This picture makes me smile every time.

I found it posted by someone I barely know on facebook and couldn't stop looking at it. Infact, I was so tickled I downloaded it so I could look at it from time to time. I am using it without permission, infact. Sorry Clarice. I just can't help myself.

Sometimes I ponder that a picture of my partner or my own dog doesn't have this same effect. Or pictures of sunsets or rainbows or little children playing. But I think, very simply, it's contextless adorableness and absolute ridiculousness could never be replicated by an image that had history, or backstory or import.

Once, I was at Breitenbush and a little girl was sitting on her mom's lap and her mom was, like everyone else in the clothing optional hot spring pool, naked. The little girl was just old enough to be talking a bit, and every once in a while, when her mom would uncross her arms revealing her breasts she'd say, with utter joy and innocence "there they are!"

Thinking of this, for some reason, gives me a similar sense of amusement.

Not everything that brings a smile can be defined, and often, defining it or understanding it, truly, would kill the trigger. Sure, I could ponder a backstory, figure out why it was that I liked this one pic of a dog in costume and not another, what I thought started that little girls innocent exclamations. But I prefer not to. I get a feeling, and it is enough.


I try to remember this.