Category Archives: thankful thursday

i have been participating in ~30 days of gratitude~ each november for the past few years. those posts go on facebook each november, but i have also gathered them here to look back at on days when my gratitude tank needs a top-up.

~thankful thursday~ hugs

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/23

I am grateful for another stunning sunrise over the bay this morning.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/23

I am grateful to have him home on this Friday night, watching Ice Age together over the official meal of November. (Photo from summer, when both these youngsters were smaller than they are now.)

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/23

I am grateful for a few little spaces in my weekend for some extra writing time.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/23

Today was Don’s celebration of life.

I am grateful to have gotten to know Don before he went on to join the mycelial network that feeds and communicates with the trees. I am grateful and honored that Jeannie included me in his celebration today. I am grateful that in my extra writing time this week I was able to write five pages and then cut them down to two and a half pages, to fit in a four-minute time slot. I am grateful that while my hands shook, I don’t think my voice did. I am grateful Rich and Quinn were there holding my hands. I am grateful for the embracing response of the rest of Don’s community (like literal hugs; his older brother whom I’d never met hugged me not once but twice), for new connections, and for the energy Don is already somehow instigating to keep his work going.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/23

We’re entering that phase of November when the gratitude really starts flowing, picking up momentum, and although I have one by 8 am, I also have seven more by 8 pm and it becomes impossible to choose. I am grateful for a sweet share from a farm girl I’ve known since I was a farm girl, of a post written by another farm girl she thought I’d appreciate. I am grateful for the sunshine day after a soggy, windy weekend. I am grateful for a sunny window table in the library at my work where I spent my lunch break with my laptop (more mini writing retreats whenever I can). I am grateful Rich made popcorn when we got home from work.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

11/14/23

Some nights in November I am just grateful to bask in the warmth of the wood stove and scroll back through photos of summer.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

11/15/23

I am grateful for my job. You know, when you picture what you will be when you grow up, and then you actually grow up and you are something, they can be two very different things. And yet, you can end up being grateful for the weird thing you ended up being, all the same. This is a picture of a weird thing, a fish called a penpoint gunnel, like a little squiggle of eelgrass, only a swimmy little animal, which I only know because of my weird job and how it sent me to Alaska, three times now. I think if I am still going to Alaska years from now and finding penpoint gunnels, I will be grateful.

~thankful thursday~ yet to let me down

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

11/1/23

Welcome to Grateful Year Eight!

As usual, I come to the blank page of November 1st with a large helping of overthinking and a heaping portion of here-comes-winter dread, with no idea what to write about today. I am grateful for the beautiful Halloween morning sunrise on my way to work yesterday. I am grateful, always and every day, for Rich’s humor on the dimming days leading up to November, for begging me to not disappoint my adoring fans (he means himself), and for his wonderful suggestions of what to write (which I will not share here.) I have in other years (including the very first year) begun day one with how grateful I am that he is my person. As usual, I do not want to begin with my gratitude for the nachos we ate for dinner tonight. (Of course we did, and I am grateful for them). But the beginning of the month always feels like this, like it will take effort to “come up with” a post. So, I think I will embrace that, and say I am grateful to have learned that this practice requires work, to know to expect it, and to know that I can also expect the multitude of benefits that result. I don’t mean benefits/results in a “The Secret” sense, because focusing on gratitude does not magically make only good things happen to me. In seven years of gratitude there has been loss, grief, a pandemic, in addition to nachos, butterflies, popcorn and cranberries. I have ridden the waves of all the different emotions. Gratitude doesn’t eliminate the hard things, but it does provide a whole lot of perspective. Gratitude has yet to let me down. I’m still me, still ambivalent when November pulls up to the curb and tells me to jump in, but jump in, I do.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

11/2/23

I am grateful for date night. It might sound like same gratitude, different year, but there is always something new, exciting, or silly on our dates. Tonight there was an enormous, gnarled, and bulbous jack-o-lantern perched on a curve of the bay road as we drove to dinner, a plate of crusty, buttery garlic bread with some sort of aged cheese melted on top, and our server (who we know by name by now) had the rest of our “usual” order memorized. I look forward to Thursday date night all week.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

11/3/23

I am grateful for poetry. One of my forever favorites is by e.e. cummings and ends with “it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.” A few memorable ones I’ve come across this year have been Ada Limón’s “Joint Custody,” Camille Dungy’s “Sanctuary,” and Kate Baer’s “What Children Say.” This week I was introduced to Andrea Gibson and when I turned on their album Hey Galaxy on the drive to work this morning, I cried during each of the first three poems. The lines that got me first, in “Your Life” were,

“Choose to spend your whole life telling secrets you owe no one

to everyone, ’til there isn’t anyone who can insult you

by calling you what you are”

