Ah gratitude! I am so grateful for so many things, and tonight, although it is later than usual for me to be starting this blog (after 10 p.m. EST) I actually have been thinking about the many random things that I’m grateful for today. Tonight I have no particular thing to land on; I’m rather like a bee flitting from one flower to the next or ricochet rabbit bouncing from one topic to another. Stay with me if you can and see how many things you can notice that I’m grateful for and how that resonates with things you might be grateful for as well.
First I am grateful for my family (you’ll possibly read more about this tomorrow after I’ve spent Thanksgiving at my sister Ruth’s house.) Tonight I remembered briefly what it is like to have a mother/grandmother around. I was at Ruth’s house hanging out watching her and her mother in law prepare food for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast. It was good to see Mrs. Lee–I hadn’t seen her since my nephew was born 12 years ago and we’d both traveled to DC to help out around the house while my sister and her husband adjusted to life with a newborn and a two-year old. You wouldn’t know Mrs. Lee is 90 years old by watching her; she moved around the kitchen with the grace of a 70 year old and when I expressed concern something I thought she needed help with, she promptly shooed me away, insisting that she was just fine as she was. And so she was.
She and Ruth engaged in a simply choreographed dance as they moved around the kitchen working on various things. I also watched Mrs. Lee interact with her grandchildren–my niece and nephew–and thought briefly about my mother, 17 years removed from our lives. I didn’t experience any sense of loss as I watched, if anything I experienced a sense of gain. I regained the experience of motherness near me and I simply soaked it in like pancakes soak up syrup. I am grateful to have felt that and am looking forward to spending time with her tomorrow. She traveled into town with another of her three sons and I was highly entertained watching her go back and forth between them–my sister’s husband and his brother–as they told stories on one another and caught up on news from the neighborhood.
Ah, gratitude. I hung out there for a few hours, then needed to get back home and take Honor out for her evening walk around the yard. Outside the night air was crisp and cold. It had been a relatively mild, but once the sun went down it cooled dramatically. But oh was it beautiful. The moon and stars showed clear and bright, and Jupiter lit up the Eastern sky, where I’ve noticed it hanging out over the past several days. As a very amateur skywatcher, it gives me great pleasure to notice what’s happening in the heavens. I am awestruck at and grateful for the beauty that I observe in the firmament. Is it any wonder that humans continue to be drawn to the mysteries of the universe, that our imaginations soar into the infinity of the night sky?
And finally, this evening I found myself putting up a gadget in my laundry room that I can hang up and organize the various poles associated with brooms, mops, and other implements that had been stacked up against the wall. My objective was simple: find a rack to hold my various cleaning implements that I could attach to the wall. Earlier in the afternoon I had gone to the hardware store. I was a woman on a mission. I had worked on my list for a few weeks since the week my oldest sister had come over to help me hang pictures, unpack boxes and determine what things I needed from the to organize and/or decorate parts of my house.
I love the hardware store. I am as happy in there as some people are in clothing and shoe stores or fabric and crafting stores. I love tools and I love building things and taking them apart (on aptitude tests in middle school I scored high in “mechanical”) and am totally enthralled at all the tools, nuts and bolts and other fasteners. Power tools, gardening implements, indoor/outdoor, lighting, paint…Anyway, I gathered assorted items into my basket, purchased them, and left the store pleased with my supplies. I went straight to Ruth’s house from the hardware store and so wasn’t able to start any projects until I got home. It is unusual for me to start something that late (it was after 9 p.m. when I decided to hang up my broom holder gizmo.) The job, though small, did require drilling and measuring and screwing things into the wall, all of which I did with great gusto. When I had finished it and hung up all the brooms and mops and such, I stood back and, like God, saw that it was good.
I am grateful tonight for random, simple things: for the time spent with family laughing and enjoying one another’s company, for being in my element as I strolled through the aisles of the hardware store, for the love of putting things together and having them function like they’re supposed to, for enjoying the beauty of the moon and stars on a clear, cold November night. As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, I hope more people take the time to focus on the simple blessings that are all around them every day and are grateful, not just tomorrow, but every day. It takes so little effort, and the payoff is priceless.
