Have a Restorative Weekend. | Cup of Jo

What are you up to this weekend? To be honest, this week was kind of rough on our end for allll the reasons, so I’m looking forward to restorative lazy days with sweet preteens and cheesy pasta. Hope you have a good one — take gentle care — and here are a few fun links from around the web…

Kindness is a business model.

What it feels like to travel with family, haha.

Holy smokes, TV is good these days. Coming up: The Good Mothers, about women facing down the mob; Tiny Beautiful Things in which Kathryn Hahn plays a middle-aged woman trying to find herself; and Ali Wong’s and Steven Yeun’s dark comedy Beef.

Last weekend, my friend brought over the funniest board game. Everyone was laughing the entire time.

Oooh, a pretty spring look.

This color quiz was fun but maddening. How did you do?

Here for the capacious bag round-ups.

Who else would like to ride a train around Europe? “I was in the dining car of a train, halfway from my home in Prague to an event in Budapest. Despite the great service and cool décor, the meal was wildly better than I had any right to expect: a crisp, improbably thin, fried chicken fillet, tender on the inside, accompanied by the Platonic ideal of potato croquettes and a craft beer that had been custom-brewed for the train. It was not just good. It was spectacular.” (NYTimes gift link)

How GORGEOUS are these paintings?

Hahaha.

Plus, four reader comments:

Says Becka on the best comedy of the midwest: “Here for the Midwest love. I’m in southern Wisconsin, and although today we’ll only get a high of 50, it’s sunny and this morning we saw a chipmunk. First of the season! I love those little goofballs. Also shout out to Michigan, Wisconsin and Chicago residents for MOST excellent voting recently.”

Says Hanna on what have you learned from your grandparents/elders: “Losing a grandparent can bring such profound grief. I love that my Grandpa Norm told me to put a $10 in my coat pocket when I put it away for the season: ‘You’ll give yourself a surprise treat when it gets cold again!’ He’s been gone for over five years, but I still think of him when swapping coats.”

Says Laura on what have you learned from your grandparents/elders: “Grandmothers, to all of you I raise my Earl Grey and smileweep. Going through a midlife divorce here, with all its halving of family photos and reimagining holidays and rewriting the forensics of history, and ALL I HAVE TO DO is ask my darling departed soulmate gran to please place a hand on my head from wherever she is, and I am STEADIED.”

Says Elise on what have you learned from your grandparents/elders: “I’m so sorry Joanna. This poem felt very Milly to me…”

I Am Standing Upon The Seashore
by Henry Van Dyke

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
“There, she is gone!”

“Gone where?”
Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;
“Here she comes!”
And that is dying.

(Photo by Irina Polonina/Stocksy.)

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