Little Luxuries

This Spring my wife and I went for a chilly, drizzly, windy walk one morning to work up an appetite for breakfast. (Completely unnecessary: breakfast always sounds good to me.) Between the weather and the then-new stay at home order, we pretty much had the bike path to ourselves.

The birds seemed to be enjoying Spring. We saw a ton of robins, two bluejays, a Mallard duck couple, 2-3 cardinals: all out, singing their songs and doing their thing. Curiously, there was also a crawfish in the middle of the bike path about 40 feet from a footbridge that crosses a stream.

Ordinarily, I trust that animals know better than I do where they should be and what they should be doing, but in this case my wife and I decided to repatriate it to a more suitable habitat. I set him (He’s a guy, right? Should have asked directions, right?) down on the bank of the creek, where there were raccoon tracks in the mud from the night before. From the bridge, we could watch Bartholomew Crawfish (wife’s choice of name) slowly make his way down toward the water, accidentally rolling onto his back a couple of times, then righting himself. He was moving quite slowly, but deliberately. It could be my imagination, but he seemed relieved to stick his head back in the water.

Back home, we warmed up over hot oatmeal and coffee. Those comforts always seem to possess a depth beyond the ordinary when you’re cold and damp. A dinner companion of Ruth Reichl says it well in her book Save Me the Plums, “When you attain my age you will understand one of life’s great secrets: Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.”