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~thankful thursday~ paradox

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/25

I’m grateful that having outdoor kitties to tend to forces me to leave the house after dark. Tonight I looked up and realized the often cloudy sky was clear, and I had a great view of starry sky surrounded by treetops. It made me think of my trip to sea earlier this year, another thing I’m grateful for. I think it’s a funny paradox of gratitude month that it makes me both be more in the present moment (noticing the things in front of me, today) and also be more reflective about short-term and longer-term past things for which I am grateful. These are some of the stars I got to see this summer.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/25

I had my pick of the last decade of 22nds and they were almost unanimously about one topic, so I chose one that made me smile. Happy dorkaversary, Rich.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/23

Can you find my husband in this photo? I can, because even though I can’t read the name on his coveralls, his sideburns are unmistakable. I am grateful for him (again, I know, ew, but the 22nd is our day). He does fascinating things at work like suspend a very heavy engine on very short straps and move it from point A to point B inside a fishing boat with zero room to maneuver. Sometimes he welds and fabricates, sometimes he operates a crane, and other times he solves impossible problems like the one in this image. Which I’d like to thank his coworker for taking, because sometimes when he tells me about his day, the stuff is barely believable. For the first few years we were together and someone asked me his occupation I said he allegedly welds, because I hadn’t actually seen him do it. I mean, making things out of metal and fire? But then I did see him do it one time. And it was all true.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/25

I’m grateful for the weekend, a Saturday of lovely weather for the final farmer’s market of the season, for the women I work with every week and their badassery, for another date night to enjoy some lighthearted theater. I am grateful for a little time to sleep in this morning. I’m grateful for my community, and to hear their voices speak out at the Town Hall meeting this afternoon. I’m grateful that I’m still not taking this class for a grade, and I do not need to overthink it when it comes to gratitude.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/25

I am grateful for the Hamilton soundtrack to sing along to in my car, a new book in my Libby app that is making me laugh, and kitties.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/25 (posted 11/26)

It’s like this. I did not feel grateful last night. I was fighting sleep all evening, had powered through two somewhat frustrating workdays, and just wasn’t feeling spiffy. To be honest, I powered through my Monday night gratitude post as well. I’m calling myself on it because I have talked before about not wanting to weaponize gratitude, not wanting to engage in toxic positivity. What I said on day 24 was true (the things I mentioned had made me smile that day) but it had been a struggle to post it. By Tuesday night, day 25, I just felt miserable and to make the same kind of struggle post again felt dishonest.

This is not how most years go, at least not how I remember them. When I talked to Lauren today, she said, “this is the hardest gratitude year,” and I am grateful for Lauren, because she gets me when I don’t even get me.

I had been busy minimizing my feelings, trying to keep a lid on a simmering mood. Trying not to feel it, trying not to acknowledge it lurking under there.

Looking at my memories of day 25s of yore, there were multiple years when my gratitudes involved Quinn. This would make a mom happy, if she knew she was about to see her kid, but I have no confirmation that I will.

In 2020, on day 25, I apparently was grateful! In the pandemic! I wrote a cheerful post about a fish, a post which I would hesitate to make today, so often have I been warned, reminded, and cautioned not to speak about the work I do. Though I despise this policy, and I believe it is detrimental to everyone, I want to keep my job.

But, come on, I felt grateful in 2020, surely I can find it in myself to feel gratitude in 2025. (Yeah, see that? That’s the minimizing.)

Holidays are just not the best time of year for everyone. If that is you, I’m sorry, and I feel you. I guess what I am retroactively grateful for on day 25, is the permission to not always feel grateful.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/25

It is brother gratitude day which is so convenient because I am catching up from a temporary gratitude shortage and I will happily embrace the traditional day 26 topic. I am grateful for my two brothers, and their lovely families. I had so much fun with them in October. The most fun might have been when Rich discovered that on Google street view, looking at my parents’ house, the house we all grew up in, and scanning across the road into the field, you can find one of my brothers hard at work. But Google did not blur him out, because what was visible was not his face, because he was doubled over harvesting potatoes! We had such a laugh over this. Can you recognize which brother’s not-his-face it is?

a little more 2024

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Taking a photographic walk down memory lane for the year and there are three of you who might want to join me.

