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~thankful thursday~ going on

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

11/1/24

Did November 1st sneak up on me? Yes. And no. I knew it was coming, but it arrived in the blink of an eye. So after a jam-packed Friday, it’ll be a shortie for day one.

Michael J. Fox says, “My optimism is fueled by my gratitude. And with gratitude, optimism is sustainable.”

I’m grateful for this borrowed wisdom because optimism seems crucial in this moment, and if gratitude can fuel it, it is just one more reason to kick off another year of 30 days of gratitude.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

11/2/24

I am grateful to have been under the Friday night lights for last night’s high school football game. I am no big fan of football, although I am a reluctant fantasy football player to fit in with the guys at work. (Okay, maybe I still don’t fit in; I called my team She-rah Princess of Sportsball.) I root for my husband’s team and my family’s team, because it matters to them, while harboring no illusions nor denial of the toxic aspects of the sport. At any rate, I’ve attended all the home football games at NHS the past three years while Quinn has been playing at the games in the pep band. You all definitely know by now that I’m a band mom.

PSA: the band kids are in danger if we don’t defeat the felon. The homophobic, transphobic, anti-Department of Education, anti-gun-safety, anti-choice, anti-environment, hatred-fueled candidate for president. Please vote for the band kids: for their safety, their ability to be themselves in the world, their autonomy in their own bodies.

Last night, in their final game after a mostly losing season, our team won in an epic manner, and it was senior night, during which the football team seniors and the cheer team seniors were honored, and I have a band senior (the band seniors stayed invisible in their corner of the bandstands, but whatever.) And the band sounded great, and the cheer team is always amazing, and the football team was winning, and the kid who usually plays the drum set had to leave at halftime.

For the second half of the game, Quinn got his chance, at long last, to put down the bass drum and sit at the drum set and play all the songs he has been practicing throughout high school. This was something he had ardently wished to do. I was so grateful to be there to witness it, to take inordinate amounts of video of the fight song, let’s go band, pokerface, funkytown, tequila, school’s out for summer, the hey song, and all the songs he got to play. He also got to play the snare drum, as he alternated with his snare drum player friend so they could both have a chance on drum set. You know that thing the drummers get to do, to start off the song, where they whack their sticks together above their heads, to give the rhythm for the song they are all about to start playing? Watching your kid do that particular thing, to lead the band, is a crazy awesome feeling.

There is so much going on in the wide world and my own much smaller world, that it is difficult to even know how I feel on a spectrum from despair to joy, from anger to hope, much less what to write. But I was jumping on the bleacher seats, fist pumping and screaming at the top of my lungs happy last night when that boy carried that ball down the field, and my boy whacked his sticks to make the band play the fight song. I am grateful for one uninhibited moment of joy.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

11/3/24

A friend I met in an online group when our boys were infants, so a friend I have now known for seventeen years, posted a confession sometime this past year about her gratitude practice. She said that sometimes she wonders if it can be another form of spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. At the same time, she shared that she believes her gratitude has been life saving for her in the years since her oldest son died. This woman has done so much awe-inspiring work on raising awareness around grief, and I take her thoughts on gratitude very seriously. I commented on her post that I, too, wonder about the potential for harm coming from a practice that has such good intent. I’ve thought about this so much in the months since our exchange. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting, I just never want to show up to the gratitude without being authentic.

It’s like this: there is a lot that goes on in any given day. Yes, I can almost always find something I feel grateful about during a given day, but also? Some days, there are some very large elephants in the room that make it more difficult to access gratitude, and more importantly, I would not want to negate all other valid feelings by trying to tamp them down beneath a gratitude that is forced.

Take today for example. I am super grateful for yet another annual fill-your-pantry market, another bucket of honey, another freezer full of humanely raised meat. I am ever so grateful for my husband who drove me not once, but twice, to the valley, and sat with me through a very difficult event.

But not mentioning that the event he was driving me to was one where we witnessed and joined in the grief of a family whose twelve-year-old son has died, would feel wrong. To not acknowledge sadness doesn’t do my gratitude practice any favors. I am not just going to say I am grateful for the life of this boy while I am so torn up that it is over. I don’t want to use gratitude just to spin every negative thing that happens into positive vibes.

