Unexpected Delights
It is the simple things that make life bearable.
Those moments of uncomplicated joy are fleeting. If we do not pay attention and take time to appreciate them, they quickly disappear into the mists of time. The best part of unexpected delights is they are free. All we have to do is savor such moments.
In the privacy of your mind, ask yourself what things, events, or people make you happy. Before you know it, the list is not only lengthy, but it continues to grow. After all, life is all about growth through learning and paying attention to the world around you.
As this writer prepared to write this column, she had to smile at the simple act of enjoying and appreciating something like the fresh scent of clean laundry. Doing laundry is a perfect contrast between unpleasant beginnings and pleasant results. You fill the washer with stinky clothes, especially in the spring and summer months. Then you smile as you moved the washed items to the drier. If you are fortunate to have a separate laundry room in your home, the entire room smells amazing.
Let us continue with a few more examples of pleasant scent-related delights. If you or someone you know likes to bake, you may, at times, enjoy the mouth-watering aroma of fresh-baked homemade bread or something sweet like cookies.
There is a time-honored trick realtors use when showing homes. They bake a batch of cookies. The lazier ones boil water with a few drops of vanilla. Both versions intend to impart visions of your ideal home to the buyer. Take a whiff. You can easily imagine living in this house and baking cookies for your family. Or, your spouse can imagine you baking him some cookies.
Now for a mini-rant regarding the smell of flowers. Have you noticed roses from the florist do not have a scent? So annoying. That is one of the great little joys of life, leaning over, butt in the air to smell a rose. It seems, some “clever” gardeners and horticulturalists decided to propagate roses for their appearance. The flowers they tampered with lost their scent. The result was Frankenroses.
Roses are flowers intended for a loved one. Picture a woman’s smile when her lover brings or sends her roses. What is the first thing she does, besides giving the guy a heartfelt kiss or perhaps a big sloppy kiss? She leans over the magnificent roses and smells them, but if there is no scent, part of the romantic gesture and her hormonal response is missing. If roses do not have a smell, they will not attract butterflies or bees, which are part of the flower’s reproductive cycle. They tampered with Mother Nature.
Romance is a blending of several senses: smell, touch, sight, or even taste because of the torrid kiss. The sound comes from the moans of pleasure that happens later. Remove the aroma, and you might as well have an artificial flower.
In the taste category, two divine items evoke a positively blissful response. One is eating that perfectly softened ice cream when you first open the container. The other is placing a Godiva Masterpieces chocolate with a ganache center on your tongue.
When we bought our young son tennis shoes, he always tested them out by running from one end of the store to the other. They had to pass the speed test, and he only knew one speed, fast. His favorites back then were Zips, which happened to bring him joy.
Delight comes in many forms. Women of all ages have different ways of checking out a dress before buying it. When this lady was a young girl, hers was the twirl test. If her skirts did to flair and ripple just right when she twirled, she rejected them. After all, a girl has specific standards to uphold.
Now that you know some of the things that bring this writer unexpected but appreciated delights take time to compile a list of your own. It is about time we took a moment or two to smell the flowers.
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