Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Playing good (not just winning) volleyball.

2. Sergio has been taking pictures of our volleyball team this summer. Today he shared dozens of photos with us.

3. Cereal for when I don’t feel like cooking and ingredients for when I do.

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

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is Books with Geographical Terms in the Title. Here are ten I’ve enjoyed:

1. Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery (Gog and Magog!)
2. When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin
3.  Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
4. River Secrets by Shannon Hale
5. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros
6. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson
7. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
8. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
9. Where the Moon Meets the Mountain by Grace Lin
10. Rainbow Valley by L.M. Montgomery

I also want to acknowledge that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books also popped into mind for this list, but I haven’t read them in a long time. While they definitely did contribute to this New England-raised girl’s childhood understanding of the middle of the country, I recognize they featured a number of very negative images of interactions with the Native Americans who lived on and were displaced from the land the characters were “settling.” Before I’d include them on a list that implies an endorsement or hand them to a young reader, I’d want to re-read them to see whether that’s still the case.

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The moon wasn’t full (Saturday is the Harvest Moon), but this evening’s moonrise was still spectacular.

2. As I was walking to the garden, I saw some folks had set up a net and were playing volleyball. “Would you like to play?” one of them asked. I assured them I would, but I had to go pick my tomatoes first before it got too dark. We played until the lights came on.

3. I decided we should award surprise superlatives to the volleyball team this time around, so a teammate and I wrote best-of’s for everyone, which I think went over really well. While we’d kept each other’s secret, I was cheerfully resigned to “team mom” for my organizing role. But instead, in a heartwarming, don’t-cry-on-the-field kind of moment, she dubbed me “Queen of the Misfits,” and I’ve never felt more seen or more touched.

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

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share ten books we loved so much when we borrowed them that we had to get our own copy. I wasn’t sure I’d get to ten, but it wasn’t as hard as I’d expected:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Maryanne Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
3. The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
4. The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak
5. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
7. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
8. A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
9. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
10. Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

How about you? Do you buy books that you’ve borrowed if you love them? Or are you an avowed non-re-reader?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. The camera (and flashlight) on my phone started working again!

2. We landed in Baltimore at dawn and the sky was beautifully streaked with pink.

3. My BFF, Karen, and I got a chance to catch up.

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