And for the poet the insult had been one about being gay, whereas the insult I remembered (because the gift of poems is they take you right there) had been one that cut me so deeply a long time ago. I don’t need to tell it to you to make the story make sense, because all you need to know is that if someone called me this same thing now, my smile would just shine. And so I cried in my car instead, big ugly sobs while gripping the steering wheel just before the traffic light by the pawn shop and the kite store. Which is about the closest I can come to describing the inner life of this grateful 45-year-old woman.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

11/4/23

“Gratitude doesn’t eliminate the hard things” as someone once said. Today I am grateful that Lisa kitty allowed me to give her a bath. We are in a little bit of denial that Bart and Lisa have arrived in kitty old age at fourteen. Lisa has (probably) cancer in her jaw that is making it harder for her to do normal cat stuff. Grooming is especially difficult for her now, and it was time to give her a hand with that, but cat baths are generally not done for good reason, and I wasn’t sure how it would go. She didn’t love the idea, but she held still on the towel I had warmed in the dryer and let me rub her with warm wet washcloths and comb her fur. She did not extend a single claw, and now has a nice lemongrass-cedar scent (a big improvement). I knew she had not held it against me when I wrapped her in another warm towel and she willingly snuggled on my lap getting rubbed down for a half hour after the bath. Her purrs and tail twitches communicated that she feels grateful, too.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

11/5/23

I am grateful for my husband’s unfailing willingness to drive me places. Our annual pilgrimage to the Fill Your Pantry market started out a colorful forest drive and ended up a gray downpour. All I had to do was enjoy my heated seat and look out the windows. At the market, we obtained our usual bucket of honey and stash of responsibly raised meat, and I am grateful for the full freezer. I saw heirloom apple varieties I recognize like Winter Banana and Fameuse, which made me rattle off a few more in my head that I did not see, but know from my parents’ orchards: Blue Pearmain, Hubbardston Nonesuch, Red Astrachan, Mother. I reveled in the varietal names of the dry beans I didn’t buy, too. Found another mother called Good Mother Stallard, a mottled maroon whose namesake was someone named Carrie Belle. I am thankful for the growers and namers of all the good food that fills our bellies.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

11/6/23

Nachos! It’s their day, and this year, we happened to synch up (yes, for those keeping score at home, we did just eat them on 11/1. So?) I’m grateful for an easy evening meal following an easy grocery shopping (parking lot pickup has my heart). Hope you’re having an easy evening, too.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

11/7/23

When I got to work this morning, the cubicles were strung with twinkle lights, and my coworkers had added a fish lamp to our shared office space. We eschew the overhead fluorescent lights, and have been slowly bringing more good light to the cubicles, but today we leveled up. It is the right time of year for bringing the light. As I documented the twinkle situation with my phone (that sweet “already found my gratitude and it’s not even 9:00 yet” feeling) I realized there were fun reflections in the photos that hang in my cubicle. I had to hold my head a certain way to overlay the light reflections across, say, a butterfly. How I hold my head seems important to practicing gratitude, to finding light.

More lights kept arriving throughout the day. As I left work, a rainbow saw me on my way home. In a chat with a couple of writing friends, light bulbs seemed to appear above each of our heads as we spurred each other on to new ideas. And a “one minute” chat in my driveway turned into more like a half hour when a friend swung by with an extra pan of enchiladas she happened to have. Though the driveway was dark, laughing in her Subaru added even more light to my well-lit day. I’m grateful for all the ways the light finds me in November.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/23

I am grateful for yard kitten snuggles as I sat in the yard after work and watched each solar path light blink on, one by one around the yard, as the day dimmed. Some of the lights are rainbow colors, a treat we gave ourselves this year. Smoke began to rise out of our chimney and I knew Rich was inside building me a fire in the wood stove, and I felt grateful.

~thankful thursday~ peanut butter

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/22

Grateful. It’s been too many pandemic holidays without him. So grateful to fill him up with food and love.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/22

Today I am grateful for my brothers, one of whom has a birthday today. I have said this before, because it’s year six of this gratitude project and every November 26th I’m going to think about them. And always I’ll feel grateful for the humans they are, their presence in this world, the slices of bread to sandwich me, which I guess makes me the peanut butter. I am grateful to have unearthed this photo of them, uninhibited, nontoxic to the core.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

11/27/22

I’m grateful for: listening to Rich offer to teach Quinn to drive; and an all-day game of Cat-opoly with the two of them.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

11/28/22

I am almost out of days of gratitude and books have not yet had their day. Tonight, while Rich took in a Steelers game and popped us some popcorn in Bob’s honor, I listened to the exquisite audio of this book that I have on my library app even though I bought the actual book and have it in my lap. And as soon as I get done listening and my library hold ends I will open this up and start again at the beginning and underline all the things that made me speak aloud while I listened. There are some books that dunk you right away and sweep you along in a current and you just hold on for the ride. Lidia Yuknavitch is one of those authors. I’m such a fan, and also, I get to sell heirloom tomatoes to her family at the farmer’s market once in a while, so that’s also fun.

