~thankful thursday~ the slightly belated conclusion

11/24/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

i am thankful for being able to spend this past week with my boy!

11/25/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

i am thankful for babies, new blessings to shower love upon.

11/26/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

i am thankful for john denver and radio serenades from my sweetie.

 

11/27/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

last night what i originally wanted to say was something about my gratitude for the wonderful friends in my life, but when i read what i had typed about the shining souls i call friends, it was about as interesting to read as a grocery list. that’s when john denver came along and saved me from myself. i just couldn’t do justice to the amazing people in my life or how lucky i feel. i mean, i have all the best ones, and it’s not because i’m very good at being a friend. i have lucked into some amazing connections with people who for some reason put up with my intensity, and i have been careless with more than i have been able to hold onto. even those friendships i have managed to maintain are sorely neglected. and i have squandered some friendships and completely lost touch with some really good ones. the few who seem to persist have really thick skins and are the kind who can tell me, as neil young puts it, when i’m “pissin’ in the wind.” i don’t know what i’d do without my best woman whom i take for granted until i have to dump-process all of my overthinking on her, or my sister friend who “accidentally” cooks too much dinner and feeds my family on a suspiciously regular basis, takes care of my son whenever he’s out of school and i have to work, and meticulously pulled together the details of my all-over-the-place hippie wedding as my wedding boss. i don’t know where i’d be without the lighthouse beam of support my online radical mama friends shined at me 10 years ago when i was lost in darkness, and it’s only logical that many of them have become friends in real life, while my real life friendships often take place mostly online due to time zones and geography. regardless of format, i am so grateful for my friends!

 

 

12/3/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

i’m thankful for the sunshine today. i am slowly finishing up my 30 gratitude posts for this year. i wanted to take my time writing a few more of these, and a few busy days have slipped by. still mindful of gratitude during those days, and feeling it especially well during the flood tide of my son’s homecoming on friday, by the time the sun shone today, i was brimming with gratitude. i won’t claim i have done a brilliant job of creating my own light this season, but i have been working on it. a bright sunny day like today does wonders for me. we slept in, ate pumpkin pancakes and drank coffee while the rain finished falling. once the sun came out, i rushed outside and bedded down my dahlias under some leftover straw bales from the wedding. then the three of us took a winding sunday drive along the river to cut ourselves a christmas tree. when we got to the one we would take home, a hawk flew overhead and called out. it was such an easy decision at that point. (i mean, how do other families choose a tree?) the beautiful view out the passenger window, whether it was of cascading water we can’t see when summer foliage is filled out, a rusty bulldozer overgrown with blackberry vines, or cattle grazing in a field, it all looks still more beautiful to me when the winter sun is shining on it. i dug out my mom’s swedish meatball recipe for dinner, and then rich beckoned us outside to gaze at the supermoon (also made possible by the wonderful sun.)  photo credit on a couple of these, including the blinding sunshine on mama’s shoulder, goes to quinn.

 

12/25/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

unable to find the newspaper clipping that my dad saved for me over a decade ago, that held a christmas story (or maybe it was a reader’s digest?) i have been saving this post, and hoping to unearth it somewhere. in the meantime, a miraculous rose has been blooming outside my front window, and is still going strong as of this writing, even after enduring a fairly hard frost this past week. its juxtaposition with the rainbow twinkle lights bordering the window is a perfect date stamp on a photo of the brave little blossom.

when my dad gave me that story, i remember that it was lovely. i remember that it made me feel good, both the story’s content, and the fact that my dad had thought of me when he read it. in return, i painted him a rose, in watercolor, that christmas, and it still hangs up in the living room of mom and dad’s home.

i did find a legend about a christmas rose when i typed my vague search terms into google, about a young shepherd’s daughter named madelon, who was ashamed to go and see the baby king lying in the manger without a proper gift to present. her tears falling in the snow resulted in the growth of a rose right there at her feet, and she presented this miraculous rose to the child she had so longed to see.

i have friends who have lost a dad this year. i have friends who have lost a mom this year. i am thinking that it’s not the content of the newspaper clipping story that matters here, and though i cannot share for sure whether it was that story, i feel i can share what really matters, which is that it is a connection i will always have between roses, my dad, and me. roses have other significance for me as well, but this little miracle rose in particular, blooming right on through the month of december, seems to point to the dad-christmas rose connection strongly.

photo from christmas day!

i hope that my friends who have lost parents this year let their tears fall openly on what must be a terribly confusing day full of both joy and grief, and that some gift of healing results from their falling tears upon the earth.

i am grateful for my dad, and for my mom, and for roses and miracles today.

1/22/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

i think it’s high time i write a gratitude post for day 30. i’m sure my topic won’t surprise anyone too much… no, it’s not nachos! i’m thankful for my husband of six months (!) today. since i have left quite a gap between posts, i have forgotten all the other things i said back in november, so i am not too worried about making sure this 30^th gratitude is original.

on december 22 rich and i celebrated being together for 6 years; on january 10th i realized it was yet another dorkaversary, the occasion being 1.5 years since we got engaged! so we decided the next night would be date night, to celebrate (it would have been date night anyway.)

one other milestone has been reached (when i announce these things to rich i like to tell him we’ve reached a new level in our relationship)… the brisket from the wedding is all out of the freezer! we ate up the last of the brisket burritos (and brisket omelettes for breakfast), so that is a big deal.

on a recent saturday morning waking up well before dawn, we noticed a star shining brightly out the window, so we turned the lights back off and looked out at it, sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. we saw a few shooting stars, so we called it another star date (we also spent several night sessions lying on a tarp in our front yard during the geminid meteor shower in december). i finished getting dressed in the semi-darkness, but it wasn’t until 12:30 near the end of my shift at farmer’s market that i realized i had put one of my layers of clothing on inside out.

yesterday, we observed the eve of our six month dorkaversary with all day dates: breakfast, football and movie rental dates, as well as a quick trip to the beach to reenact some of our day-after-the-wedding shenanigans. then we got into a fight. we think it’s our second one. the first one was about rinsing the eggs (don’t ask) but this time he provoked me with, “i’m so lucky you’re my wife.” it was all downhill from there, as we duked it out over, “no, i’m the lucky one!”

it’s not that we agree on everything, but we can hear each other out on anything.

and then we have a good laugh.

rich has a bone in his left arm that was set the wrong way when he broke it as a child. he opted to not have it re-broken (can you blame him?) and so his left hand is naturally oriented palm downward. when we were planning our wedding ceremony, we decided that instead of one of us having both hands in either the bottom or top orientation, we’d each have one upturned palm, and one palm downward, when we joined hands. i don’t know that anyone noticed this, but it felt very symbolic. we both give, we both receive, we balance. yin and yang, masculine and feminine seem to be out of balance in so many instances in the world. it is such a comfort to me that this is not the case with us. i’ve got a guy who’s so secure in himself that he isn’t even bothered by me gushing about him on the internet.

i’m definitely luckier.