The weather is perfect. It is 79° and sunny, but the breeze is strong and cooling. The leaves seem to dance, a gyration, a spinning up and down. The nights have been perfect for sleeping, down to the 60’s. If I could control the weather, this is the day I’d make.

I have a black and white picture of me standing against a tree. I remember it was taken the summer we vacationed on Islesboro, Maine. We stayed in a secluded house close to the water. There was a short pier and a rowboat upside down on the sea grass. I was ten. The angle of the picture makes me look tall, exaggeratedly tall. I am wearing shorts, a blouse and a visor, a white visor. I wore that visor every day that summer. I loved it. I wore it everywhere, inside and outside, which is strange as I never really liked hats. Having to go to church was painful enough but having to wear a hat to go made it even worse. Perfect irony is I now have a hat collection, and I have several baseball type caps. I think of those caps as the ancestors of my visor.

I have seen so many wonders. When I was a kid, the wonders came every day. I remember walking to school and seeing small sheets of thin ice over puddles. Crystals shined from the ice. Sometimes I could see the reflection of the sun, blurred and small. In the winter, the dew froze on the grass. I loved the cracking sound when I walked across the lawn, across my father’s lawn. The colors of the trees in fall were amazing, red and yellow and orange. We ironed the leaves in wax paper to preserve the color. I’d cut the paper around the leaves to use as bookmarks. They were forever fall. The sidewalk on the way to school was overhung with branches. I remember the buds of the leaves at the start of spring sprouting from those branches. They were furled. I watched the buds grow into tiny leaves then get big enough to shadow the sidewalk. The murmuring of voices on summer nights carried from house to house. I’d sit on my back steps and listen. They sounded almost ethereal.

I have seen many wonders in my travels, but I expected to see them. It is the unexpected which still stops me to look, to hold and to wonder. Wow is all I can say when the sky at sunset is covered with reds, oranges and pinks. The colors seem to dazzle. Morning fog draws me to the deck. Birds singing to greet the day still makes me smile.

I am glad I still see the miracles of every day.