And while I’m feeling thankful for books, my gratitude for librarians continues to be ardent, as I’ve leaned heavily on the interlibrary loan privileges that come with my student status at SNHU. The benevolent book fairies have been busy whizzing articles at me across cyberspace whenever I hop down another research rabbit hole.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

11/29/22

Holy cow, it’s penultimate gratitude day. I scanned back through the month to review:

We made it through another winter, we will make it through this one. Get us some therapy if we need to.

Sunshine, nachos, a pallet pirate ship full of feral kittens.

Job, house, MFA.

Cows who have names, four gallons of honey.

Cloud whales, crock pot.

Husband hugs.

Sunrise, sunset.

Men’s gummi vitamins.

Ma and Pa.

Soft walls, warm fires.

Peanut butter.

I am grateful for the way these gratitudes, post-it-note and placard-sized, and every size in between, collect into a quirky little bundle each year and make a kind of sense together, put off a sort of warmth, a little light, they almost hum. It’s a nice way to stand on the threshold of December, with this little bundle in my pocket.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

11/30/22

For the first twenty-nine gratitudes this year, I was thinking this was year six. Then I looked back at the previous years to remind myself what they were all about, and it turns out, this year of gratitude posts is year seven. How powerfully magical.

I think you know what we ate for dinner tonight, official meal of the gratitude challenge. And to kick off December, we decided to put up our tree, and I am excited for morning writing time with not only my sun lamp but also twinkle rainbow lights. I am grateful for each and every small light this time of year. The sunset that sometimes coincides with the end of my work day, the weekend sun glancing off kitten fur. And the metaphorical kind, blinking like fireflies from all you lovely light bringing friends. Two hundred and ten gratitude posts later, I remain ever grateful for you all coming along for the ride.

~thankful thursday~ feathered and furry friends

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/22

I am grateful for a moment with the ocean at sunset and the trust of a tall, lanky friend to watch it with.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/22

I am grateful for a winter squash kind of day.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/22

I am grateful for unexpectedly calm seas, spontaneous dates, and laughter.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/22

Grateful again, for all the same things. But repetition isn’t so bad.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/22

Grateful for ten years and eleven months of loving Rich. I’m grateful he is and has always been the kind of man who, when he sees a feral kitten, does not see a throwaway, but a treasured furball; who, when he received not just me but all my baggage, did not return me to the pound, but embraced me and blended me into his loving family. It’s never going to stop being surprising, and I’m always going to be grateful for his love.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/22

Today I am grateful for Lemony Snicket-inspired emails from my son that made me laugh. And Lisa kitty in the ham box. And nachos.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/22

I am grateful that a small panther named Lookout was available to demonstrate another thing I was grateful to spend most of my day doing: lounging in the sun. I procrastinated my pie-baking and spent the middle of my first day of vacation writing outside, my favorite. Grateful for the sunshine time and as always, Grandma’s never-fail pie crust. And kittens.

~thankful thursday~ soft walls

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Thursday… ish?

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/22

I am grateful to be feeding a bottomless boy and playing endless rounds of Tiny Epic Quest this evening. As Quinn has slowly reintegrated into life at the dragon house, I stood in Fred Meyer one recent day contemplating the gummi vitamins. The ones in the cupboard from when he was in seventh grade and the pandemic began that led him to shelter in place at his dad’s for over two years were kids’ multivitamins, now hardened with neglect and past their expiration date. On the grocery store shelf, I looked back and forth between kids’ and men’s. Kids’. Men’s. I put the men’s gummi multivitamins in my shopping cart. Grateful for vitamins, and the boy-man sleeping under my roof tonight.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/22

I am grateful for sunshine again. The dwindling of the busy market season allows me to work a little on Saturday to earn my produce, then go home and nap. Then walk in the woods with the kittens (I guess feral kittens love to be taken for walks) taking backlit photos of vine maple leaves to wake up from my nap again. A newt saunters by with a wave. A stand of tiny mushrooms sprouting from a pinecone catches a sunbeam. I go back inside and I am grateful to get to watch Quinn, also sunlit, eat systematically around the flaky pastry crust edge of the Danish I brought home for him, then the gooey cream cheese center, then lick his fingers.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/22

I am grateful for a phone call with Mom today. Another big 2022 gratitude is that I finally got to visit Mom and Dad in January and June, and I’m looking forward to another visit in January. And then June (when I graduate) and then having them come out and visit us in Oregon again. I am so grateful for my parents and for their love.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

11/14/22

I’m grateful that even when a day in the middle of November is a blur between the hours of still dark and dark again, sometimes it’s a very pretty blur.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

11/15/22

As I spend each November being grateful, I tend to take a closer look at gratitude.

