The Pleasure of Simple Things Done Well

Yesterday afternoon my daughters and I planted a bleeding heart root and a couple dozen daffodil bulbs. Wearing gardening gloves five times too big for their hands, the girls knelt on scraps of cardboard I’d retrieved from the recycling bin and bent over the loamy, fragrant soil, carefully digging up small holes with trowels and now and then holding up a worm or a stone they’d come across like prizes plucked from a Cracker Jack box.

I don’t know how good a chance the plants have of surviving. It’s pretty late in the fall planting season, and today we woke to a scene straight out of Currier & Ives. The first snow of the year always seems the purest and the whitest and this morning it blanketed the trees and landscape like the robes of Arctic royalty. The small patch of woods behind our house was transformed into a magical forest where I imagined unicorns and wizards in white cloaks moving among the frozen trees and acting out some drama beyond the ken of human senses. But how the weather bodes for the plants we put to bed we aren’t likely to find out until next spring.

And that’s OK, being uncertain about the future. Because the real pleasure is knowing that my daughters and I did a good thing, a simple thing, the best way we knew how at the time. It is a realization I come back to with greater frequency the older I get: the deepest satisfaction often comes from the simplest activities. Planting daffodils, for instance. Or, as my daughters and I did afterward, picking up sticks to use later as kindling in our fireplace. Or sipping a cup of hot chocolate in the kitchen, where we could survey the work we had done.

I have come to this pleasure in other ways, too. By cutting wood or hammering nails, “drows’d by the fume” of cedar, oak or pine. Walking in the woods early in the morning when much of the world is still asleep and the air is taut with the sound of rustling leaves and wind and the scurry and scratch of squirrels vaulting from tree to tree, their tails following them like wisps of grey smoke. Writing a letter – on paper with a pen in cursive, not by email – to a dear friend I haven’t spoken with in years.

If this all seems obvious – that simple things are best – why is it that the lesson is so easily, repeatedly forgotten? Why does it require so much effort to do so little, especially this time of year when greed and gluttony take center stage? Who knows? But now when I get the urge to reinvent myself, to figure out what life is all about, to plumb the depths of my soul, I know the best course of action is not to think but to do.

To plant a flower.

To hand-wash the dishes.

To build a fire in the fireplace.

To make soup. Which is precisely what I did yesterday afternoon, a hearty Italian recipe my grandmother brought over from the old country.

I blended together Parmesan and Romano cheeses, breadcrumbs, nutmeg and black pepper. I grated lemon peel into the mixture, the citrus tang tickling my nose, and cracked three large, bright white eggs into the bowl and kneaded the dough to the consistency of polenta before stuffing it into a potato press and watching the noodles drop into a boiling pot of beef and chicken broth. I inhaled the steam rising out of the pot and was absolutely transported by the smells it contained.

This was heaven. This was joy.