The gratitude connection, From Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving

Pumpkin pie from TG 2021 - long gone, of course.

Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian (and other international friends) who celebrated the annual harvest feast on Monday Oct 10th. For several years I have used the time period between the Canadian holiday and the US version (Thursday Nov 24th this year) as my one gratitude a day season. Not that I'm not grateful every day, but I try to adhere to the discipline of posting at least one small thing I'm grateful for here on FB, daily.

The traditional family rules are it can be small or large, concrete or abstract... the thing you're grateful for... but "no repeats".

I'm going to build this list, and share what I was grateful for, day by day, and then post the final list on Thanksgiving Day in the USA. The point of the exercise is to build up our gratitude muscles, and prepare our hearts for the Winter Holidays ahead!

• Oct 10th: warm blankets I crawled out of this morning. Others added theirs in the comments: their cat, their warm home on a chilly morning, their A/C (she lives in Florida), their dogs across the years, and Wordle.

• Oct 11th: I posted as a comment on my cousin's starter that I am grateful for this exercise, and those who join me in it. Her gratitude of the day was books!

• Oct 12th: I am thankful for clean running water, hot and cold. This is easy to take for granted, but HUGE if you don't have it. I think that was one of the hardest bits of news out of the hurricane coverage (Ian) in Florida, that hospitals lost their water supply. Yikes. So the fact that I have this today, and every day that I do have it, gives me a boost of gratitude.
• From others: music, and beauty of autumn leaves.

• Oct 13th: Thankful for neighbors who plant flowers that surprise me every year.

• Oct 14th: Thankful for dreams that can blend folks still living and those passed on into a pleasant, restful sleep. Also thankful that anxious dreams are just that, dreams, that we can feel relieved to awaken from!

• Oct 15th: Thankful for the memories contained in my collection of coffee mugs... from Spark to ObCo Donuts, to the Christmas ones, to the Calamity Ware ones... all have memories attached. On Facebook I posted a photo of my blue Spark mug with my gratitude, and got a lot of friends over there that I met through Spark commenting on the post.

• Oct 16th: Today I am thankful that among the lessons of the pandemic was learning to trust that the produce will be just fine if the young people pick it out for me and I pick up the groceries at the curb! In the process, I discovered a convenience / luxury I didn't think I needed and didn't realize how much I would appreciate.

• Oct 17th:  Today I am thankful for a calm and sunny day.  The temperature is chilly (seasonally so), but the wind isn't fighting the sun and the sunshine makes it feel warmer.

• Oct 18th:  Thankful for the life of my Dad, on the 23rd anniversary of his passing.

• Oct 19th:  Thankful for home appliances, from vacuum cleaners to washing machines to microwave ovens.

• Oct 20th:  Thankful for old SparkPeople dot com, and all the friendships formed on it.  While these friendships may be virtual, they are genuine, and thus in my book, they qualify as real!  That includes all of y'all who are reading this!

• Oct 21st:  Thankful for my kitty-duty swapping sister.  Thanks to both of us having feline co-habitants, this ability frees both of us to travel when needed.

• Oct 22nd:  Thankful for herbs and spices. 

Pumpkin and spices in oatmeal.

• Oct 23rd:  Thankful for friends who introduce me to challenging online games, most recently sedeorcle, which is wordle on steroids, with 16 5-letter words to solve in parallel with the same alphabet and 21 guesses total to win.  So far, I've won only one daily game, but three practice ones.

• Oct 24th: Thankful for safety from the nearest grass fires of the season.  With the severe drought locally and extreme drought around the state, I am thankful that there are heroes willing to go out and contain them, and heads wise enough to order evacuations to keep people safe, even as property is destroyed.

• Oct 25th:  Today I am thankful for procrastination. Sometimes it is just the way of letting my mind prepare for and adjust to a change before I make it. Sometimes it is waiting for all the facts to unfold, so I can make a wise choice. Sometimes it results in a missed opportunity, sometimes it teaches a lesson, and sometimes it saves me from a mistake. As bad a rap as it gets, it is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is patience in disguise.