Every October, I know that by mid-November some gratitude momentum will build. But every November 1st is daunting. There is something about October that whittles me down. Only because I know the benefits do I intentionally sit down each November 1st and begin again.

Sometimes I judge my gratitude posts because they are tainted with ungrateful sentiments (say, about a difficult coparent or a bad hiring process) and think, my gratitude isn’t pure. And then I think, if I strain out any negative feeling, I’m not being very real.

I can both have a terrible day and express gratitude. It’s not that gratitude wins, or that it erases death or taxes or my archnemesis coparent. It doesn’t resolve my inlaws’ complicated estate-trust-thingie and it doesn’t end war or defeat the patriarchy.

What gratitude does do, is it lights a little warming fire in my soul while the shitstorm howls and sleets and ices over the part of the world I can’t control, just outside. I have soft walls and the wind can knock me over sometimes, but I prop my shelter up and keep rebuilding my little fire. Imperfections, scars, holes are all illuminated. But so are textures, colors. I notice the way the sunset makes the tent walls glow orange, noticing that the night is long, but the sun does rise again each morning. I keep turning toward it, and it keeps being there to greet me. Grateful for gratitude, year six.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/22

I am grateful for salted caramel rum gelato.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/22

I am grateful to be married to such a hardworking person who works overtime hours for large chunks of the year. I am also grateful that he leaves work promptly at 4:30 for date night, because priorities. Also, the sunrise over the bay when I arrived at work this morning was easy to be grateful for.

~thankful thursday~ celebrating bigger

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

11/4/22

I have felt grateful quite a bit in 2022. One thing that happened to me this year is I got hired to a permanent position doing what I’ve been doing for decades, contract to contract, grant to grant, lab to lab, with some lapses. Biologists do this all the time, but it’s a horrific system, and should be phased out, and I’m not shy about holding this opinion. It would be difficult to overstate the amount of relief brought on by this development, after all these years. Even the tiny auto loan I took out ten years ago to buy my 2002 Dodge Neon required payments that stretched, at that time, beyond the end of my one-year job contract. And a one-year contract is a good one, often the best there is. And sometimes they get renewed, like that one did, that year, so I paid off the Neon after all.

Side note: I’m grateful for my little Neon, with its little second engine that could, that I still drive to my job, which is now a permanent job I can keep until I’m done with all the car payments I may ever want to make.

I like fish, and I’m grateful to get to work with them, and I like the people who work on the fish with me. I’m grateful to be needed and valued enough for my skills that a whole job, with benefits, was bestowed on me.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

11/5/22

I’m so grateful for all the congrats on the job, wow, thanks everyone! To follow on gratitude for my job, another big thing happened in 2022 that I am also super grateful for. Rich and I closed on our house that we’ve been hoping to buy since we moved into it six years ago. A strong sense of providence and a heaping scoop of divine glitter sparkles pervaded the timing of the job-house combination. See my previous post about payments that extend past the end of contract durations if you want to understand why. Two mortgage payments in, and a lot more to go, these two big adulting milestones feel like they just had to go hand in hand.

I have not made Facebook posts or told many people about these huge life events in real time (July for the job, September for the house) and I know now that I was falling into the silence-will-protect-me trap. I have feared that knowledge of my successes would lead my coparent to strike out, but either these new developments made it to him despite having kept my celebrations small, or here’s an idea, maybe it’s not me or anything I have control over that makes him play dirty.

So I am celebrating now. I am so grateful to have a home with a wood stove that my husband has been keeping warm through the last few weeks as the weather got chilly. I am grateful for the well-insulated walls and the sturdy roof and the quirky backsplash and the big front window. I am grateful for our good well and our septic tank and our driveway covered in a blanket of needles. I am grateful for comfy spots to snuggle our kitties and my borrowed fairy dog. I am grateful for the acre and a quarter sloping gently to the slough-bayou, with giant beautiful redwood, port orford and western red cedar, hemlock, and spruce trees lining the trail we have walked into being and Rich has maintained with his power tools for our daily walks. I am grateful for a couple of redwood trees in particular, the wedding trees we stood in front of when we said our vows five years ago, and so grateful we don’t have to move away from them.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

11/6/22

I’m grateful for a day full of real and satisfying work of filling our pantry. I have been attending the fill-your-pantry market since its early days, back when Rew was still my last name, before I even met Rich. When they can’t find my pre-order filed under “H” I know to ask them to look under “R”. When I was a kid eating meat and potatoes on the farm, Dad would exasperate me by telling me the name of the cow I was eating. I usually made a big scene and stomped away from the table, but I have come around to appreciate that close knowledge of where our food came from. I did not ask the nice farm family today the names of the cow, chickens, and pig we will be eating this winter, but I am sure they knew. They also radiated gratitude for our purchase, for supporting their farm, and said it was fine to haul our chickens, sausage, and roasts out to our car in their cooler and bring it back in when we were done.

