Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A family with two dachshunds walks past us. The older eyes the crinkly kites some kids are flying and decides to bark at them. The second is a puppy, who is happy just to pee now that they’ve reached the grass.

2. My garden is full of long-stemmed, fragrant violets, greens are big enough to start gathering for salad, and the peas are past knee-high.

3. CBS All-Access has given a month’s trial away for free, so Rudi and I are watching Picard only a little bit after everyone else we know.

How about you? What beautiful things have you been noticing in your world to keep things sane-ish?

Turns out, even when wearing a face mask (okay, so it was a tank top I repurposed), you can still notice the heavenly scent of lilacs when they first start blooming.

This bush was just before the Buffalo Bridge (many of D.C.’s bridges are nicknamed for the animal mascots guarding them). I didn’t finish up work until after 7 tonight, by which time the sun was below the tree line. So instead of wandering in the sun, I walked over to the Mt. Zion/Female Union Band Society cemetery, figuring that there might be fewer people there than on the sidewalk (which aren’t wide enough to accommodate the pedestrian crowding during a time of social distancing). Mostly, that was true, so I got to call my folks surrounded by the long dead, which seemed comforting. (For those of you who’ve actually read it, from that cemetery, you can see across the ravine to the cemetery, still used and gated, where Lincoln in the Bardo takes place.)

When we defrosted the freezer last week, I found a bag of pie crusts.

Tonight, I decided to make pie.

Well, technically it was a crumble, or maybe a crisp. Or maybe both, because I had too much filling and topping for just my normal-sized pie plate, and had to add some of each to my smaller-sized pie plate.

It all smelled amazing.

And the filling and the topping were perfect.

But the crust dough was freezer-burned. I’d thought the dough smelled off. But I talked myself out of it, because I really wanted pie.

Rudi and I have decided that we’ll just eat the filling. When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. When it hands you dough, you make pie. And let’s face it, this is a way more interesting way to eat those apples than out of hand.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share the cause of how we’ve added certain books to our physical TBR piles. I decided to focus on ten books I bought because I loved their author’s earlier work:

1. Threatened by Eliot Schrefer, because of Endangered
2. Sleeping at the Starlite Motel: and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home by Bailey White, because of Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living
3. The Blue Shoe: A Tale of Thievery, Villainy, Sorcery, and Shoes by Roderick Townley, because of The Great Good Thing
4. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, because of Eleanor & Park
5. Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo, because of Because of Winn-Dixie (and others)
6. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, because of Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths
7. Odes by Sharon Olds, because of The Dead and the Living
8. The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life by Natalie Goldberg, because of Writing Down the Bones
9. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, because of A Walk in the Woods
10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, because of Housekeeping

How often do you buy books from an author, perhaps without giving it your normal amount of consideration, simply because you loved one of their previous works?

I was out walking the other day, trying to get to the house where they have the Barbie party scene out front to see if the Barbies were socially distancing or if they were living a better life than the rest of us. But there were a group of neighbors hanging out in that vicinity, so I couldn’t get close enough for photos. (As best as I could tell from across the street, the Barbies were not socially distancing, but had taken to wearing masks, and at least two seemed to be boxing a coronavirus ball. I’ll ask Rudi to get us photos later.)

But I did get to see who lives near the Barbies. It turns out their neighbors, one block over and tucked into a tree box, are fairies!

No one seemed to be about.

But it also seems like fairies would be much better at social distancing than Barbies.

I’m sure they were just waiting for me to pass by.

Have you discovered anything new and exciting about your neighbors during this time of sheltering in place?