#5

The unexpected gift of having a sick kid and knowing you'll be spending a quiet day at home with her--the child you rarely get to spend time with alone because she's in school five days a week.  There's nothing on the calendar, you've found a substitute to help in your son's class, and the promise of a sunny day stretches out before you.

#4

The leaves along the central boulevard have started to turn.  So few trees here do it, and after living in the desert for ten years it's a bit like time travel to slowly drive under their towering limbs and watch for that solitary yellow or red that might gather its pluck and throw itself with abandon into the autumn wind, sharing its exhilaration at that final act, after waiting so long among its stolid brethren, not knowing its fate, or perhaps not caring.  Were I walking under that waning canopy of brilliance, I'd capture yet another fallen star and preserve it as a bookmark.

#3

For the sanctuary I discovered today—seemingly so far from the city yet right in the middle of it—and the family of coyotes that welcomed me as I crossed its threshold into their world, one without traffic noise, houses, or any mechanized thing.  If not for the communications towers adorning a number of the peaks, I would have thought I was truly out in the middle of the desert.  For the long moments of solitude between other hikers, for the mountains that enclose the valley and the city with the foresight to keep it wild, I am grateful.  It allowed me to fall almost in love with the desert again, like I first did 10 years ago, like I only seem to when I’m alone with it.

#2

It’s the first week of December now.  We’ve finally succumbed over Thanksgiving to turning on the heat, and still we, the adults of the house, were cold, so we had to turn it up again over the weekend.  Every year, while I swelter as the thermometer hovers around 115°, I pray for the cool weather, but this year, now that it’s arrived, I’m having a harder time acclimating.  When January temps in my hometown rose above 50°, folks went outside in their t-shirts, because it was a heat wave compared to the below-zero wind chills they’d faced through the holidays.  But 50° here is a good 50-60 degrees lower than what we faced just a few months ago, and so it is with relish that I open my winter closet and sift through sweaters, sweatshirts, scarves and gloves, and start cladding myself in layers that I can shed as the winter sun warms the house and car throughout the day.  This wrapping and unwrapping, this daily shift from cold to warm and back again, the welcoming of the sun, finally, after months of ruing it, the rediscovery of favorite clothes that cloak me from the wind while I watch the children, still shoeless, play carefree in the yard, it’s a blessing.

#1

For the birds who congregate every morning on the wires above a particular alley in my neighborhood.  There are dozens, scores of them, all lined up and screeching in some sort of morning coffee clatch.  And on rare occasion, you can see them all lift off, one at a time but within milliseconds of each other, and swoop in one great burst of clattering feathers through the sky, among the rooftops, and they remind you that life is a series of miracles, that everything is alive and the center of its own universe, bumping up against yours and sometimes, when you’re lucky, crossing one another’s thresholds.

Gratitudes

It’s becoming tradition that some friends use the month of November and impending Thanksgiving to identify things in their daily lives, both large and small, that they are thankful for, and post them on social media.  It seems to me like a good practice regardless of the month, and whether you manage to record it daily or not.  Since my time and focus for writing longer posts is limited, this seems like a good place to record my own gratitudes.