I am also grateful for a new four-gallon bucket of honey because there is something so wealthy about all that gold.

I forgot my camera, but luckily I always have an abundance of local food photos up my sleeve.

P.S. Happy nacho day!

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

11/7/22

As I try not to be devastated that the sun is down when I leave work, I am grateful to get a very nifty glimpse of the moon while driving home. The top half was obscured under a periwinkle dusk cloud, which made the moon look like a big whale eye (not the first time I’ve seen whales in the sky). I didn’t capture that image but when I got home I watched it rise up through the trees and then went inside where there was soup in the crock pot.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/22

Today I’m grateful I got to leave work on time before dark, and that it wasn’t raining, or even very windy, and I stopped by the beach. I’m grateful I thought of it this morning, so I had my camera with me. I’m grateful I arrived in time for sunset, and that sunset was quirky and unique. I’m grateful I started my day by turning in my final thirty-page creative writing packet of my third semester of the MFA program I’ve been semi-secretly enrolled in. Twelve thirty-page packets since last June means I’m about to be a thesis student. I’m grateful to be quitting this business of staying small and keeping it all under wraps. Also grateful for my vote and to all who vote for women not to have to stay small.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/22

I’m grateful for an ordinary day of hard work, kitties and woodstove fires, husband hugs, and nachos. (And falling asleep in my chair before posting a gratitude post, apparently!)

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/22

Today I’m grateful for sunshine.

 

~thankful thursday~ feral kitten pirate ship

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A few days after Thursday but here we go! Year six of daily facebook gratitude posts compiled for my non-social-media peeps here on the blog.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

11/1/22

It is November. We made it here, again. I am grateful, just for that. If you are new here, I’m about to post every day of this month about something I am grateful for, in which we learn one reason I’m not on twitter (hint: not enough page space). Before I get too far into this, I want to say that if my past five years of gratitude posts have ever made you feel feelings you don’t want to feel, especially involving words like “should”, please visit the three dots at the upper right of this post where there is an option to “Snooze Mary Beth for 30 days” which is the perfect amount of time since I’ll snooze myself in exactly 30 days for the other eleven months. No hard feelings, I promise. This whole thing is about taking care of ourselves and that’s one great way.

I am grateful for the friends who encourage me to continue making gratitude posts each November. Some of these friends have shared that they, too, get SAD and struggle with the lengthening darkness. Making it to another November means we made it through another winter, and we can make it through this one, too. And speaking of mental health, I am especially grateful today for one friend who has made it to today, having survived a year of harrowing health adventures. This friend is also the Therapist Extraordinaire of my lifetime, who taught me: my first commitment is to myself. If you know, you know (lucky you, too).

T.E. was on my mind this morning when I emailed Lauren (so grateful for her every day), something about my son’s father to the effect of, “I’m so pissed that he is doing this right now. It’s bleeping day one of gratitude, bleeping bleeper.” Therapist Extraordinaire walked me up out of some of worst troughs of despair with my nightmare on coparenting street. He unfolded me from the contortions I was performing to try to achieve the insta-worthy separation and said I was allowed to pursue happiness instead.

One thing T.E. taught me years ago, a lesson I am still working on, is, “my silence will not protect me.” Lauren told me this morning, “you’ve held your breath and your voice for years afraid of being attacked only for this.” And it’s true. My silence doesn’t keep him from reaching and grasping for new ways to take from me.

When there are a small number of people in the world out there who know the whole backstory and still want to be my friend, it dampens each new atrocity into a buzzing mosquito. It siphons the survival surge out of my blood and reminds me I don’t need to fight or flee. Not anymore.

Some of you are friends and relatives of my coparent and I don’t want that to make anyone uncomfortable. He is nice to other people, just not to me. I can be around people who love him. One of the people I love most, my son, counts him among the people he loves most. I’ve never asked anyone to take sides. Reminder that the three dots/snooze option is available to all. Me holding silence for others’ comfort is not one of the available options.