So I guess that’s another thing to be grateful for: increasing clarity about exactly what my gratitude practice means to me. I am earning this over the years. Today’s clarity: I’m not interested in weaponizing gratitude.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

11/4/24

After some weekends, it’s possible to be grateful for Monday. I am grateful for a productive day scrubbing a fish tank until it sparkled. I am grateful for a simple evening of tuna melts (thank you local fishing community for supplying cans of tuna that have spoiled us for life against grocery store cans), strawberry ice cream, and watching Farm Aid with Rich while we each provide a resting surface for a cat.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5 and 6

11/5 and 11/6/24

Speaking of elephants in the room, I couldn’t really post last night. But this morning someone on social media somewhere quoted lines from a piece by Ursula K. Le Guin:

“The death way or the life way? The high road of the warrior, or the river road?

I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace.

The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last.

The way of the water admits them all.

The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going—carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.”

I spent most of my day walking around the lab, controlling the flow of water, or being baffled by my inability to control it. I was grateful for the distraction, something to focus on, something to keep my body moving. I had a short break and took a walk on the estuary trail, paused and listened to the sound of the water for a few minutes. And then I went on.

As for tonight, I am grateful for the official meal of November, served proudly on national nacho day.

Here is the full blog post the quote is borrowed from. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/119-the-election-lao-tzu-a-cup-of-water

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

11/7/24

I am grateful for date night, same dreamy husband, different year. He is good to talk to. Five stars, would marry again.

 

~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~ seed bank

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11/5/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

I have kept a gratitude journal for much of 2020. It helps me in November, and this year I needed help in all the other months. I was also looking ahead with some awareness that this November might not be my finest hour either, and thought of it as an investment, but it’s not really money in the bank I’m picturing. More like a seed bank, like I was putting away seeds from the flowers I grew this summer, knowing I would need to have the memory of past flowers and the hope of future flowers tucked in a safe place in order to get through the flowerless days. In July I recognized this, and was grateful for, “this garden of gratitude I am growing, one which will be able to be visited in November and harvested from when I may not have enough of what is in season.”

A few of the summer seeds I collected in my bank:

7-12

Hummingbird having a snack of crocosmia while the sprinkler was watering the terrace garden, and then resting on the flower stem to have a little shower before taking off again.

8-27

Pulled over on Otter Crest Loop overlook and took pictures of the beautiful blue ocean, trees, rocks, Queen Anne’s lace. Whales came by to say hello.

9-1

The smell of fifty pounds of beautiful peaches ripening in the kitchen.

9-3

Egrets wading in the bay as we drove the bay road home for date night pizza night. Their reflections in the blue, blue water (so nice and sunny) were just stunning.

9-5

Having enough energy to chop two ziplock bags of peppers for the freezer and can nine pints of fresh chopped heirloom tomatoes in rainbow colors, the urgent care variety I salvaged from the compost bin at market. One green zebra tomato (with one tiny squashed shoulder) the size of my head filled two pints with one more chopped piece leftover… one pink damsel that was about the same size (with one hole poked in it from another stem)! By tomorrow these would have been slumping with mold. Some beautiful vegetables are so vulnerable that it defies all pragmatism to try to bring them home, but I do it anyway, to honor the farming wrought, against all pragmatism, to bring them into being.

9-17

Walk on the beach- a fun egg case, a new nudibranch, and the whole place to myself since I arrived at dawn in the fog. Just what I needed.

Date night. Always.

11-5 today:

Speaking of date night, it is date night once again… modified for the times we inhabit, but we still observe this weekly tradition. I am grateful my love didn’t look at my tenderness, my propensity to fall to pieces, and decide I was too vulnerable, grateful that he defied all pragmatism and brought me home anyway. Grateful for the gratitude seed bank today.

11/6/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

I am grateful for the tiny bird that visited my window this morning, when the sun came out (grateful for the sun). I did not think I would get any photos but this little guy really wanted to check out what was going on in our living room, and kept lurking long enough for camera retrieval, and even after Lisa kitty wandered over and settled herself down to watch the nature channel. (The bird did decide to depart when Bart panther-pounced up beside Lisa.)

I am no birder, but my Sibley guide said it might be a Ruby-crowned kinglet. They would like our spruce trees, and would be coming down out of the treetops this time of year to migrate, possibly. When I first saw this bird’s head, I thought it could have bashed its head on the window and been bleeding. No, it was a little more red violet than red, so maybe it had smashed one of my last few raspberries on his head (DIY raspberry beret?) and finally I got a good enough look to realize it was the actual color of the feathers. (Parsimony would have helped me here.)

I later discovered that the scientific name of this little bird is Regulus calendula, and, of course this magical creature would be named after a star and a flower. Not just any star… the first schooner bunk I slept in on my first semester at sea was also named Regulus. And not just any flower… calendula, one of the only things still blooming in my flower pots in November, a botanical healer, an edible salad topping, and of which quinn asked me as a toddler, “are you going to put calend-u-willa on that owie to feel it better?”

