Let me just tell you about my life now

This very well may be the happiest life I have ever lived. In my mind, happiness is a choice, it has been for years now, and it's one that I choose. This is different. This is a moment in time where all of my stars are aligned in a silver studded row on blue velvet. I can not recall a time where every aspect of my world was more blessed. Here we go:

I've somehow unintentionally stumbled into my dream job: to take care of lovely little babies, to prepare for my ultimate dream job: to be a home-y momma. It is heaven to wake up each morning and not once think, "Golly, I do not want to go to work today." The truth is that I don't even refer to is as "work," just nannying and tending.

I love driving an hour there and an hour home each day, time through the gorgeous canyon with nobody but my favorite podcast or my thoughts and prayers. I love it when the babies give me big hugs and when they run up to me with a daisy and say, "I got a flower for you!" I love when the boys leave for school and the baby is ready for her nap, so I get to hold her until she falls asleep, then lay her down and hope it won't wake her up. I love to set up my little spot in the front room and do as much homework as I can before the boys get back and baby girl wakes up.

Homework. I love my homework. This might come as a shock, but I'm a writer. For the last four years or so, I've planned on going up North to my favorite school on earth, and though I've had blissful ideas of studying philosophy, fashion, astronomy, business, and who can remember what else, English has always been my thing.

Whenever someone asked me what I'd like to major in, the answer spilled from my lips before my mind felt a drip, "English," of course. That's what I'm doing with an emphasis on Creative Writing (imagine that). For that reason, I'm somehow miraculously immersed in class curriculums and textbooks that I could spend my entire day in. You see, I am an incredibly right-brained person, completely revolving around invisible things: feelings, intuition, mystical magic, love. It's undeniable.

If I'm an angelfish, you'll never bait me with something tangible. I don't want your worms, I don't want your facts, science, or what-nots. I want you to tell me that up there out of the water, there are fairies--these dainty little tufts of fluff that blow off of some yellow thing that turns white and humans call dandelion--fairies that grant wishes. Tell me that and I'll gladly swim to the surface and follow you wherever you'd like. I'll learn to breathe and drink air. I will learn how to fly for a fairy.

That's who I am. And four out of five of my classes this semester are just like me. My grammar class revolves around anything but rudimentary memorization of thousands of grammatical concepts. Our weekly workload consists of an open-ended class discussion and a very special writing called, florilegia. That word directly translates to "gathering of flowers." Nowadays, people call them "commonplace books," but I will always call mine a florilegium.

Each week we must read for pleasure and find something that we absolutely love from our poems, novels, or stories, then quote it in our florilegium, our gathered garden, and write about why we love it, how it spoke to us. It's the loveliest practice. And all of my classes are like this but one, where I do a whole lot of concrete, stiff schoolwork, but I don't mind because it's all about plants and flowers.

what the entrance to my garden looks like

I'd been a bit worried for this school year, frightened that I might drown in my work, but it has been nothing but realizing that I breathe under water.

And of course there's my honey, the one that I've somehow had an unheard of love story with, something of a cinematic experience, a fairytale. This may be the loveliest time we've had with each other yet. Each day he stops by after work, picking me up and swinging me around, tickling me so much that tonight in a phone conversation he said out of the blue, "I really need to stop tickling you so much." I asked where that came from and he replied quite sweetly that he worried he'd make me miserable. To that, I assured him that I would surely miss it if he quit it.

Today in church, I had to hold his hand with both of mine because if I let go, for even a moment, he would pinch my leg. The crazy boy simply can't sit still for that long and after about ten minutes, has to let his wiggles out by shaking his leg and tickling me. At one point he caught me off guard and I accidentally jumped off the pew in shock! Of course I would give him these smiling scowls and whisper, "You better stop it right now," but I loved it more than anything. The bishop--his uncle--might not have been so amused, or might have been completely because it seems like the two of us are near exactly like that uncle and his wife. He probably did the same thing back in the day.

We're inseparable, even in thought. At my cousin's baby shower on Saturday, I didn't make it through any ten minute period without being asked about him. And I loved it. That's how it's always been with us: hearts in our eyes whenever someone says the other's name, getting all giddy and talking about each other every chance that we can get. After two years, that hasn't gone away, and I'm starting to wonder if it ever will.

We have our little routines: trying to figure out where to eat and always ending up at Chick-Fil-A, silly movies on the weekends, and Sunday dinners at his parents' house with five or six or seven of his siblings and their little families.

When he knocks on the door, I run as fast as I can to open it, throw my arms around him and get interrupted by Moose (who we've begun calling Goose) who thinks that this red-headed friend of his is, of course, here to play with him. Moose spends the whole visit all over him, nudging his toy chicken or ball into Harry's lap. Whenever I leave the room for a moment to switch the laundry or grab a drink of water, you better bet that those two are already playing fetch and wrestling.

There are so many other things: home life is wonderful, mom and I are goofy as ever, laughing at silly stuff and singing our silly songs. She's still addicted to TikTok, now posting her own. I love my best friends and haven't felt quite like I belonged with another friend as much as I do with this one and her lovely lover. They light up my world. We talk about books and say the same things so often that it's alarming how similarly we think.

I don't know how I got so lucky with this life, quite honesty. Maybe it's just a fruitful season after the sticky, messy ones that came before it. I'm sure to run into some of those again--and some of these again too. Truly, I look forward to it all. But for now, I'm just enjoying this heaven on earth.