Favorite Thing-ing

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens are fine, but schnitzel? Seriously? Schnitzel up at the top of the list with chocolate and foot-rubs?  

Slicing onions for soup, and humming that ditty to the accompaniment of the rain, I had a nostalgic moment of favorite thing-ing.It was prompted in part, by the shattering of my favorite coffee cup, which, until its demise, I hadn't realized was my favorite.

It had been given to me by a friend, and had Lucy and Ethel on it. But what won my heart wasn’t its sentimentality, or what it represented, it was the cup itself, its heft and capacity. 

Without it I’m not exactly bereft, but there is something slightly less magnificent about my mornings. 

I don't think of myself as particularly materialistic although I admit I have worn favorite shirts over the years way past what's decent, and delayed ripping them up for cleaning rags much longer than was reasonable. And I know that the times of my life lived without a go-to shirt, were never completely comfortable. 

Similarly, having once found and owned the perfect purse, of precisely the correct size, depth, number of pockets, weight and length of strap, and carrying it to tatters, I never again achieved that degree of purse-contentment.

But I wonder what makes us love this or that thing? What makes the right things so right?

And now in the gift giving season, how can we possibly guess what might be that thing for another person? 

Did I even suspect that I was creating the standard when I first slipped into that cheap maroon jacket? Or that from that moment forth to the cursed day I left it on the back of a chair in a diner, that I was living in the golden-age of jackets?

Did the person who found it and wore it away, feel the same way about it?

At least, on this rainy winter day, I can say that in my life I have known the perfect jacket, the perfect coffee cup, the perfect purse and a few perfect shirts, and can consider myself well-thinged. 

xo

Amy