Basically, this little bird might as well have started singing to me, “you belong among the wildflowers, you belong on a boat out at sea, far away from your trouble and worry…”

So it was an easy choice today, though happy nacho day to those celebrating (we’re out of avocados, such bad form! We all know I will be grateful for nachos other days this month!)

11/7/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

I am grateful that a woman can hold the office of the vice president of this country, and not just in theory anymore, but in reality.

What it’s like for me personally, is I’m just now realizing how much it matters to me. I have been thinking for a while, like since maybe a little over four years ago, of how it matters to little girls everywhere, watching, listening, absorbing, that women be trusted with positions of power, but it hit me tonight that, as Quinn pointed out to me one time, I was once a girl. Tonight, hearing our Vice President-elect say, “I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” was the moment I could no longer hold back tears. The other thing this election outcome is like, for me personally, is like the time when I was leaving an abusive relationship and I was having a panic attack that I had almost forgotten to get some of his tools out of the vehicle we had shared, and my guy friend who was helping me pack my U-haul told me, “MB, someday, someone is going to say nice things to you.”

I’m getting pretty used to the person I’m married to saying nice things to me all the time, I mean it’s pretty relentless, all the nice things he says, and does. Also, when I showed up wildly unprepared for cold rain and gusting wind at farmer’s market today (pretty sure I’m not the only one with some of my ducks not in a row this week), I was so grateful for his XL hooded sweatshirt (and the fishing community who keeps him supplied with F/V swag from all the boats he works so hard to build and repair every day) stowed in the back of the car, which nested nicely atop my size M sweatshirt and kept me warm for the whole day.

I am grateful to be able to look forward to having a president very soon who, when he speaks, will not trigger memories of years of emotional abuse. A nice aside is that the President-elect is the very guy who wrote the legislation that enabled me to get a restraining order when I needed one. America, get ready, because someday soon, someone is going to say nice things to you.

11/8/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

I am grateful for the glorious weather today as my honey and I made our annual honey pilgrimage to obtain our four-gallon bucket of gold. I am grateful for the fully stocked chest freezer and pantry heading into the season of slow cookers and staying in. I am grateful for the way the god light was slanting through the conifers in the fog as we drove east, and for the colorful trees painting our journey into a rainbow road trip.

 

11/9/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

Today when I was waiting an extra long time for my grocery order, I was grateful I had brought along my book. I am grateful for the ability to order groceries from home and pick them up outside the store, and for the energetic youth who cheerfully hoisted two cubic yards of potting soil into my trunk, saying he does the same to help his grandmother, who also likes to garden. I’m grateful the store gave me a discount I didn’t ask for, just because I had to wait; I basically got paid to read fifty delicious pages. I am so grateful, in case I haven’t said it yet this year, for good books. Sometimes, they take me right out of myself, and sometimes they pour me right back in. I have leaned on them hard this year for both of these essential services.

 

11/10/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

There are days when writing a gratitude post is like plucking words from the air as easily as picking raspberries off the vines in the vase on my kitchen table. Even though I spent part of my day today studying word-crafting, tonight I am in percolating, not plucking mode.

I do have one gratitude I’ve been tucking away for a day when I was otherwise undecided. I have been having a much easier time waking up in the morning this November, having finally bought myself a full-spectrum light near the end of October. I’ve suspected myself to be a SAD puppy for a lot of years now, so I’m not sure why this took me so long. I’m grateful that when I mentioned it, my husband was also wondering why we didn’t already have one, and happily turned it on for me the first few mornings, during his usual wake-up (yes, I’m a grown-ass woman who has trouble waking up before dawn without help). The thing is, just a week or two in, I’m already awake enough to turn it on for myself, and more importantly, I don’t feel like rotten black death inside for the first hour of the day as my body rejects it’s-still-night-time like a mismatched organ. I don’t know what wizardry this is, but I know this little light is better than any supplement has ever done by me. We call it my sun ball.

When I was buying it Rich supportively said he thought it would help us both, though he felt he may not be as affected by shortening daylight as I am because, he said, “I generate light.” Boy does he ever. (He meant welding but I mean how he lights up my life.)

