Eight Reasons to Celebrate March 12

1. Sun. The kind of sun that means spring is really here. That fringes limb tips with red and green baby-hair-fuzz at the tips. That brings color back to earth and lens.

2. Friendship. Time spent with someone whose tastes and interests are similar to my own and with whom I travelled to Nashville and back.

3. Turkish lunch. Whatever else you eat at Anatolia, begin with Haydari -- thick yogurt with chopped walnuts, garlic, carrots, spices, lemon -- and slide your pita bread into it like a palette knife.

4. Nashville B-cycle. Cheerful rider-friendly red bikes with generous baskets available for members at locations all over town. Hip and environmentally friendly. 

5. The Frist Center. See a show as rewarding as "Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: Highlights from the Detroit Institute of Arts." Tantalizing skin tones, rich and varied fabrics, atmospheric landscapes, flower-mania still-lifes -- an escape into a world of business-made money made into fool-the-eye art.

6. Shop. Global Market is going out of business because a jerk sold the building without telling the market owner. He was angry, and I am sad. No more Indian box dishes, English tea and biscuits, Goya crackers, sharp candied ginger in tins, and lime pickle relish. But today I came home with English tea and ginger thins. And happiness that I went before it wasn't there any longer.

7. Lake Cheston. Two tiny spiders, about a quarter the size of my pinkie fingernail, flirted and sparked along a web-draped reed, absorbing and glowing with late light like little jellies or gummy arachnids.

8. Research. Looking for the flower still-life painting in the exhibition, I discovered Bas Meeus, a photographer who makes his own 17th-century Dutch still lifes and then photographs them.

Bas Meeuws Flickr

So many good things in one day.

And with sun.

Did I mention the sun?