How To Feel Happy Today

• Live where the sun has no bite. We're on day 8 of a heat wave. Much of this week has been in the nineties and hundreds. If I was in Seattle right now it wouldn't be so hot, right? Did I not move north enough?

• Eat great food. Friends of ours brought us yellow cherries from their own tree and we have been snacking on them nonstop. Then my mom made us tofu sandwiches and bought us bing cherries. Food is really good right now. Plus we made dinner for friends on Friday that turned out to be excellent.

• Adopt the sweetest kittens in the world. With nonstop purring it's difficult to stay in a bad mood. Not impossible, but difficult.

• Don't focus on how you've messed up your kid for life and how huge this whole parenting responsibility is. Or how your kid knows just what arrows to shoot through your arteries for maximum damage. Ignore the blood.

• Catch a frog. Frog's are way cuter than any creature should be. Watching a tadpole metamorphosize into a frog is like watching evolution speed up for short attention spans. A fish grows legs and crawls out of the mud. It doesn't get less biblical than that for us non religious people.

• Don't watch "Grey's Anatomy" because everyone in that show is embroiled in unhappy relationships and if any one of them can do something to irrevocably damage what might have been good in their lives, they do it. The medical crap hooks you and then you have to watch all these pathetic ill-adjusted people crash and burn. It's too late for me but there may still be time for you to avoid this snare.

• Put clean sheets on the bed. Takes me to a happy place every time.

150 Frogs

Tadpoles are like minuscule vessels of childhood joy. It seems fitting that in this house, one that we love and feel right in, we should find ourselves the lucky recipient of a Pacific Treefrog's progeny. All one hundred and fifty of them swimming and sunbathing in our tiny dirty pond. I was going to clean the pond because the algae died and turned the water blackish. It's cleared up a bit since then...but now I cannot clean it without concern about our little nursery of frogs.

In spite of the fact that I have only given birth to a baby once, and am happy as hell to see my reproductive organs put up a "gone fishing" sign*, I seem to find myself surrounded with new life. Everywhere I turn there are babies. My kittens, though healthy and getting much bigger now, are still my babies. Chick came to me as a puppy and was very much my baby. Our hens were day old babies when we got them- nodding off while standing up and then startling awake wondering where they could find some little snail to ravage. Babies keep entering my life.

Now I have one hundred and fifty tadpoles. Somehow, seeing the tadpoles made me imagine how my garden will change from a wasteland of lawn and dusty "low maintenance" shrubs into a wild tangle of flowers and food. There is so much work to be done to transform it that I feel slightly paralyzed. It's a big yard, for which I'm thankful, but every inch of it is either blanketed in lawn or is laid down with four layers of non permeable plastic and has things I must dig up out of compacted clay. I have never gotten a garden that wasn't a lot of work to transform.

While Philip was putting the roof on the chicken run and I was shoveling dirt into the wheelbarrow for the tenth time all I could think is "I'm too old to be starting over with a new garden. Let this be the last time I start over!"

I want a riot of flowers: shasta daisies, penstamon, verbena, black eyed susans, grandmother's pincushions, lilies, corn flowers, poppies, larkspur, cosmos, sage, salvias, lavender, wall flowers, and violets spreading blankets of sweet flowers under the shade of fruit trees.

Obviously I cannot have enough roses. Some of my old friends need to find place in my small paradise of plants: Frederick Mistral, Abraham Darby, Jardin de Bagatelle, Honor, Oklahoma, and Peter Mayle.

I better go get dressed. I have a lot of digging to do. I hope you all have happy productive week-ends!

*Which, technically, they haven't yet.