Celebrate This Week: Come Ramble with Me!

Join us each weekend for Celebrate This Week with Ruth Ayres. 

                                                         When we pause to celebrate, we find the joy.

A week filled with moments to celebrate and remember.

Whew!  This has been/is one of those weeks.  I returned from DC on Sunday evening and played catch-up most of the week.

• I'm celebrating a lovely evening spent with my friend, Anne, at Beautiful:  The Carole King Musical.   I was transported to my college years when Lynn and I religiously listened to Carole's Tapestry album.  And then I made the mistake of counting up how many years ago that was.  I won't share, but it was a bit surprising/horrifying.  How did I get this old?

• I'm celebrating the creative talents of my friends.  We decorated for Trunk or Treat on Friday evening.  It's a fun annual event that I've been attending for two decades.  It's amazing to watch the transformation from plain church gym to beautiful decorations for this fall event.

• I'm celebrating my friend, Deborah, who agreed to work three additional days. Then I only had one more day to work for my friend, Patty (who's been  in upstate New York celebrating the birth of her granddaughter).  
• I'm celebrating words.  I get a M-W's Word of the Day.  Today's word, osculate, is new to me.  It just doesn't seem to fit its meaning, kiss.  Something about kiss is soft, but osculate feels hard.  I was thinking it's maybe the difference with the hard c sound in osculate.  Kiss has that k sound at the beginning, but it's softened by that double ss sound at the end.  Another word I'm celebrating is lagniappe.  The popcorn effect continues as I encountered it last week in Kirby Larson's new book, Liberty.  "She gave them each a B.B. Bats Taffy saying, 'Here's a lagniappe, something extra, to celebrate.'"
• I'm celebrating connections made in books.  Connections that can carry us from the words of the page into delightful memories from the past.  Kirby Larson's reference to Popular Mechanics magazines in Liberty was a lovely stroll down memory lane for me.  My dad subscribed to Popular Mechanics and kept yearly stacks of the magazines in our attic tied up with twine. 
• I'm celebrating words and books and a serendipitous discovery after I read this from The Poet's Dog:  "But I grew up with words. . . He read me Charlotte's Web, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Morning Girl, and my favorite story, Ox-Cart Man."  I made a mental note to check out The Ox-Cart Man.   I was curious to see why it was the character's favorite story.  Several days later, I stopped by one of the free libraries in our community and sitting on the shelf was, you guessed it, The Ox-Cart Man!
• I'm celebrating daughter Sara's baby bump of grandson #2.  He'll be here in a little over three months.  
  

• I'm celebrating that it's only three and a half weeks until Teddy and his folks arrive.  Last week's Sunday parting was softened knowing that it would be just a short time until this sweet boy and his smiles (and his parents) would be visiting us for Thanksgiving.  Here's a pic Sara posted on Instagram:  "The evolution of a Teddy smile!  Feeling like the luckiest Aunt in the world the way this sweet boy smiles for me!"