I keep a list, on the back of last year's diary, of small things that made me happy that week. It is the only list I write religiously. Here is April.
1. The new café in Carouge. Around the corner from the studio, the kind of place where the espresso is six francs and the woman behind the bar already knows the order. I took two Sunday-class women there afterward and we stayed for ninety minutes. The mat-bag pile under the table grew. Someone brought their dog. Nobody looked at a phone for the first forty-five minutes — I counted, because that is the kind of thing I count.
2. The blossom on the way to class. The two cherry trees on Rue de la Filature opened in the same week, which they always do, but this year I happened to walk past them twice — once at sunrise, once at dusk. I took both photos. They look identical. They are not identical. The dusk one has a slightly different blue underneath, a kind of bruise of an evening, and it is the one I keep coming back to.
3. Three new women in Sunday's group. One was visiting her sister from Brussels, one had moved to Zürich a week earlier, one I think had been planning to come for six months and finally did. They stood at the back, the way new people do, and at the end one of them said "I didn't know you could do this with strangers." Reader, you can.
4. Pancakes on a Tuesday. A Tuesday. Not a weekend. The middle-of-the-week pancake is more luxurious than the Saturday one because no part of you thinks you've earned it. I made them with the slightly-too-old yoghurt at the back of the fridge and ate three standing up before I'd thought about whether I would.
5. "See you at the lake." Not from anyone in particular. Five different women said it this month. It became my favourite goodbye. It commits us both to something beautiful — there will be a lake, there will be a Sunday morning, there will be us in our soft layers, and there will be coffee afterward. That is now my entire calendar.
April was small. April was enough.