~thankful thursday~ moss

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

11/7/25

Today I am grateful for kitties and wood stove fires. A throw back, but it’s just as true as year one.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/25

I am grateful for some dry weather today, to set up a late-season veggie rainbow, and to take my camera for a walk in the woods. I always like to add a photo to my gratitude posts, but have been in a photography lull. So today I fixed that. When I am thinking about gratitude, consciously, daily, it makes me look more closely at things. It makes me be conscious of the thing, to name it “this is my coffee that I’m drinking,” or “this is the kitty that one year ago was a poopy tiny sniffly runt and now look at this queen.” I can get into autopilot mode sometimes, gulping the coffee without noticing, dumping kibble in bowls while my mind is elsewhere. It’s a subtle but important difference to take a beat to acknowledge the thing. And in acknowledging it, the next step, gratitude, is another kind of autopilot for me. As I snapped photos of spiders and mushrooms, I kept wanting to get closer and closer to the ground, until finally I was on my knees, able to smell the fungus and focus on individual fronds of moss.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/25

It’s husband gratitude day everyday, but especially today. I am thankful for Rich’s muscles with which he helped me move a bed into the newly painted bedroom today. I am thankful for his Sunday kind of loving. I am thankful for how he supports my creative life (gratitude oversharing included). I am a broken record about this last one, but I am thankful to be married to someone who is always, without fail, nice to me.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/25 (posted 11/11)

Every year I’m reminded that I am not taking this gratitude class for a grade, and year ten is no different. As for yesterday, I was graceful for gratitude grace periods and a little bit of sunshine.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/25

Today I am thankful for veterans. I am reposting last year’s gratitude post about Cousin Rita, because she and other forgotten and underestimated veterans have been on my mind. As the current administration truncates the horizons of women in the military, Rita reminds me that those soldiers who are being erased are just as worthy of respect and deserving of honor on this day. Women are veterans. LGBTQ+ people are veterans. To me, you can’t be erased.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/24

There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.

It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.

She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.

I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.

I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.

But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.

That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.

In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.

After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.

In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.

But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.

So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/25

Today I am grateful for the life of Jane Goodall. I am watching her funeral, which was held today at the National Cathedral, in installments. I saw her speak almost twenty years ago and I’m so glad I can say that I was in a room with her, because she is like no other person who has lived. I was born on her birthday and she defines my hair goals for myself, but obviously it goes deeper than those things. As a “difficult woman” who is a biologist who names her subjects and who also writes… you can find her in my book shelf, my search tabs, and my passwords. She has always inspired me and I’m so grateful for her example.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/25 (posted 11/14)

I was so grateful to be back at work yesterday that I fell asleep in my chair before I could post about it. I am grateful to have such good colleagues that we all congregated in the hall first, catching up before we logged into our dusty computers. When each person arrived, we raised our arms up like soccer parents and made a sparkle finger tunnel to welcome them back.