Not the loud kind.
Not the kind I imagined at twenty-five when I thought about what joy was going to look like when I finally arrived at it, the champagne-and-confetti version, the unambiguous declaration that something wonderful has happened and is being celebrated with the full production value of a wonderful thing. That kind of joy exists and I have felt it and it is real and it is not what I am talking about.
I am talking about the other kind.
The joy that comes in without announcing itself. The ten-day green in May that I mentioned, the particular green of the trees before it settles into the ordinary summer green, which I have been stopping to look at every year and will stop to look at every year for as long as there are Mays available to me. The first soup of the season, the one I make in October when the temperature drops and the house can hold the smell of it properly and the eating of it has the quality of a small ceremony, a marking of the season, a saying-yes to the October we are in rather than the summer we have left. The dog at the end of the road who always recognizes me now and does the specific full-body wag that dogs do when they are genuinely glad, without ambivalence, without management, completely glad in a way that I find both enviable and instructive.
The call on a Sunday morning from a voice I know.
The book that is so good I stop reading it for a moment to be in the fact of its being that good, to feel the quality of having found something that is exactly what I needed without knowing I needed it. The afternoon in the garden when nothing goes wrong. The late evening with the people I love best when the conversation has gone somewhere real and the wine is finished and no one wants to be the first to say it is time to go home.
This is what joy looks like now. Smaller than I imagined. More frequent than I expected. More available than I knew joy could be, now that I am no longer moving too fast to receive it.
I am receiving it. I am showing up for the ten-day green. I am stopping for the dog. I am in the soup and the book and the late evening and the Sunday voice.
This is it. This is the whole of it. I am glad to be here for it.