• Oct 26th:  Today I am grateful for the beauty of colors in the Autumn. Spring has its own beauty, but Autumn has a ripeness to it. The smell of drying leaves or of an autumn rain only add to the visual display, when every tree and building seems to stand out in its complete three dimensions, backed by either bright or cloudy skies.

• Oct 27th:  Today I am thankful for my alarm, and that I rarely have to use it to get up in the morning.

• Oct 28th:  Today I am thankful for soap, and that clean smell my favorite brand gives me. The favorite kind may be different for each of us, but whatever the scent is, it will smell "clean" to us!

• Oct 29th:  Today I am thankful for my kitties' vets, and that they spot things I do not. Their questions on Friday led me to realize I was completely missing the real symptoms Rubia was exhibiting.

• Oct 30th:  Today I am thankful for when reconnecting works out.  Met a niece I hadn't seen in about ten years at her shop this morning.  Sometimes we get SO out of touch we can't pull off reconnecting.  I'm glad in this case that did not happen.

• Oct 31st:  Today I am thankful for measuring cups.

• Nov 1st: Thankful that the lawn mowers took my leftover Halloween candy off my hands.

• Nov 2nd:  Thankful for shelf-stable foods and the tech that makes them so.  Some of that tech is really old, such as drying grapes to make for raisins!

• Nov 3rd:  Today I am thankful to be able to afford the surgery that my younger kitty needs. I may have to put off some other spending, but at least I didn't have to choose between her life and the heat or the groceries. Our pets really are more than companions and friends. They are luxuries, sometimes. 

• Nov 4th:  Today I'm thankful for the schedule flexibility of retirement. I'm also thankful for advance notice coming from government and businesses that enable me to adjust. Oh, and totally unrelated, I'm grateful for the early college years that trained me to drink black coffee. So it's not such a shock when I have to take it that way.

• Nov 5th:  Today begins my week of acknowledging my gratitude for those who have put on the uniform. In this time where we have an all-volunteer military, less than 1% of the population of the United States do so. Why today, and leading up to Veterans Day? Because 13 years ago today, one of the worst mass shootings occurred on an Army Base in Texas. It was a horrible day for me, from afar. My son was part of the unit hardest hit by it. It was not nearly as horrible for me as it was for 13 families who lost someone, or for the 32 wounded, or even for the people present on base at the time, in the midst of the chaos that surrounds such events.

One of the lessons that has come from the awfulness was the renewal of a commitment to live every day. In the years following, I started doing the gratitude exercise earlier, because I just couldn't take facing having to be grateful on its anniversary, when it was only "day 5".

But here's the meat of today's gratitude: Following bad things happening, we have choices. One of those choices is to learn from them. It is a choice to remember. I still have Facebook friends among the other families who were affected by this. It is a choice to do our best to take care of our own health, so that those who are wearing uniforms in our families don't have the added burden of worrying about us, "back home".

I'm grateful for the reminders to "make good choices", "remember", and value one another. And I am grateful for those who signed that blank check, "up to and including" their lives, in service to their country.

• Nov 6th:  Today I am grateful for live streaming platforms, since I can't get several of the "live TV" over the digital airwaves.  And for the amazing tracking technology we now have on our Smart phones.  I can follow specific friends that I know are running, well beyond the elite runners who "win".  Today I'm particularly grateful for access to the NYC marathon streaming, where I can relive memories of the year I flew out to be a spectator there.

• Nov 7th:  Today I am thankful for the boost my attitude gets from an earlier sunrise. Here is my neighbor's tree, framing today's, at 6:55 a.m.
  
  
  
• Nov 8th:  Today I am thankful for the cloud cover. Even though it means I can't see the full lunar eclipse this morning, these clouds might bring us a bit of moisture, and we need it!