Quinn turned 17!

I hatched some eggs!

I went to Galveston, saw dolphins, drove boats.

Jazz band went to state!

Rich and I went to New York! There were fireflies.

A family portrait was taken at Oregon Country Fair by a kind stranger.

I went tidepooling! (I plan to do much more of that in 2025.)

I went to Kodiak twice… love it there. Fin whales were my favorite wildlife sighting, but there were many contenders for that role. Practiced my new boat skills. Backed the boat trailer down Anton Larsen Bay ramp successfully!

 

I did not take gratitude for a grade. But I am grateful for this year!

 

 

 

~thankful thursday~ light cone

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/24

After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/24

I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed.  It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/24

I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/24

I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28

11/27 and 11/28/24

Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Observed 12/1/24

I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.

Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.

“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”

“Mmm.”

“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”

“Whoaaa.”

I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.

And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.

I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

Observed 12/2/24

I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).

I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:

Friday night lights

clarity

light cone

sunrise

stage lights

cousin Rita

head lamp

sunlight on water

sunlight on kitten fur

glow slugs

cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying

you, and you, and you.

I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.

When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.

I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.

Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.

~thankful thursday~ glow slug

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~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

11/14 and 11/15/24

I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/24

I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/24

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/24

I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/24

I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/24

I am grateful for sunlight on water.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/24

I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.

~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.

 

~tidepool immersion~ within and just outside

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This is a bird. I found three options on a blog of what it might be. To my eye, it looks most like the surfbird, but based on the description of rock sandpipers being solitary and quiet, that seems like a likely choice. It also resembles (to a person who looks at fish all day) the black turnstone, so I am not ruling that out as an id, either.

There was quite a breeze, and I loved the way the outer tidepools divided between the textures of the water within and just outside.

The find of the day was a dead octopus! I have never seed a live octopus in a tidepool, and while that would have been cooler, this was pretty remarkable to see. I stared at the scene for quite a while as quite a few hermit crabs crawled around the suckers. The large red sea urchin appeared to be quite interested in octopus meat as well.

I think the anemone pictured above is a painted anemone (Urticina grebelnyi). Below is our very common giant green anemone.

~thankful thursday~ magnitude

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/23

I am grateful to have Quinn home, where he can up his apple-peeling game.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ days 24 and 25

11/24 and 25/23

Giving myself two days of gratitude credit, because I was away from my laptop for a full twenty-four hours (and I know it’s unusual, but I don’t use Facebook on my phone). I am grateful for the uniquely special relationships you can come across in blended families. There is something so refreshing about a four-year-old saying, “Nana, can you ask Quinn if he will play Candyland with me?” In earshot of the sixteen-year-old, who says, “Sure!” without reservation, and then they go play. Something extra tender about the way the sixteen-year-old knows how to play up what a tricky hiding spot the four-year-old has hidden in this time, during hide-and-seek. It reminds me of when the sixteen-year-old was just barely five and cheering on the college track athlete, yelling along with her teammates to “push it, girl!” and how she was totally game to color with him in his dinosaur coloring book in the stands after her race. Now he is showing her daughter how to dig up dinosaur bones in a phone app, and trots along by her side in the park as she pedals her princess bike with training wheels.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/23

I am grateful for these brothers of mine, this year and every year. I’d be grateful just for their excellent brotherness, but they are also superb in the department of uncleness. I hear B’s laugh and T’s sense of humor in my kid, and it was sure nice of them to share.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

11/27/23

It was just four days into my first year ever of writing gratitude posts when I first declared my gratitude for “sleeping kitties purring near the crackling fire.” One of the things that has hit home for me during this eighth grateful year is that gratitude does not stop or even slow down time. My kitties were so much younger then, and this year, their age suddenly showed. Three years ago, I included this Brené Brown quote in my gratitude post, and it still resonates.

“Gratitude is vulnerability. I’ve had the honor of sitting across from people who have survived tremendous things. No matter what the trauma was, they said: ‘when those around me are grateful for what they have, I know they understand the magnitude of what I’ve lost.’ So often we’re afraid to be grateful for what we have because we think it’s insensitive to those who have lost. However I think gratitude, in some ways, is healing for people.”

