On The Floor of the Precious Commodities Exchange

She sat there, across the table, with that heart-stopping smile outlined in a ragged smear of chocolate ice cream. She was giggling at the same time, and there is no defense against that combination. I was lost.

Not the lost I usually feel nowadays, that fellintoadeepdarkhole kind of lost. No, let's not talk about it.

The lost I was feeling was more like ambling through wildflowers in the park on a bright, breezy day. A day with no agenda. A day with no real demands on my time. A day where I could feel free to not think and give myself up to love. Her smile and her laugh can do that, you know. She is a superhero in that regard.

I sat in my chair, blueberry ice cream settling in my belly. The ice cream had been laced with flakes of dark chocolate. Quite tasty on a warm summer eve. Watching her spoon up her chocolate ice cream, feeling the breeze in my hair, I was blessed with a feeling of grace. It was a reprieve from anxiety and fear. The antidote was right there on front of me, complete with that silver bell laugh and rose window eyes.

I would give a lot to be able to bottle that feeling, or turn it into something like incense. Or maybe a Glade plug in. One striking feature of that moment was not that I had been suddenly overwhelmed with happiness. There were no golden shafts of light, no choirs of angels. None were necessary. I had something perhaps more important than blatant happiness. I was content.

If contentedness were a commodity it would be at the top of my own personal precious metals exchange. The stock ticker would read CTNT and I'd have market feeds sent directly to my personal phone.

Not that such a thing exists, and it shouldn't. This feeling is a currency all its own, minted only by our hearts and backed up by our full credit and faith that things do go right and feel good all by themselves...as long as we let them.

I sat in that chair across from my Wee Lass, full of her grace and blueberry ice cream, and gave thanks for them both. It felt good.

This post was inspired by two very different sources: my daughter and the ever-intriguing Adam P. Knave, perpetrator of Stop Motion Verbosity and other assorted hijinks associated with the written word. Why? you may ask. Well, hearing my daughter laugh and reading Adam's post "Accentuate The Positive" pretty much knocked me into a new orbit tonight. A higher orbit, and one to be shared.