Honestly, I feel like time is whooshing past me at a ridiculous pace. How is it already Thursday? And, yet, time is inching along. How is it only Thursday?

But the important thing is it is Thursday. Time for three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Rudi and I happened to have baseball tickets for the night that rookie phenom Stephen Strasburg was set to make his major league debut. The kid was only drafted last year and is barely old enough to have celebratory champagne dumped over his head. I admit that I fully expected the weight of an entire region and the rush to bring him up from the minors to cause him to self-destruct part way into the first inning, but I was wrong in my misgivings. Instead, while he started out throwing a fair number of balls and although he did give up a two-run homer, he set a new club record for strikeouts in a game (14), gave up nary a walk, and clinched a win in front of a raucous crowd of 40,000+. And all in less than 2 1/2 hours!

2. Rudi and I are dragging a bit, so we spend the evening coloring.

3. Friends invite me to join them for a weekday morning outing. I’m delighted to accompany them in their mischief-making.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world?

So, I meant to post my Ten on Tuesday yesterday — y’know, when it was Tuesday. But life got in the way both yesterday and earlier today and now is when I find myself with the time to sit down and respond to this week’s topic:

10 Favorite Children’s Books

I tried to come up with picture book-type books, but I had a hard time recalling too many, so I morphed over to chapter books. Some of those may border more on the YA classification, but it’s a fuzzy boundary anyway.

1. Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss (Most important book I’ve ever read.)
2. The Please and Thank You Book by Richard Scarry (Richard Scarry is so good he can even make mannerly lessons fun.)
3. The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg (My high school French teacher first read this to us when we were seniors, and I hope someday to track down a copy in French to read to myself at the holidays.)
4. Snow White and Rose Red by the Grimm Brothers (I remember borrowing this several times from the library at my elementary school.)
5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (When our public library was about to be dedicated, the children’s librarian came to our elementary school and read this to us.)
6. The Trixie Belden series by Kathryn Kenny (It was actually a great relief to me to discover that these books, like Nancy Drew or the more recent Warriors series, are written by a publishing collective. I loved a great many of these (particularly the first ten or so), but periodically come across a dud, like the one I bought last year. Anyway, Nancy might have had the budding adult independence, the handsome college quarterback boyfriend, and the convertible, but Trixie was more instantly relatable with chores and schoolwork and annoying brothers. Plus, she had a clubhouse and the rest of the Bob-White Gang.)
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Still one of my favorite books of all time. Who didn’t want to be Jo?)
8. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (Ditto. Plus Anne holds up so much better in her sequels than Jo did in hers.)
9. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (This book has to rival Little Women for being the most frequently re-read book in my life.)
10. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (Meg, Charles Wallace, the witches… The concept of tesserecting. Physics. Honestly, this book is what gives me any hope for science.)

Wow! I thought that would be so much easier than it was. I had to leave out so many favorites — The Little House books, Heidi, The Secret Garden, Eight Cousins, Ballet Shoes, the Lord of the Rings trilogy…

I also remember liking a series of picture books my brother was fond of, but which I can’t remember any title or author details. But it’s about a little old man and a little old woman who get married. And in another book they drive their old-fashioned car in a rally of sorts. (I could be muddling the details. They might not be in the same series, but I believe are by the same author/illustrator. Ringing any bells for people? Dad?

Finally, leave your own list in the comments. I still read kiddie lit with alarming regularity and would love to check out what’s been important to you.

I thought I’d share some photos from Rudi’s and my community garden plot because I don’t think I’ve done that yet this season:

Rudi surveys the week’s growth.

Our chard re-seeded itself after last year and was our first crop of the season.

This is the rosemary plant our neighbors gave us to replace the one that was plant-napped earlier in the season. It seemed safer to plant it down in the garden, rather than where it would inevitably be stolen by some unscrupulous person.

This was our third season for our strawberry plants and the year they really came into their own. We got no berries the first year, a few last year, and have now harvested two bunches of strawberries and will get at least one more.

Green beans — still covered with fuzz.

Shelling peas — still more shell than pea.

We planted some seedlings — tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, kale, and cabbage. The cabbage and the kale are now huge. The farmer we bought them from said we can just harvest the outer leaves and the plants should keep us in leafy greens for a good amount of time.

The salad greens are abundant — we planted two types of lettuce, two types of spinach, and arugula.

The arugula has gone to seed (as has one variety of spinach) already because I didn’t stay on top of it.

Here’s the back of the garden — peas and kale are what’s growing in the center of the shot.

Beans and peppers and strawberries — and the neighbor’s garden in the background. They are growing a healthy crop of weeds right now, but I expect to see it cleared in a week or two. They usually tackle the planting in June.