It was earlier that day that my father-in-law had died. There have been a fair few November nights over these years when I have felt daunted by my commitment to keep on showing up to reflect on what I’m grateful for. Two years ago, November arrived just as we returned from Oklahoma following my mother-in-law’s death. This November I spoke at a gathering of Don’s friends and family because Don died earlier this year. In these times it’s not that hard to access gratitude, it’s more that it’s hard to rein it in, to narrow it down, to not feel compelled to attempt to reckon with every single thing about a person’s whole life for which I feel gratitude. Those nights when nachos, while a great dinner option, cannot be the subject of the post because there is too too too much else.

As I sit here deciding what I’m grateful for tonight, I keep glancing over at Lisa kitty where she is lying stretched out on the cushion in front of the wood stove, and I stare for a minute to see if the fur on her belly is still lifting with another breath. She has let me give her four baths now. On the last one, she barely complained, but lay in front of me, letting me wring warm washcloths across her back. If you know Lisa like we do, you know she curses like a sailor, dropping f-bombs every other meow, so this submissiveness was telling. Last night she climbed on my lap and let me pet her for a good hour or more, though she has been extra solitary lately, crawling into a box or a drawer for long stretches of hours. But after work tonight she greeted Rich with meows to hurry up and light the fucking fire, then curled up in front of it. It feels meaningful that she is here with us this evening, front and center by the warm crackling fire, in our midst, for a wee bit longer.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

11/28/23

Lisa held on until this morning, but before I went to work, she took her last breath. Rest well, sweet kitty, I will miss you.

I am grateful that work asked so very little of me today, other than to absorb research talks about Pacific cod, one of my fish loves, so basically I watched tv about Alaska and flashed back to my summer wilderness time in Kodiak. Some nice escapism. Usually my job asks much more in a day; on Monday I tagged fish—performed thirty-one minor surgeries—before lunch. Today, light duty, but lots of brain engagement, which was what I needed.

And my friend of the uncanny impromptu casserole timing nailed it again, so that after I got home an hour late after driving home the long way to avoid the accident bogging down traffic, dinner was already made. (I’m looking at you, camp boss.) So grateful.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

11/29/23

I am grateful for this month of sunrises. Every November marks a new beginning for me, ever since I started doing this crazy thing. Sunrise seems a fitting symbol, and the ones I’ve witnessed this month, including this morning, have been exquisite.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

11/30/23

It has been a month. I sprinkled some seeds on our Lisa kitty’s grave this afternoon, to get a nice soaking now that our rain is setting in, so some wildflowers can start rooting in before spring. Three years ago, I said this about seeds: “If I had a theme this year it might be the seeds of gratitude planted in the gratitude garden, and how they are an investment in my future nourishment. Whenever I notice and appreciate the snuggly kitty on my lap, the warmth emanating from the wood stove, or my hardworking husband coming home from work, it’s another seed in the seed bank. These dormant spirals of potential, storing an idea for next year, waiting it out through the harsh conditions of winter. So many adaptations to fly, float, cling, catapult, shake, or shatter, to make sure they deliver on the promise of future abundance.”

It hasn’t been all eulogies and graves this November. It has also been Candyland and apple peels, sunrises and sunsets, yard kittens and mini writing retreats, nachos and casseroles, twinkle lights and wood stove fires, warm towels and heirloom apples, poems and bay road drives, garlic bread and ocean soundscapes. I’ve been warmed, fed, cheered on, cheered up. A chorus of voices of complementary gratitude has sung out from all of you who climbed on the gratitude bus with me for yet another year. I’m so grateful to begin winter once again from this gratitude grounding.