• Nov 9th:  Today I am thankful for the fact that even while in any given election we may not get EVERYTHING we want, every time, we have the ability to vote, and have that vote respected. I am thankful for the wins, accepting of the losses, and valuing the process.

• Nov 10th:  Today I am thankful for the younger generations in my life. They do give me hope that the world is in good hands.

• Nov 11th:  Today I am thankful for all the "once a year" days of recognition. While we all know that we should be grateful every day, that we should thank Veterans every day, honor our mothers and fathers every day, we don't always say it out loud. It's easy to just go with the flow. These holidays remind us how important people, pets, organizations, etc. are in our lives.

• Nov 12th:  Today I am thankful for central heating, my warm breakfast and coffee, and my cracked corn bag.  Can you tell it's a cold morning where I am?

• Nov 13th:  Today I am thankful for music.  And for the richness of sign language, even though I don't speak it.

• Nov 14th:  Today I am thankful for all the personal trainers who have helped me through the various phases of my life.

• Nov 15th: Today I am thankful for the justice system, and for the court personnel who educate those of us called for jury duty. It might not happen often, but I have always learned something from the experience.

• Nov 16th: Today is a good day to be grateful for the generations that came before me. This would have been my great-great grandmother's birthday. Tomorrow would have been my mother's. My own falls just a few days later.

When I was a child, knowing the birthdays were close together, although separated by many years, enabled me to feel connected to history. G-G-Gram had been 4 years old when President Lincoln was shot. I met her when she was 101 and I was 9 or ten, I think.

The trip across two states to see her was a big deal back then, in the early 1960's, before the Interstate Highway was fully built and connected. See? Connection to history!

• Nov 17th:  Today I am thankful for humor and a sense of the ridiculous.  I need to go back and re-read Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  'Nuff said.

• Nov 18th:  Today I am thankful that one is never too old to learn, or to try something different. You can buy six cotton handkerchiefs for less than a box of premium facial tissue. Budget and better for the planet, too. Thanks to friends and family who have been doing this for years, I finally got on board.

• Nov 19th:  Today I am thankful for the amazing variety of good, nutritious food available in our grocery stores, and for all those who contribute to getting it there.  From farmers and ranchers to truckers and railway and shipping workers, from butchers and bakers, deli workers and checkout clerks, to the ultimate luxury of personal shoppers... I thank you for helping to feed the world.

• Nov 20th:  Today I am thankful for the body that seems to keep on keeping on, trip around the sun after trip around the sun. I am thankful that it still responds well to being treated well. All those things your mom and grandma told you were good for you, still are. Nutritious food, fresh air, brushing your teeth, going to bed on time, and being active (as one can be).

• Nov 21st:  Today I am thankful for the amazing outpouring of greetings for my birthday, yesterday. People are just wonderful, you know! I do not need a whole lot of attention, and on-line greetings are just fine in the "getting rid of physical objects" phase of life. It turned out to be a perfect day for me, right down to the weather!

• Nov 22nd:  Today I am thankful for books and the storytellers that write them.

• Nov 23rd:  Today I am thankful for good driving conditions in the region of the country I live in.  People I know are driving for the Holiday weekend, and the forecast looks good for them.

• Thanksgiving Day, 2022:  Somehow the day itself makes me want to be grateful for something profound.  But the profound is built from the ordinary efforts of each of us.  If we desire peace on earth, let it begin with peace in our hearts, and be extended from there to everyone we meet in daily life.

Today I am grateful for my cookbook, and for having learned to bake a pumpkin pie many decades ago.  I am grateful that my son likes my pie, and that I'm still able to put one together at this phase of my life.  I'm grateful that the oven works and there is power to my home to make it so.  

A very blessed Thanksgiving to you all, whether it's celebrated in your nation today or not!   

 

Life is good.  We are Thankful!  Spark on.