When I think about a “perfect day,” it’s really nothing special.
I think most of our perfect days are just plain old, regular days. Days that start with warm, sweet coffee and are lived mostly in stretchy pants and old t-shirts. Days that include sitting in the house and walking around in the yard and a good amount of laughing, just existing in the comfort of the home we’ve made here.
We’ve had some good days this year. We traveled a lot with the kids compared to our normal. At the beginning of the year, the husband (Chad) and I got to be with all three of them as they took their first plane rides, and we experienced the magic and wonder of being immersed in the whole Harry Potter world brought to life at Universal Studios. For the three HP obsessed members of my family, it was unforgettable. And the other two enjoyed it, too.
Toward the year’s end, we took another fantastic trip into the Great Smoky Mountains and enjoyed playing together as a family, helping our children build a repository of memories to cover over our parenting mistakes and shortcomings when they look back on their childhoods.
Our four-year-old son still talks about “ski tubing” in the snow. Our fourteen and nine-year-old daughters shared a room in our rented condo, and the five years between them dissolved as they giggled, stayed up late, braided hair, and took refuge from their brother behind the closed bedroom door.
The oldest was princess-for-a-day as she participated in homecoming this year, and getting to see her soak up that experience was beautiful. She also passed her driver’s test.
Everyone got their braces off.
Those were some of the big events. But the things that make me smile the most are much more mundane.
Just like always, we took camping trips to our favorite campground a whopping thirty-five minutes from the house. Just like always, we sat around the fire, took some hikes down a familiar trail, and fished in the same river Chad’s been fishing since he was old enough to hold a pole. Just like always, I chased a boy on a bicycle in endless circles as he lived his best life, covered in dirt, sweat, and creek water from head to toe.
Early this summer, Deacon and I had a truly banner day I managed to capture in writing before I forgot the beautiful details. I wrote, “Today is a gift. It’s so far from perfect, but it’s flawless. We checked the buds on the blackberries, looked at the leaves on the apple trees, kicked up grasshoppers in the yard (while I pretended they aren’t scary). There was no hustling, no proving, no doing. Just being. And it was a gift.”
On the perfect days, I wear an apron most of the day because I like it, and it’s functional. I use it to wipe hands and messes, to hold my phone in my pocket in case a sister or the husband calls. But I don’t need it to check the time, because on perfect days time doesn’t matter.
Chad has the green thumb around here, and we all reap the benefits of it. The kids and the cousins picked ripe, juicy blackberries all summer long, popping them straight into their mouths still warm from the sun.
I sat on the porch and admired the roses he planted, the hydrangeas dug up from his grandmother’s house, and the Carolina Jessamine transplanted from his mom’s. I fussed at the azaleas because they weren’t blooming.
I watched the humming birds at the lantanas and spirea, and I was so grateful for what Chad did with those plants that I just cannot. They played a starring role in my perfect days for much of this year.
Days spent under quilts, watching movies, reading books, seeing the craft projects the girls are working on and the towers and ramps the boy has built, hearing the back door open and shut as Chad moves between the house and the shop, those days are perfect, too.
I want to enjoy every adventure and experience life has to offer, but I never want to forget how glorious the mundane is. I want to enjoy the minutes between those adventures.
It’s the in-between minutes that will make up most of my life anyway, and I want them to be minutes well-lived and well-loved. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, I think this might make the list, this finding meaning in the tiny moments of each day.
Some days and some years are filled with suffering and challenge. And if a perfect day in your world depends on everything going right, well then you’ll be out of luck forever. But if you can find a new definition of a perfect day, maybe you’ll find a whole bunch of perfect ones even right in the middle of a storm of suck.
I hope so. Life’s too short and too precious to just survive it and call that “good enough.”
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“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