 

11/11/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for and in awe of the connections… the unseen order of things… the cosmic consciousness. This may not make any sense to anyone else, and I’m okay with that. (I’m not taking this class for a grade!) I was told to “just obey it” yesterday when the wrong scene came to my mind during my writing workshop, and I spent ten minutes writing descriptive language about a scene I had no idea was connected to the piece I’m writing. Turns out it was so integrally connected, I spent the next twenty-four hours with wave after wave of profound revelations crashing over me. A significant breakthrough. In the earlier part of the class, when asked to explain why I was the most qualified person to write what I’m writing, I wrote why I’m the expert on mothering my son, including a sentence about the placenta that it still in a ziplock in the back of my freezer. Then today, as I was reading more of my book (my teacher is one of the authors), I came across a passage where she announced to her teen daughter that her placenta is still in the freezer. Shortly afterward, a rainbow came pouring across the page as the low and lazy November sun streamed in through the glass block window.

In other literary news, Rich and I discussed this morning what constitutes a nacho (singular). Grateful for November nacho nights, a pair of placentas, and rainbow connections.

~thankful thursday~ birds and bees

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i have been making a daily gratitude post on facebook once again this year, (if you’re interested, here are last year’s posts) and once again i will transcribe them all over here on thursdays so that my friends who have had the better judgement not to join facebook may read them.

 

11/1/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

i am thankful today for hummingbirds. i am once again entering november with an inkling that i could stand to realign my partly cloudy attitude with some gratitude. today i got a text from a friend inviting me to come and see the costa’s hummingbird visiting her feeder, which i will do tomorrow. when i got home after work, i took my camera outside to visit our own hummingbirds and realized this one would let me approach it quite closely for some glamor shots. i ended last november’s gratitude fest on providence, and i think it is not coincidental that this little harbinger of joy is returning to my awareness today. while i have a tendency to let thoughts weigh me down, these tiny beings show me how they alight here and there, without all that heaviness. they change direction as often as needed; they remind me i always have a choice to redirect towards joy. they guard fiercely, but dance joyfully, and choose to drink in sweetness. they surround themselves in flowers, hovering amid beauty, embodying lightness of being. i’m grateful for their help today getting me on the right vibration for this practice.

11/2/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

both cats are on my lap leaving no room for my laptop, so i’m contorting my wrists to type off to one side of the chair, it’s late after a delightful date night, and i must head to bed soon. but guys, i got home from my costa’s hummingbird visit after work, only to have my husband waving me down to the edge of the forest, flashing the “bring your camera” hand signals, and we got to hang out with this amazing barred owl for a nice long photo session. he told the owl it needed to hold on until i got home, and of course, the owl listened. the conversation went something like, “who cooks for you?” to which he replied, “my beautiful wife… she’ll be home in just a minute and i’ll introduce you!” we’ve been listening to this owl and even spied it in the dark on one of our walk-to-the-mailbox dates, but seeing it in our trees with some daylight left for photos was an unexpected treat. i am very grateful that i get to be married to a guy who appreciates the magic of the natural world as much as i do.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

today (yesterday… posting belatedly what was on my mind) i am thankful for the ripple effect of this 30 day gratitude practice. i would never have started doing this if i hadn’t read wonderful gratitude thoughts from good friends of mine prior to last year. then, this year, it seems i have inspired another friend to give it a try. in addition, so many great connections are made by friends whose comments also serve to amplify the gratitude. selfishly, i have been enjoying my own gratitude posts from last year, thanks to the memories feature. while it may seem a bit circular to be grateful for gratitude, i realized when my post from last year about my amazing mom came up, for whom i am forever grateful, that every one of these i write is essentially extending gratitude forward through time to influence my future self to dedicate even more neurons to feeling grateful, where the ripple effect of blessings can compound the interest on today’s investment in the thank bank. i’m envisioning this little hummingbird flying back to me in another year, tiny saddlebags overflowing with blessings that have been packed into it today, special deliveries from this present moment.

11/4/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

i am thankful for my family!

i was curious about last year’s 30 items for which i was grateful, so i made a list.

2016 gratitude list

  1. fiance, wood stove fires
  2. karate and yoga
  3. mom
  4. abundance
  5. quinn
  6. laughter
  7. best woman lau
  8. big ocean waves, perspective, impermanence
  9. words
  10. music
  11. community
  12. kitties, wood stove fires, safety pins, memory loss
  13. dad
  14. the farm
  15. wood stove fires, kitties, food, baths, whiskey, coffee, soft blankets, music, home
  16. siblings
  17. books
  18. joe biden and his work advocating for women
  19. outside time to work on my garden, board games with friends, grandma’s pie crust, kids whispering to each other’s faces, farmer’s market, etc.
  20. therapy, not needing get an A in gratitude, photography
  21. love notes
  22. nachos, dorkaversaries, chats with mom, chats with friends, library, nachos
  23. wood stove fires, music, friends, family, things that are bigger than my little circumstances and help me have perspective, kitties, playing games with my kid, nachos, books, and my fiance
  24. water
  25. our kids
  26. buyers of my future book, words beginning with q
  27. role models (barbara kingsolver, jane goodall, ani difranco)
  28. dolphins
  29. awareness, friendly reminders, long hugs, e.e. cummings
  30. providence

