"For this is love and nothing else is love"

Over at Easy Street, Mrs. E posted an “assignment” for her readers. We're supposed to make a list of simple things that we love and take for granted. I would have posted a list anyway--I always do my homework, Mrs. E!--but I'm feeling blue today, and I think it'll help cheer me up!

I've also posted one of my favorite poems below: "A Prayer in Spring" by Robert Frost. It's a poem I love for a lot of reasons, but it seemed unusually appropriate to Mrs. E's assignment.

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I love the burbling sound the coffee maker makes, and the faint plunking of rain on the kitchen skylight. I love hoodies in autumn, and sweatpants and dusky mums and orange leaves bright against black bark. I love the sound of pop music on my car radio and memorized poems murmuring in the back of my head (“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today . . .”). I love the library, the stale smell of old books and yellowed pages, the margins scratched with strangers' notes. I love the way that cookie dough always tastes better than baked cookies do, and being surprised by the generosity of strangers. And I love curling into bed next to my cat, her eyes squinted shut, plush and warm and purring faintly, and the way the moon cools as it rises, paling from gold to white to silvery blue.

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A Prayer in Spring

By Robert Frost

OH, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,	5
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,	10
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,	15
But which it only needs that we fulfil.