This might appear to be a forgotten patch of earth, but instead where we planted our potatoes and our peanuts. I believe what’s popping out is all just the potatoes, but it could be peanuts because I don’t know what the plants look like. (Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out soon.)

And we aren’t the only ones enjoying our garden patch. This fellow thought our kale plants were just grand.

So that’s it right now. But I will say that it’s really cool to walk home from the garden with a whole tote bag of things you’ve grown — two containers of strawberries, a bag of spinach, a bag of lettuce and arugula, and a bag of cabbage and kale.

Rudi and I spent tonight sorting through old papers. They’d been stuffed into the space Rudi’s desk and we were hoping to repurpose that space for something else. Mostly it’s what you expect to find when going through old stuff — outdated magazine offers, charitable requests, old bank statements. But I knew there were also four containers under there that held important papers of mine.

Sure, I figured some of them would have become things I didn’t need — pay stubs and the like — but I also knew there were letters and cards and things I wanted to hold onto.

So when Rudi wanted to head to bed, I told him to go since I had to tackle those last boxes myself anyway.

Boxes one and two held the stuff I expected. Sure there were some things that could be pared down, but I was unsurprised by what I found and just mostly tidied and consolidated.

Box three held … junk mail. It was a huge let down. I mean, it’s good because I don’t need to keep nearly anything that was in there, but still. It’s hardly what I was looking forward to.

So, I admit it was with a little worry that I pulled the last box toward me. Would it also hold the remnants of some last minute cleaning?

The box did not hold important papers.

Instead, as I lifted the lid, I was met with the smell of rosewater.

It’s a box of little items from Connecticut that I didn’t want to lose — an old perfume bottle (thus the scent). The seahorse pendants that came from necklaces my grandmother brought me back from Hawaii when I was small. The charms to my charm bracelet. Some of my favorite necklaces from high school. A suncatcher from Karen. A broken keychain from Grey Kitten. (No, GK, not that first one. That one is in my parents’ basement.) A birthday card from coworkers a decade ago. The first amethyst ring my parents gave me when I was a kid. A flower pin from an elementary school friend.

This is why people save things. Little mementos from their lives that wouldn’t mean anything to other people. Even Rudi looking through this box probably wouldn’t know the significance of two thirds of it. But my looking through it tonight took me away to people and places and times that matter a great deal to me.

Most of my treasures remain scattered — in boxes around the Burrow and in my parents’ basement. I wonder if I would feel more whole if they were in one place where, on the days when I’m feeling lonely and lost, I could just open a box and follow a rose-scented path back through my own life.

I’m glad it’s Thursday and not just because I need the weekend to arrive. (Honestly, I dozed off on a cat last night and then put my underwear on inside out this morning and didn’t notice for hours… Clearly I need some sleep.) Here are three beautiful things from my week:

1. Going to Old Town Alexandria on a weekend is never a smart idea, but sometimes your errands take you there. Memorial Day Weekend meant King Street was particularly packed, but it was also filled with bikers who were in town for Rolling Thunder (an annual event designed to raise awareness about POW and MIA issues and to assist veterans). Everyone walked up and down the street admiring the motorcycles and trikes — but particularly the Boss Hogg parked right at the bottom of the street. Very classy and so cool.

2. I buy two pints of shelling peas so there will still be some left when Rudi gets home.

3. A terrific afternoon thunderstorm strikes the area Tuesday to mark the beginning of meteorological summer. I turn my back to my computer for a few minutes so I can watch the lightning and listen to the driving rain hit my windows as the storm sweeps through downtown. Blue skies return shortly thereafter.

I have decided to sign up for the Non-Fiction Five Challenge for the third year in a row. I have finished each of the previous two years’ challenge exactly zero times.

Here’s going either for a win or a third strike. Let’s hope for the former.

The challenge:

Read 5 non-fiction books during the months of May – September, 2010. At least one [should be] different from your other choices (i.e.: 4 memoirs and 1 self-help).

The five I currently aspire to read:

1. Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating: How to Choose the Best Bread, Cheeses, Olive Oil, Pasta, Chocolate, and Much More (because Kelle’s tea package reminded we owned a book by the owner of Zingerman’s and who doesn’t want to know these things?)
2. The Geography of Bliss (because I’ve failed to read it both other times)
3. The Invisible Kingdom: From the Tips of Our Fingers to the Tops of Our Trash, Inside the Curious World of Microbes (because it’s a science book that actually seems like fun)
4. Sun in the Morning (because Karen gave this to me two Christmases ago and I can’t understand why I still haven’t read it yet)
5. The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France (because it was sitting by my bedside too long and is now on the floor next to my desk, because I enjoyed the author in All Creatures Great and Small, and because I love Peter Mayle-type stories)

Things could change. Life is too short to be dictated by a list written from lack of blog fodder.