Three Things I Love

This is a good meme to be tagged with just now. So, because Dr. Write says I should, here are three things I love (other than family, friends, and beverages):

1. Water. It just feels like home. My only time snorkeling, I felt like I could stay there all day. My earliest memory is of the gray foam at Kalaloch, on the Washington coast. When I saw Lake Ontario last fall, I felt that same sense of peace that the oceans give me. I even love staying in the shower far too long in the morning. The theme for my 45th birthday (mark your calendars people: March 1, 3pm, my house) is going to be Under the Sea. Or Tropical Paradise. Or something.

2. Reading. I come from a family of readers--"no reading at the table" was an actual rule for dinner, and of course we read everything in sight, from milk cartons to cereal boxes. I got lost in the Oz books, in trashy bodice rippers, in muckraking books about the counterculture. Now, I want to read magazines and blogs and websites, and chick lit and speculative fiction and Serious Literature. And the comics. And the back of the milk carton.

3. Animals. This is a family thing, too. Animals remind me to stay in the moment. I don't mean to romanticize the lives of these creatures, but I am amazed at how much they are both like and not like us, how the behaviors can be so similar, yet totally un-self-conscious. I want to get to know every cat in the neighborhood on a first-name basis, like Belle who lives around the corner, who comes running to greet me on warm evenings, rolling on the sidewalk and looking for scritchers. And the birds--twitching their heads this way and that, wiping their beaks on branches. I'm endlessly fascinated.