~thankful thursday~ all true

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/23

I am grateful for the sun melting into the ocean on my way home from work, and the red crescent moon dipping into the ocean on our way home from date night.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/23

I am grateful for writing, as a discipline and hobby and obsession. One of the things I like about writing personal narrative is that there are constant opportunities to reanalyze, rethink, reassess what I always thought was true. There is a story I tell myself, and then there is a story beneath that story that I have yet to discover, and when I do finally get at that deeper story, it is always more rewarding. Usually the surface story is something I’ve memorized about my life that feels true enough, and has served me well enough, but the story underneath is truer, and will serve me better. The story underneath is always the one with more layers, more complexity, more nuance, and less duality. There is moral certainty in the top story that I have to give up, though, in order to embrace the truer story.

My son required a neonatal intensive care unit when he was born, and that is where my attention has been during the war between Israel and Hamas: the NICU in Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. There is no story I can embrace where 39 babies in critical condition must be used as a shield by either side in a war. There is no justification for infants who require breathing assistance to not be receiving it, for their bundled bodies to be lined up in a row on a bed when they are prone to infections and should be in isolation, when they need warming beds, but the fuel to provide the electricity they require cannot reach their hospital because their “side” might pour it into a tank instead.

I read that 90% of the children in pediatric hospitals in Gaza are experiencing traumatic stress, and 82% of them say they fear imminent death.

I read that parents are writing their children’s names on their bodies—when children’s bodies arrive in the morgue, coroners find the marker writing on their legs and torsos. In some cases this is the only way to identify the bodies.

Women continue to give birth during this conflict, infants are being tended in a neonatal unit where the life support equipment helping children to make it through their first weeks of life has stopped beeping their heart rates, stopped inflating their lungs, stopped warming their tiny bodies. The medicines commonly needed in a NICU like surfactant and caffeine citrate have run out. Because I can remember how it felt to press my face against my son’s sedated body in a NICU cubicle, to wind my arms under and around his tubes and wires to be as close as I could to him, I can recall the comforting sound of beeping, the warmth of the incubator radiating from his body. The story I’ve carried was that I just wanted him out of there, that the NICU was a place of trauma that was keeping us from beginning our mother-son life together. I know that story served me in a way, but I know a truer story now, one in which I feel gratitude for that place and the bridge it provided to help my son make it to the start of that life. I imagine the terror and heartbreak of that comforting beeping going silent, the incubators going cold.

If we give up our moral certainty, can we find an answer that is not anti-Palestinian, nor antisemitic, nor anti-Islam? I do not know what it is, but I believe it precludes the slow sacrifice of babies requiring neonatal intensive care. The solution will not be born from the surface story that has seemed true enough and has served its purpose, but from a truer one that is harder to tell.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/23

I am grateful for a day saturated with writing, reading others’ writing, reading my writing aloud, and hearing others read their writing. And a little lap time with yard kittens.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/23

I am grateful that Rich is at least as invested as me in my gratitude posts, and I cannot go to bed without him reminding me that I haven’t written one yet. Good morning, love, I am grateful for you.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/23

I am feeling grateful for my mom and dad today, and realized I didn’t take any super awesome pictures of them together this summer, so I will remedy that on my next visit. I did take pictures of them separately back in June, Mom and Quinn, heads together as she showed him how to make soap, Dad on the tractor, and there is a snapshot of the two of them blurry and laughing at the dance party following my MFA graduation. I am grateful for the comments on my previous post, appreciating the love between Rich and I, and wondering if we know how lucky we are. I know it is rare, and I do know we are lucky, and I also am lucky to have witnessed another rare pair, all my growing up years.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/23

I am grateful to have finished work with time before sunset at 4:43, for a walk to the water’s edge, and ten minutes of listening to the ocean.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/23

Can you find my husband in this photo? I can, because even though I can’t read the name on his coveralls, his sideburns are unmistakable. I am grateful for him (again, I know, ew, but the 22nd is our day). He does fascinating things at work like suspend a very heavy engine on very short straps and move it from point A to point B inside a fishing boat with zero room to maneuver. Sometimes he welds and fabricates, sometimes he operates a crane, and other times he solves impossible problems like the one in this image. Which I’d like to thank his coworker for taking, because sometimes when he tells me about his day, the stuff is barely believable. For the first few years we were together and someone asked me his occupation I said he allegedly welds, because I hadn’t actually seen him do it. I mean, making things out of metal and fire? But then I did see him do it one time. And it was all true.

 

~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.