I heard Chapelboro’s own Victor Lewis say on the air that music with more synthesizers makes his afternoon better. So, I sat down to make my own list of afternoon feel-goods, not in order to compare, but as if Victor had offered the invitation.
My afternoon is made better by hawk sightings in the sky and the piercing knock-knock-knock of a pileated woodpecker.
My afternoon is made better by cheerful texts with buddies who gently rib each other, for example, about our training (or lack thereof) for the upcoming 5K jog.
My afternoon is made better by chocolate-chip cookies and tall glasses of really cold fizzy water, by yellow butterflies and zigzagging dragonflies, by friendly dogs, and by drivers who wave for no apparent reason except that we happen to pass each other.
I love the clean, washed-out feeling in the air after a good afternoon rain and ferrying squiggly earthworms from the sidewalk to the grass while a chorus of birds chirp their fury from the trees.
I love the fact, which I learned just this afternoon, that one teaspoon of rich forest soil may contain tens of miles—yes, miles—of fungi called hyphae, which connect trees to each other like a hyphen joins words. Mind-blowing.
I love serendipity, a happy accident, like tuning my radio in time to hear Victor’s unabashed love of synthesizers and the rocking song that followed. I love how we are connected in often invisible ways, like underground microscopic mushrooms, and every now and then, we become aware that we are joined (hyphenated) with each other across time and space. Such moments definitely make my afternoons better.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of “Little Big Moments,” a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and “Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems.” Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.
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