It was an exceptionally beautiful spring. Chaotic and full in all the ways, but a sweet one nonetheless. Some seasons make beauty hard to find, and some seasons make it easy. This season finding it was easy! It won’t always be, I know, but what a gift when beauty and goodness is abundant.

Oh yes! If you’re new, hi. I’m Abby, the founder of Studio Tell, a copywriting studio for creative entrepreneurs who love beauty and creating it but don’t love selling it. Every quarter or so, I love to look at what beautiful goodness saved my life that season—* a combination of Barbara Brown Taylor’s “What’s saving my life” and “beauty will save the world.”

Why share from my little ordinary life? I’m not anyone special; my life isn’t that dramatic. But I think my one wild and precious life is worth paying attention to. It’s how I see God working—in the little, unimportant, lovely moments.

So let’s get into it! Beautiful things that saved my life this spring, 2026.

Poppy’s growing vocabulary! New words and phrases basically every day. I’ll never forget her crying and saying “I. See. Dada?” when I had diverted to get her milk after she woke up from her nap and I initially told her we would go right to Dada. Watching a child grow and learn is SUCH a beautiful thing.

Planting all the plantsss. Marshall calculated that we have planted around 63?? bushes and shrubs on our property this year. Most of those were free willow cuttings from friends. Many of them were very cheap shrubs that M found on Facebook Marketplace, his new favorite hobby. We only spent actual money on a few things. But wow we wish we had planted them all five years ago when we moved in but can’t WAIT to watch them grow and transform everything.

California nostalgia. I took a quick, kinda chaotic trip to California, just with Poppy. (Probably the last time before she turns two and we have to buy her a ticket!) I love California, and loved seeing all the abundant growing things at my parents house and everywhere. I love my life here in Idaho in so many ways but my soul still misses California DAILY and I love filling that cup back up.

The day they disked the field around our house. Word on the street was (still kinda is) that the farmers won’t be planting the field around our house this year because of a water shortage and high diesel prices. (Insert multiple sobbing faces). I LIVE for the things that grow here in this desert field, and was especially heartbroken because the field was just growing up in weeds. I asked a couple of my friends who get it to PRAY they plant the field this year and THE VERY NEXT DAY the farmer came through and disked it up. Only a few days before a baby shower that I was planning to host in my backyard! I’m still praying they plant it. But for now, a disked field is better than one thats full of weeds.

Gathering for the funeral of an old friend. Maybe this one seems strange—obviously funerals aren’t exactly happy; this one was especially tragic, a young father leaving his wife and family much too young. But the loveliest thing was the people, so many old friends, so many hugs and it was incredibly sweet to reunite with home people that will always be home people.

This spring was absolutely not without its stress and chaos. You better believe I could make a matching list of the hard things that existed right along with these sweet ones. But I want sharp eyes for the goodness, and this little quarterly list is one way of practicing that sharpness. Beauty is saving the world, saving my world, every day.

*The presence of em dashes in this blog post means that I wrote it and I like em dashes. No generative ai touched this blog post, thank you very much.