I am grateful for good therapy. I am grateful for lessons that reverberate with new relevance after all these years. And I’m so thankful for the person behind the lessons.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

11/2/22

Today I am grateful for all the sweet comments, messages, and encouragement on yesterday’s post. I want to reply to each one but that may be a weekend gig, so please just know each and every one made me smile and feel grateful for each and every one of you. I am grateful the sun came out today. I am also grateful for nachos tonight, for their supreme ease and deliciousness for tired people, and I’m not taking this class for a grade so it’s okay if I use nachos again in four days on their official holiday.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

11/3/22

I am grateful for date night. When Rich got home from work, the pack of kittens who have come to live in our yard scampered up to the driveway to greet him, then ran away again toward their food bowl, then zoomed all around him while he poured their kibble. I am grateful for these kittens. And I am grateful for my husband who is the most indulgent kitty daddy. They do not just have a food bowl, oh no. He has built them a pirate ship structure out of pallets and a tarp. He has added boxes and kitty beds so the kittens can nestle in the lengthening cold darkness. They are attuned to the sound of his truck and they run up and down around his work boots in anticipation of his feedings. We hovered for a few last minutes of daylight and gave some attention to Fluffy who is experimenting with getting petted, and then we were off on our date night.

And he got us the yummy chicken tenders for an appetizer and asked me all about my day. And we ate the shepherd’s pie with the cheese and hot sauce because it’s cold outside and that’s when we crave it. And then he got us dessert, because this is the way he cares for not just his kittens but also his wife.

~thankful thursday~ hope and home

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11/25/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for all of you, dear friends and family!

 

11/26/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

(Observed on day 27) At some point every November I will say I’m grateful for Grandma’s never-fail pie crust recipe. At some point I will notice that you don’t have to feel great to feel grateful. At some point I will skip a night and observe my post on the following day, showing up to the page only to close it again without writing a word, not feeling grateful enough, like there is some sort of minimum value. At some point the next day I will remember that it doesn’t matter what the reading on the gratitude gauge says, what matters is showing up for it. Grateful.

 

11/27/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

I am grateful for mums, so there can be flowers in November.

11/28/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

I am grateful for a sunny Sunday to follow a saturated Saturday. I am grateful to have travel arrangements made, to finally see my parents for the first time since the pandemic began. I am grateful to look forward to a trip that is a vacation, after the last several that were not. I am grateful for the tiny mascot for joyful flight who posed patiently for my camera today.

 

 

11/29/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Today I am grateful for the many connections made each year when I start posting November gratitude. If I was taking this class for a grade, I would not get an A in responding to comments this year, but I appreciated every one, and I see you all there, pressing your hearts and likes and hug faces. I felt your in-person encouragements at farmer’s market, and your messages directly to my inbox meant so much. It is just one of the ways that showing up to attempt gratitude creates the conditions under which more gratitude is generated. It comes on wings, it comes in waves, it comes one popcorn and one cranberry at a time.

 

 

11/30/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

This morning getting ready for work:

“It’s day 30! Last one! I’m grateful for these hot towels! The End!”

Rich didn’t seem convinced. I guess I did already use the hot towels on Day 4.

~

After work:

“We have been alerted that the recent lone sea otter near Yaquina Head, has hauled itself ashore on Cobble Beach with an apparent injury.

It has been taken into captivity for assessment and treatment. That’s all the information we know at this time. We will keep you updated. Let’s hope for the best. (Elakha Alliance)”

Dang it.

~

Let’s hope for….

Hope, the thing with fur. Oh, I am so sad.

Let’s hope he lives.

Let’s hope he heals.

Let’s hope he has caregivers like D from 3 West in St. Francis hospital.

Let’s hope his caregivers do not have to play hospice nurse like D.

Let’s hope he swims free again soon.

Let’s hope for all those other bigger grander outcomes, too. The triumphant return of his kin to these shores. The reunions long awaited.

Let’s hope…

~

When I tried to learn more about joy, it turned out gratitude was at its root. Maybe there is a similar connection between gratitude and hope.

~

I am grateful for…. hot towels. Nachos. Rutabagas. Chocolate cupcakes. Injured butterflies who keep flying. Injured sea otters who keep swimming.

I am grateful for the love. Sometime early in November I scrolled by a Ram Dass quote that has been bobbing to the surface of my consciousness all month. “We’re all just walking each other home.” I like that. I am grateful for how well it sums up what this year’s 30 days have been about, and grateful for your company on the walk.

~thankful thursday~ everywhere and nowhere

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11/18/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

Today I’m feeling grateful for all the little things, the popcorn and cranberries that grow into long garlands of gratitude if you string them one by one.

 

11/19/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

I am grateful for spontaneous dates to go outside and look at the moon. Rich handed me my jacket a little while ago and took me out on a moon date this evening. This photo is not from tonight, but from a moon date somewhere in New Mexico, waking up in a Rest Area and getting back on the road toward home.

