Full of It

Glee. It is a 2nd grade spelling word. Double consonant. Long double "e." It's sort of a throwaway word. A synonym for happiness, but why use "glee" when you can just use "happiness"? The difference, I feel, is in the actual pronunciation. You have to smile when you say glee. It's hard to get out the glee without the smile. It's almost onomatopoeic. Glee!!!!!

Still, it's kind of a disgusting word, isn't it? Glee? It's worse than a Mr. Roger's expression. It falls dangerously in Barney territory, and that, frankly, is a scary zone where everyone appears to have done a great deal of things with balloons and whippets. It's one of those words that rhymes with way too many other words and lands squarely in giddy songs about trees and bees and knees and downhill skis.

But yesterday? Honestly. For a few moments, I experienced this tingly feeling of contentment that I could only characterize as gleeful. I felt glee because my life was just the way it was. I was just sitting on the hard floor, laden with exerballs and goldfish cracker crumbs, reading a book to Baby Girl whilst smelling the mix of yogurt and Johnson's shampoo in her hair and I felt such glee.

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The people I admire most are not the ones that do earth-shattering things with their time and talents or the ones that are just cozy with what they have, but those that do both. They take what they're given and never stagnate, and continue to grow grow grow, but even when every proverbial Uno hand is a wild card Draw Four and the color changes to precisely the color they don't have in their hands at all, they never stop hoping and they never shirk the feelings of glee whenever they may come, which is usually the unlikeliest of yogurt-shampoo scented of times.

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Yes, my kid is carrying a basket with a basket inside.