“The little things are infinitely the most important.” Arthur Conan Doyle

It seems to me that the more complicated and difficult life gets, the more we truly appreciate the little things.

Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? The simple things that we left behind in a cloud of dust as we race for the newest, the biggest, the best of everything – those are what make us happiest now?

I can’t speak for everyone else, but they do for me. I almost cried with happiness this week when I saw the first forsythia bushes shouting out their happy yellow message of spring. I was more excited for the first day of baseball season that I remember ever being. This afternoon I saw people sitting outside at a local cafe, soaking up sunshine and coffee, and it made me feel good. With everything else going on in my life right now, those three things took me back to a time when I noticed stuff like that, back to an era in my life when I had time to appreciate forsythia and baseball and eating outside.

I was waiting for the mail today, expecting a check I very much needed, and I kept going out to the porch and opening the lid on the mailbox and peering inside. Each time, I felt that little clutch of expectancy as I touched the lid… maybe this time there would be mail inside. And when there wasn’t, I experienced it all over again 20 minutes later as I shuffled back out to the porch. With everything else in my life having become instantaneous, I suddenly realized I was enjoying waiting for the mail. Thanks to a greased-lightening internet connection, I don’t have time to even wonder what’s in my e-mail inbox before I’m bombarded with offers of free Viagra and back-to-school loans. I’ve lost the joy of anticipation.

When I was a kid, I had a little Kodak camera, the kind you had to manually forward with your thumb until you felt resistance and then you knew it was ready for the next shot. When there was anything on a roll of film that I was dying to see, I’d use up the rest of the pictures as fast as I could – that’s where all those blurry shots of my hamsters came from – and then badger my parents to drive me to the grocery store so I could fill out one of those envelopes and stick the roll of film inside and push down the gummy flap and drop it in the slot … and wait. And wait. And wait. And call the poor clerk several times a day after the first couple of days and ask him to please check and see if my pictures were back. And God help the man when they actually were back, as I’d be at the store before he finished hanging up the phone, and I’d open the envelope and slide out the thick stack of pictures and stand there, reliving every moment I’d captured on film as if it had been the most important of my life.

I took a picture of a child the other day, and she immediately came over to me and reached for my camera, wanting to see the digital image on the back. Something inside me died a little. And we thought Polaroids were fast.

That’s what I mean when I say I miss the little things. Excited, chest-squeezy anticipation, foot-stamping impatience, those glorious “FINALLY!” moments. That’s why I was overjoyed to see the forsythia, to hear the first crack of the bat, to see people sitting outside at the local cafe. Winter, as insufferably long as it was this year, gave me back those little things during this past week. It’s enough to make me wish I had a roll of film around here somewhere.