If You Want to Feel Joy

A week in the natural history of happiness.

Thursday

Two Satsuma trees crowd up against the house, hard green oranges hanging from their branches. We won’t have a bumper crop this year, a late frost last April, but we’ll have enough.

I squeeze behind the trees to a water spigot against the house. A dark snake is curled comfortably beneath the hose, against the cool bricks of the foundation. I stop, glad to have spotted it. It has seen me too, and it quickly uncurls its three feet. I watch it float away, into the Mexican petunias, definitely venomous, a cottonmouth.

We’ve seen more venomous snakes this year, closer to the house. I don’t mind them moving through, but that cottonmouth looked untroubled in the sweet, damp moss behind the orange trees.

Friday

These days of endless summer are glorious, golden sunlight pouring out of a high blue sky. When I gaze up I recognize the blue as cerulean, and I think of my friend who carries that name. She has written and is coming to visit in October. She wants to see the baby (who is doing well, joyful and calm, standing for longer periods holding the sofa, now taking small and tentative steps along it.)

What I want most is this joy. The news keeps trying to steal it.

I notice that love bugs (honeymoon flies, double-headed bugs, March flies) have arrived, this year more. That seems a hopeful sign. They cling to each other and to the nectaries of goldenrod panicles.

Saturday

Easy moments before sunrise, I glance over at a sweet little sleeping bundle. Curled up, Little Fawn looks exceedingly tiny, fragile, empyrean.

Outside, a fireball rises in the east, sending out scouts of color, pink pooling behind the treeline to the north. A layer of misty blue-gray fog levitates over the pasture, where the helenium superbloom is closing down.

I watch the dark treeline. Here deer often step out from between the silvery trunks of sweet gum to browse the pasture. I see one moving, a large deer stepping with purpose toward the marsh. It is a buck, moving through the dew and the soft mist, through the pink pools and the first sun, his rack as silvery and unwieldy as a young tree.

Joy is a choice, it seems to me, especially with hatred being manufactured and spooned out to us like candy. Choosing love, creativity, and abundance seems important.

I can’t fix the world but I can choose to be happy.

SUPERBLOOM!

Sunday

Watering plants on my porch I move a small pot of prayer plant. Underneath it a small snake curls against the plant stand. The snake is only one foot long, pied, and it appears to be an oak snake, although its markings are so dark and vivid they confuse me. I bend closer to examine the head. Its pupils could be circles, they could be dashes—they are too small to see.

We keep a snake can, a metal trash bin with a lid, near the door. I slide the snake gently into the bin. Later Raven, my husband, on his way to town, will relocate the snake to a pine wood.

“Was that an oak snake?” he says when he returns.

I laugh. “I think so,” I said. “I wasn’t sure either.”

“Just in case, I didn’t touch it,” he said.

“Me, either.”

“I think that’s the tiniest snake we’ve ever caught.”

“Yes, just a baby.”

Now I walk past the prayer plant and I think about how its jade-green leaves, with their dark markings, resemble a piebald snake.

Monday

Choosing joy takes a cognitive reframing. I want to complain and worry. Instead, I tell myself these things: I have this life, I chose this life, I love this life, it’s a beautiful life.

And it works some days.

More and more it works.

Some days I wake, open my mouth, and joy comes fountaining out. The joy is pink and it sparkles, like champagne or a party dress or a crape myrtle at the height of bloom. I step outside.

The sky is the Sistine Chapel, painted golden pink. Color bubbles out of the east and flows north, and spreads even farther, into the northwest. Now a bank of color spills toward Augusta and the eastern sky striates with grays and blues.

Minutes later a pink mountain of light slides into the trees and the ground. I am lost in roiling waves of green.

Closer in, two hummingbirds try to claim the territory of the coral honeysuckle vine.

Little Fawn is watching the hummingbirds.

“Birds,” I say to her. We’ve been teaching her lots of “b” words: bee, bear, ball, blanket, bread, butter, book. Now bird. When she says them, they all sound like “meh.”

Later one of the hummingbirds will arrive at the kitchen window above the sink and hover there. Wings outspread, it will make the silhouette of a phoenix above the elderberries that grow along that side of the kitchen.

I have the baby. I have lovebugs. I have trees hanging with oranges. I have hummingbirds with throats as ruby as rubies. I have mountains of light.