 

11/20/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

I am grateful for good work bringing good food to good people. I am grateful for Saturday sun. I am grateful for my crew who sees to it that I take my break, eat my thermos full of chili, and hydrate. I am grateful for chocolate poblano peppers burnished past green to purple-brown and all the way to red. I am grateful for the architecture of each savoy cabbage leaf. I am grateful for roots.

 

11/21/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

I am grateful for a hike with Quinn, for frost pockets and cold creeks, for beaded webs and sunshine on son.

 

11/22/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

I am not taking this class for a grade so it’s fine if I cheat. November has some easy days of gratitude that I shamelessly capitalize on. November 6th is nachos. The 22nd is not the only day I dedicate to husband gratitude, but it’s a definite one each and every year. Every 22nd of every month is to be celebrated, whether we are celebrating our first date or our wedding day, and all the 22nds in between bear the title “dorkaversary” to keep things light. Today is the penultimate dorkaversary before we celebrate Ten Years Together on December 22nd.

This morning as we were wishing each other a happy dorkaversary, we recalled that ten Novembers ago, we were being helped along in our eventual romance by our yoga teacher, who decided it was high time for a partner yoga series! “Breathe with your partner,” she told us, as we sat back-to-back lengthening our spines and working out how to breathe at all, much less with our partner, oh my. “Now twist to the right and reach your right hand to hold onto your partner’s left thigh.” Do what now?! At this point in the narration Rich freely deviates from what actually happened. “That’s not my thigh you’re grabbing…”

He cannot behave. I will need more time to work on him! So grateful for the time we’ve spent together.

 

11/23/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

I am grateful for hope, which appears in this moment not as a thing with feathers, but with fur. A sea otter has been visiting our Oregon coast for several days! This is an event that for most people is probably cute and fun, but for me, it is a profound gift in a heavy time of loss.

I got into marine biology to save endangered species I loved. I became better informed about that over time, and I doubt very seriously that what I do is helping at all. What I do feels like a painstaking documentation of extinction. I know an awful lot about the very specific details of endangerment, how whole ecosystems have folded in on themselves, how our coastline here resembles what it was a century ago only on the very surface. I can take credit for saving nothing.

Sea otters were hunted down to about 1% of their historic population size. The last known individual sea otter swimming in Oregon waters was shot off Newport in 1907. Locally extinct ever since (a reintroduction attempt in the 70s did not succeed), they no longer exert control over sea urchins, which overgraze the kelp holding down the base of this ecosystem. Other species help in the role of maintaining kelp forests, though none to the extent that otters once did. Lately I lean over the edge of every far-out tidepool I visit, hoping and wishing to see a sunflower star, an important urchin predator in the absence of otters. But sunflower stars reached critically endangered status in December 2020, failing to make a comeback from the sea star wasting disease epidemic that began in 2013. Locally extinct now in the southern part of its range, sightings in Oregon are now vanishingly rare. I have not been able to find one.

I started writing gratitude posts as a way to pick myself up when the long shadows of the cold dark fall bring on familiar seasonal despair. But these last two years… despair has not been a seasonal condition. I have struggled with even wanting to bring it up this year, but my kid has still not come home to me, and this day, the 23rd, is his day the same way the 22nd is for Rich and I. I’ve been Quinn’s mom for fourteen years and nine months, and to only see him a few times a week on video and every other Sunday for a hike is… well, despair has been a steady state for this mama.

When he was little, Quinn would get into a cardboard box boat and bring a book in with him to read while he paddled, set crab traps, and coiled his ropes. One frequent book was A Lot of Otters. The premise: Mother Moon and her child become separated, her tears fall into the ocean and become stars, the otters play with the stars and draw her attention to the child by concentrating their light, and she and her child are reunited.

And this is why I will never achieve any type of greatness in my field. I cannot separate this entire bundle of emotion and sadness and longing and grief and tenderness and hope from this one tiny furry being. Somehow, now, this otter is carrying on its belly, not just a tasty meal of sea urchin, but a whole load of other baggage I need it to carry for me. It is too much for one otter to fix a whole broken ecosystem, a whole broken society, a teen’s anxiety, a mama’s broken heart.

I got to see the otter for about thirty seconds yesterday. I stood there for a lot longer than thirty seconds. Waiting. Watching. My hands took a while to recover from the cold after I left, but I saw the otter. I am so grateful I got to see the otter.

