Seattle 31, or Happiness

I love this picture. Actually, I just really love this shirt. Credit, as always, to Andi Burk.

The birthday celebrations and gifts have begun - this week, my whole family pooled together to help me buy a beautiful bed, after so many months of a small mattress on the floor. It'll get assembled when I move to the new Kibbutz house down the street on Monday. From my grandmother and her husband, a set of sheets so soft they make my bed look and feel like a cloud. They have said a quilt is on its way. I feel like the world's luckiest swan, or something.

Tonight, I came home from a long, rough shift to find a package waiting for me from my grandparents in Tenafly: sweet things, rich things, salty things, like a slice of their kitchen sent via parcel post. Tucked inside, a card, with a long rhyming poem, as is family birthday custom. With two graduations and two June birthdays, their study must've been a regular writers' den! I read the poem out loud to my listening housemates, who looked admiringly at the food (I've promised a feast this weekend!), and laughed with me, and pretended not to notice when I got choked up towards the end.

And the days are long now, the last stretches of sun reaching far past nine o'clock. We, the city-dwellers are soaking it in and storing it for the rainy season.