Tiny ants following each other along invisible trails across your kitchen counter.
Try to remember what you learned as a kid about ant behavior (was that in school or maybe just Animal Planet?)—how they communicate with their antennae and leave pheromones or some such behind so that their compatriots can find their way to the crumbs. Remember what it feels like to marvel at things—they’re so small, but they have limbs they delicately wave around and interact with each other, these complex little chemical machines.
The Capital City Go Go’s.
Drive or take the Metro over the river into Southeast DC and pay only fifteen dollars to see a minor league NBA game—it’s likely the closest you’ll ever sit to NBA-sized and speeded players and you get to enjoy Go Go music played by a live band of high schoolers. If you loiter on the concourse after the game while your friend uses the bathroom, a concessions worker may wheel past you with a cart of hot dogs and cupcakes that are free for the taking right after your other friend says, “The only thing this experience is missing is a hot dog.” Raise an Ebenezer to remember the provision of the Lord.
The honeybee searching for pollen on the far-from-flowering Brown-Eyed Susan on your fourth floor balcony.
Wonder at the two-fold miracle: that the plant is growing at all after being abandoned over winter only to be found poking back up once all the dead and brown was cut away, and that the bee found its way up there at all. Wish the bee well and advise it to come back in a few weeks when it might find more of what it’s looking for.
Your own handwriting as you write on a blank piece of paper with a Sharpie or similarly saturated writing implement.
Think about the particular way you form and connect your letters and wonder about where that comes from, why it’s different from how you used to do it, and why it’s different from your classmates even though you learned from the same handwriting worksheets. Think about your parents’ handwriting and your brothers’ and how they all look different but also similar. Think about your grandparents’ handwriting and marginalia in the drafts of the great poems and how you used to practice your signature as a kid in case you became the sort of person who got asked for their autograph one day.
The husband stepping aside, guiding his wife to move in front of him in line for Communion.
Some weeks this will rub you the wrong way, either because it mixes up the order of their row and they’ll end up in different seats when they loop back around or because it’s something you don’t have. Be grateful instead for the decades of consideration and care that gesture represents as, with a loving hand on her back, he ushers her towards the grace of God.
The rain, anytime you get a chance.
Christina Ribbens (’19) graduated with a major in history and minors in studio art and data science. After working in campus ministry for a few years, she’s getting her master’s in public humanities at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She has a benevolent dependency on tea, is always down for a game of pick-up basketball, and would love to have you over for pancakes sometime.