This morning Rich asked, already knowing the answer, whether I would go back again today to check on the otter. I did not see the otter today. But when I heard a rumor that there was also an orca sighted in the area this morning, I knew I would stand there for a long time again. I did not see the orca either. I hope to see orcas someday. (Yes, I am crossing my fingers the orca did not see the otter…)

Maybe why I like marine mammals is that there is no guarantee of seeing them. Someone said aloud what I always think to myself about that gaze you get into when looking for mammals: that you look everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

It makes me think of one quote Joseph Campbell used about God, “an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

The seeking is the thing. The waves are rough and the mammals are hiding, I’m standing there, looking at the whole wide circle of ocean, looking everywhere and nowhere. Looking for hope.

 

11/24/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

I am grateful for this sound.

~thankful thursday~ the helpers

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11/11/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for weekly date nights, for blackberries pulled out of the freezer and turned into syrup for date night cocktails, and of course for my handsome date. The photos are from other dates, we did not go to the golden gate bridge this evening, just to the Noodle Café, for which I am also grateful. But I do get to go to some very cool places with him when I am riding in the passenger seat, even when it’s not vacation.

 

11/12/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

I was having another one of those “grateful for husband/kitties/popcorn, again?” moments, wondering whether it was worth repeating all the same things over again that I am always grateful for. Then I looked back at my memories, as I’ve got a good pile of previous year gratitude posts to fall back on if I am already going to be repeating myself. I saw that one year ago today, my dad was spending the night in the hospital after a scary heart rate drop. A year later, he has a pacemaker and has re-emerged from retirement yet again and is back driving bus, but now with the proper number of beats per minute. My post from two years ago concerned butterflies and migrations and extra trips I had flown in 2019 to visit my parents, including the very last one I took there in October that year while my mom was having radiation. I am so grateful to be able to say that she is cancer-free and he is marching steadily to his new beat and in four more days they will both be boosted. My gratitude for my parents’ health is of course both amplified and shadowed by my husband’s loss of two parents in one year. But I’ve noticed that at least for me, this gratitude season always seems to involve looking into shadows, trusting that stories about shadows are so often secretly stories about light.

 

11/13/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

Grateful for a blue-sky farmer’s market day, a long evening nap on the couch by the wood stove, and bagels, the college roommate of nachos. (I took no good photos of my rainbow display today, so this one is from a few weeks ago; now there are more root veggies and fewer eggplants, but still colorful and abundant.)

 

11/14/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

While not vacationing in Oklahoma, I was grateful repeatedly for strangers who helped us take care of things. There was C, who reassured us that we were moving Nancy into assisted living at the exact right moment and not a moment too soon, and then texted me after her first night to let us know Nancy had enjoyed hot cocoa after dinner! There was E, who sat patiently with us in the bank, untying confusing paperwork knots and offering real sympathy, sharing her own story of loss even though we were randoms revolving through her office. There was J who sat with us in the funeral home, explaining the steps to this Advanced Adulting task over again when I got lost. She radiated sweetness, kindness.

And finally, I will be grateful forever for D, the nurse on 3 West at St. Francis hospital who could tell, without being able to talk to her, that Nancy needed her room a little bit warmer to be comfortable. D, who received word of decisions made in accordance with Nancy’s wishes to remove feeding tube, then a day later to remove oxygen cannula, and whose hands carried out those important jobs. D, who applied chapstick, and told us about Nancy puckering, appreciating the attention to her dry lips despite having maxed out the morphine drip. Into the isolation room she would hustle when the morphine drip beeped its “downstream occlusion” alarm, proclaiming, “it’s the song of my people!” And would joke along with us about how Nancy was just trying to get us to change the subject. D showed us her trick of being able to write both backwards and forwards with both her left and right hand. Instead of logging into the isolation room computers, she would write backwards on the glass doors, to be able to input her notes when she exited a room. D has been on the COVID ward since the pandemic began, so she has had time to perfect this skill. Concurrently with Nancy, she had two pregnant patients and was worried for them. She also had a belligerent patient who kept ripping off his cannula, who then signed himself out AMA. It’s no joke in there. When a patient from the psych ward was also COVID positive and on suicide watch, she would play tic-tac-toe with them using the dry erase markers, sitting on the other side of the window. She thought Nancy was “just a doll,” and shared about her work at the facility her Grandma had lived in. She understood dementia but it didn’t seem to get her down. She would ask her Grandma and her other residents, when they told her each incongruous story, “how old are you?” And when they said 39, or 56, it often made the story make marginally more sense. After two different days of D having a feeling “this might be her day,” based on Nancy’s vitals, she finally told us, “I’ll see y’all on Saturday,” the day before Nancy died. We did not see D on Saturday, but I’m so grateful for the days she took care of Nancy and of us.

 

(originally posted two years ago)

11/15/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

Still grateful about this.

Happy Monday, friends.

 

11/16/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

I am grateful for books! There are some gems in this rainbow of recent reads.

 

(from gratitude 2019)

11/17/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

Today I am grateful for the Ghost of Gratitude Past.