i know that last year i fluctuated between feeling like i couldn’t possibly fit all i am grateful for into a mere 30 days, and feeling like my gratitude gland was shrunken and all the wonderful things were distant and unreachable. it makes sense, because we all have good days and bad days. right now on the gratitude-o-meter, i am feeling extra thankful, and that probably has to do with spending a day and a half on back-to-back consecutive dates with my husband, and then ending today with my son back at home with us. kitties are snuggled near the wood stove fire, good food, friends, family, and live music have been involved in the various dates, and since being home i have been serenaded via both radio and you tube. quinn typed a zombie novel inside a minecraft book, and stuffed himself with grilled cheese and tomato soup and green cauliflower and ranch dressing. feeding my people well always makes me feel like i am doing a good job at life. maybe that is why i was disproportionately thankful for nachos last year (i still am). looking back at last year’s list, i had to laugh at how repetitive i was on some of the days i remember as being the ones where gratitude was harder to access… default back to kitties, nachos, and wood stove fires if all else fails. which is code for, i love these two people and the family we are together and the home, kitties, nachos and wood stove fires we share, with all of my heart.

11/5/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

sweet like candy to my soul, sweet you rock and sweet you roll ~dave matthews band

i am grateful for honey! today my honey drove us through the colorful maples and oaks of the valley to pick up our annual 4 gallon bucket of local honey, which will last us almost until this time next year. it will sweeten the pancakes and bread that will nourish us, and mix into the elderberry cough syrup i am going to make. it will feature in hot garlic and lemon beverages to doctor any winter colds. my wedding ring will keep making a happy clicking sound on the side of the honey jar every morning when i pull it out of the cupboard to add it to rich’s coffee, honey for my honey. (he sneaks into so many of these posts, that husband of mine! so grateful for him.)

 

11/6/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

having sailed through most of this first week of gratitude with an apparent fixation on birds and bees, i would like to wish everyone a happy national nacho day! i am thankful for nachos, and you all already know that, but i can’t very well focus on something other than nachos, now that i know this is their official holiday! i am indebted to my friend for alerting me to this important fact. we dutifully ate nachos for dinner tonight. i realized i did not want to use a photo of nachos (which i haven’t taken, because i don’t find them all that attractive to look at, especially by dinner time in november when there’s no more light for photography), so i decided instead to post a nacho-related photo of summer. we traditionally eat a giant multi-family meal of nachos on our annual july 4th camping trip. i believe these kids, for whom i am grateful, may have just consumed said meal, because this is the way their hair lights up in the evening sun in july, and i am grateful for that, even though it’s not the way the light looks in the evening in november. if i could mother-may-i my way in large leaps towards the summer i would probably do so, but i think there must be a good reason i’m not allowed to accelerate through this part of the year. while i am waiting to learn how to embrace winter, i will spend these chilly dark nights thinking of those warm sunny days, in gratitude.

 

11/7/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

today i am thankful for a beautiful sunrise.

11/8/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

i’m thankful for apples today. when we got home from work and school today, quinn sat in the car and read his book. in spite of staying up reading by led candle under his covers past 11 last night, he still wanted to keep reading. i may need to have a talk with that rick riordan fellow. anyway, i decided i’d warm up some apple cider and poured some into quinn’s travel mug, and by the time i had it finished he was still in the car. i delivered it to him there, and went off to read a book and have a cup of cider myself, in the house.

our cider came from an annual gathering attended by the same families referred to in the 4th of july nachos post, and several gallons are stored in jars to see us through the winter. drinking in sweetness seems to be a theme for me this round of gratitude posts!

apples also make me think of my parents and their apple endeavors on the farm. my parents have spent the last few years rehabilitating orchards on the farm land, and my mom has become quite the expert on the local heirloom apple varieties. gratitude for apples makes me think of gratitude for my parents and the example they have set for me of a couple happily going on dates (via tractor and wagon to visit their apples) every chance they get, after 40+ years of marriage.

i think apples will always remind me of all of the connections among my friends and family members, many of which reached a new level of connectedness this summer during our wedding festivities. as quinn sipped his cider today, he mentioned how much he loves the dried apples his grammy sends him each christmas. that warmed my heart every bit as much as my warm cider.