Sunday July 6, 2025: Small Moments of Delight
Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.
Daily Diary, Day 1768:
Certainly, the weather has brought me delight this past week, as have watching the birds at the feeder. And the continuing saga of Edgar and his friends has delighted me. But a decision I made after watching the movie Amelie the other night has also caused me a good deal of delight.
In Amelie, a daughter, who is worried about her widowed father becoming a recluse as he spends all his time building a sort of shrine in his garden for his deceased wife, plays a trick on him. She has a friend who is an airline hostess, who she gets to take her father’s garden gnome with her on her travels, snapping photos of the garden gnome in various parts of the world. This woman then sends the photos back to the father, with the message, “wish you were here.” Eventually the gnome “comes home,” and the father has been inspired to go traveling himself.
Anyway, I once wrote a post back in December of 2024 about a small Elephant I got from the company that supplies my tea, and the delight it gave me. But it just sits in the bay window in the kitchen, often hidden behind the tea kettle, so I realized I don’t often notice it any more. Anyway, the movie, and the fact that for some reason in the past week I have suddenly started getting posts about an Elephant Sanctuary, with these adorable videos of Elephants, made me decide to send my little Elephant traveling around the house, where I am more likely to notice her and get a little jolt of joy!
Here are some of the places my Elephant can sit, where I can see her better, when working in the kitchen, when sitting in my rocker at night, and sitting in various places in the living room.
Hope these photos make you smile as much as I did. And I would love to hear if you decided to take any of your own knick-knacks traveling!
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My husband and I had an action figure in the 80s that we moved around the house, always looking for a place to surprise the other with the little plastic guy being maximally action-y and seeing how long it took them to find it.
Your photos made me smile. I like the idea of putting favorite things in new places.
We just rearranged the art in our house, and that makes me look at it anew.
And in a similar vein, I put a favorite picture of my wife as the "wallpaper" on my phone. It makes me smile when I check my phone to see the time, or whenever.