Tuesday

At evening I take the baby out with me to feed up. My only responsibility on the farm is the horses, one coffee can of oats and alfalfa each evening. I strap Little Fawn in her all-terrain stroller and stretch a black mosquito net around her. I’ve noticed a couple of gaps where a mosquito could squeeze in, but I’m hoping none does. I park Little Fawn at the fence. As I open the feed drum, I hear horse hooves plunking against the ground, coming in to eat. A smell of wet grass is in the air.

I turn around. The horses stand on the other side of the fence, staring at the baby. They are trying to understand what this thing is, like a human but so small. Surely this is not a coyote?

Little Fawn stares back at them, fingers in her mouth.

I look off down the south pasture, checking for deer highlighted against the far trees. High above in an oak, a few male cicadas still click their cymbals. A large bird flies by at canopy level. It is a pileated woodpecker, a species I haven’t seen much this season. I hope their numbers are good.

We are living in the fragile, gossamer end of an era of incredible grandeur.

A few days later my neighbor will text to say they are allll at her house, eating magnolia seeds, and she will send a recording.

I have the horses. I have a pileated woodpecker and cicadas and bats at evening. I have so much.

Wednesday

Green tree frogs congregate on the porch at night. I take Little Fawn out to look at them.

“Frog,” I say.

“Meh,” she says.

“That’s right!” I say. “Frog.”

She watches the frog with interest, but it doesn’t do much. It crouches motionlessly, quietly, watching a tiny white moth bounce against the glass panes of a French door. Finally the frog leaps, startling Little Fawn.

I stand, darkness beyond the porch, and count jade-green mounds. Fifteen frogs dot the white boards of the porch, near the ceiling, three more on the door. I step close to one and let Little Fawn reach out to touch it. I’ve seen flower stamen longer than her fingers, each of which ends in a tiny pearl moon.

The frog, cold and wet, scrambles away. Little Fawn jerks her hand back, shocked at the coldness, the wetness, the aliveness. She retreats into my shoulder.

“Meh,” she says.

Hurricane lilies sprang up beside the hidey-hole.

I know we can’t ignore the violence and the rhetoric and the danger. I feel myself, now, that I am sometimes in danger, that many people are in danger. But to dwell there is a choice.

If you have a worry—did I leave the kettle boiling?—do whatever needs to be done to take care of the worry. If you have a worry and nothing can be done, then why worry?

Why rob ourselves of joy?

Why not notice what’s alive, what’s beautiful, what’s working, what you have manifested, what you have built, what you have been given, what’s hopeful, what’s good?

Standing in all that is a choice too, a powerful choice, even a revolutionary choice, a choice to stand, even as the news worsens, in joy.

And soon I will write about courage.

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Save America’s Roadless Areas

Again we are fighting to save America’s wilderness. This time President Trump threatens to rescind the Roadless Rule, which protects 59 million of the wildest, most pristine, most beautiful land in the United States.

The public comment period is open until Friday, September 19 at 11:59 pm.

For a quick overview, see my post about these current threats to the Roadless Rule,

Sue Kusch of the Substack “For the Love of Nature” created Talking Points for your use in commenting.

Please submit comments to the U.S.Department of Agriculture stating why it is crucial to save our roadless forests. The time to comment is limited—public comment ends September 19, 2025.

1. Submit here: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FS-2025-0001-0001

2. Or here: go to roadless.org/ and follow the prompts. Original comments weight more heavily than form letters, and this site simplifies the process of sharing in your own words why wild forests matter to you.

Please encourage your friends, family, and networks to comment as well.

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Hinterland Heroes: Thank You!

Please let me know you have submitted a letter and I will add your name to this roster of folks who love wildness, protect the Earth, and defend the American commons. In the melee of my life I missed some messages—would you please send me a note again? Thanks to all of these Backcountry Benefactors.

Brenda Keen

Christy

Cyndee Wallace

Dawn Kimble

Dave Kyler, Center for a Sustainable Coast

Donna Bolls

Emmie Gooding

Erin Geesaman Rabke

Gary Spangler

Ginger Clark

Jeannette

John Wagner

Kate Carey

Katherine Williamson

Kelly F.

Kelly Spetalnick

K.K.

Kory Wells

Laura Norris

Leah Rampy

Linda Woodworth

Loralee Clark

Maggie Johnston

Margo Solod

Mark Loyacano

Marie A. Bailey

Mary Dansak

Mary Tebo

Penryn Craig

Raven Waters

Sheila Knell

Sid Sibo

Sue Kusch

Summer Koester

Terri Leonard

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As Ever

Be well, be of good service, be wild.