A Perfect Mother's Day: The first salad from the garden

I’m not given to cheer around the holidays, but yesterday I overcame my natural instincts for swampy emotional soups and layers of conflicting feelings and managed to be plain-old, simple happy. Not the deep, bittersweet, existential, dark-chocolate-with-67-percent-pure-cacao kind of happy. Just happy. Peaceful, uncomplicated. Hersey’s Kiss happy.

It was a beautiful Mother’s Day. My husband made me raspberry-oatmeal pancakes for breakfast. Then he took me to the garden center and let me go crazy picking out all my favorite flowers for the garden. After lunch, I treated myself to the most blissful kind of nap: outstretched on the couch, a blanket over my legs, the sun coming through the window, the New York Times Magazine open across my chest.

Then we hit the garden. The girls helped me plant, while my husband and my son readied the beds. Two hours of dirt under the nails and digging in a cool breeze. As we worked, I could feel my shoulders unclench, my chest open, the curve of my eyes crinkle upward. Happiness.

For dinner, I picked the year’s first greens from our garden.

Spinach, arugula and lettuce. And then a couple big handfuls of chives. I overcooked the steak, which I suppose is how I will know, looking back on this day, that it was real. But I didn’t worry about it, and neither did anyone else. To make up for it, I dug out a small slice of super creamy blue cheese that I’d tucked away in the cheese drawer last week and then forgotten about. In my family really good blue cheese will get you forgiven for most sins.

Sometimes, I find unadulterated happiness so shocking that I get all confused and flustered, like someone has handed me an unexpected and perhaps undeserved gift, and, while I’m grateful, I don’t quite know what to do with it. But yesterday, was different. The peace just kind of settled around our house. No questions. No but-but-but what ifs.

It was a beautiful day.