~thankful thursday~ glow slug

Posted on November 22, 2024 by marybethrew

~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~ flyer

Posted on November 16, 2024 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/24

I am grateful for the music program in our schools, and for watching Quinn come up through it. As a pandemic middle schooler, his music career was interrupted for quite some time, but he has had some excellent teachers and students to study with. A fall concert features the very beginning band playing a series of quarter notes, part of a scale, and a rendition of hot cross buns. I am grateful to be part of a crowd who applauds hot cross buns with wild enthusiasm. The teacher acknowledged that you can’t get to symphonic band without hot cross buns. Tonight the symphonic band featured a senior percussionist on bells, crash cymbals, and snare drum. I am grateful to be his mama.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/24

I am grateful for the pieces of community connectedness that have become my routine over the years. Bumping into a friend at the co-op, buying my coffee beans from folks I hold dear. I am grateful for the beauty of my early Saturday mornings, painting the most gorgeous vegetables you’ve ever seen onto a blank palette of pavement. The veggies are fading into the fall hues, but I’ll stubbornly arrange them in rainbows until all that’s left is green and beige. I saved you one of my favorites from earlier in the season, too. And this morning’s sunrise was worth being up for.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/24

I am grateful for a nice phone chat with my mom today.

(would love to give photo credit if the internet provided such info)

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/24

In a time when it feels like so much of what I care about is under threat, I am grateful for moments when the being in front of me requires so much care that they are all I can focus on. Caring for beings is my thing. This is Kylo Ren, of the wild back yard bayou. She has decided I’m okay, and that I may attempt to tame her. She spent her first night in her kitty condo last night. Tonight at dark, when it was time for me to wander by headlamp into the deep maw of the backyard and air lift her to safety, it turned out that she was already nestled in her condo bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. I’ve entered my cat lady era, y’all.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/24

I’m grateful for all this rain, and also for the break in the rain during my lunch break so I could take a walk.

~thankful thursday~ going on

Posted on November 12, 2024 by marybethrew

~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~ magnitude

Posted on December 1, 2023 by marybethrew

~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~ yet to let me down

Posted on November 9, 2023 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

11/1/23

Welcome to Grateful Year Eight!

As usual, I come to the blank page of November 1^st 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.

kodiak august edition

Posted on August 30, 2023 by marybethrew

Back from Kodiak.

Otters!

Salmon!

And bears! Oh my!

I found another career idea for Dad: boat launch backer-upper. When you want to launch your boat but you need a big tractor to do it…

This octopus is named Gilbert.

These jellyfish are unnamed.

Until next year, Kodiak.

kodiak kaleidoscope

Posted on August 1, 2023 by marybethrew

Kodiak July 2023. I got to see humpback whales right away, day one on the water. And also days two, four, six, and seven. Whale wealth!

Kodiak day two on the water brought even more whale wealth than day one. Humpbacks and killer whales. It was gratifying to hear “we’ve only ever seen them one other time in eighteen years of this survey.” I can’t take much credit but I did put in a special request.

Kodiak kaleidoscope:

Giant Pacific octopus

Rock greenling

Opalescent nudibranch

Sunflower sea star

Sea otter

Bald eagle

Tufted puffin

Not pictured but still helping fill my Kodiak wildlife bingo card: Dall’s porpoise, sea lion, harbor seal, and river otter, golden eagle. Not to mention all the rest of the fish, but we won’t say much about the fish, for they are data.

Did you know that one of the collective nouns for puffins is “an improbability of puffins?” I was delighted with not just pairs, but whole rafts, improbabilities, of puffins.

I’ll be back in August to what is quickly becoming another favorite place of mine on Earth.

~thankful thursday~ soft walls

Posted on November 19, 2022 by marybethrew

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 1^st 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.

~rainbow mondays~ snow capped nest

Posted on January 31, 2022 by marybethrew

Sunrise on the icy farm.

This is my New York rainbow… as you may be able to guess, it features a lot of white! And a lot of a certain furry friend who is more of an off-white character.

FINALLY seeing my parents was just the best.

The weather was exactly the weather you’d expect for Central New York in January, but the light was lovely most days. The kitchen… site of the soap making Mom and I did together. I learned how to make the faves of the hick-a-rew household: lemongrass lime and vanilla sandalwood.

Mom also kept Christmas up at my request, which felt like it made sense given the snowy ambiance.

Any given day’s temperature report, but I was snug in my “writing loft” upstairs for week one, attending my second semester residency! I love going to writing school.

But Dad took one for the team and plowed the driveway over and over again.

But blue sky though! It was lovely the few times it warmed up to 20 and I got to take walks.

The longest walk I took was all the way to the east orchard (which they barely visited in 2021 due to excessive rain/mud), where I set eyes on Big Mama, the apple tree matriarch.