school with sandals that barely stayed together on his feet. Knowing these hardships and realizing that so much of life can turn in a much different direction in a split-second keeps me grounded and renews my appreciation of the ordinary.
P.S. I like that you keep a journal to jot down even brief observations. I keep my journal in my computer, so it’s more “work” as I have to turn on my computer, etc. before I can write in it. I think it’s a good idea to carry a small journal around.
Rudri, I had written another comment but don’t know if it had gone through…