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7 Wonders of My World, Witnessed with My Own Two Eyes:

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In No Particular Order:

1. Thousands of jellyfish, floating underneath the swimming pool raft that I was lying on, belly down, in the Adriatic. I could not put a finger or toe in the water without getting stung. Jellyfish don’t swim: they drift with the current. And so do air mattresses.
2. My then boyfriend/soon-to-be-fiancée’s deer-in-the-headlights look, right after he slipped and accidentally told me he loved me for the very first time, as he was saying goodnight, after a loooong time spent making out on my couch. (I offered him a do-over in his choice of wording, in case in the heat of the moment, in his lust-filled state, he’d lost his mind, and wanted to take it back. He thought about it momentarily, and decided he’d just leave it, as it was. Good call on his part.)
3. The quiet, earnest, sincere, pondering, lingering gaze of my firstborn newborn baby boy, who supposedly couldn’t really see me, the newborn’s ability to focus being somewhat diminished. But when they laid him in my arms, we gazed into each other’s eyes for what seemed like an eternity, as he gravely considered the owner of the voice he’d been listening to for the last nine months, and I fell irrevocably in love.
Lac Léman, between Switzerland and France. The mountains are called Les Dents du Midi. Image from here.
4. After two weeks of fog, and complete cloud cover, the morning in January that the clouds lifted, and the French Alps (les Dents du Midi) were revealed to me for the very first time, across the lake from my new Swiss home, in Lausanne. It was as if a magician had dropped them in there out of nowhere. They took my breath away, quite literally.
5. My five week old baby daughter’s first smile, that she reserved for her stuffed animal, placed beside her in the crib. (We took it away: she stopped smiling. We put it back, she smiled again. Repeat, 5 times more…) Her joy brought me such overwhelming delight.
6. The message in the barnacle-covered wine bottle, that washed up in the waves in front of us at the beach, that claimed it was sent from a boat adrift at sea. It gave the boat’s name, the coordinates, and the harbor it had sailed out of. Such wonder, at being the right place, at the right time! (Yes, we reported it to the Coast Guard. No, we never heard anything else. I’ve always wondered…)
7. The barn that gave my then-wounded father shelter during the Battle of the Bulge, when the 101st Airborne was surround by the Nazis, and the face of the woman whose family owned that barn, as she discussed her recollections of that time with me, as I translated her words from French to English, for my father, visiting Belgium almost 40 years later.
Tell me one wonder of your world, that you have witnessed with your own, two eyes.

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