What If...

What if the only things you had today were the things you were grateful for yesterday?  I wasn’t outwardly grateful, yesterday.  I don’t think I even expressed thank you more than a couple times—once for my menu and maybe again for the bill when it came and for someone holding the door for me.  I don’t know, maybe I said it a few more times, 

but that isn’t gratitude in the real sense. 

  

Gratitude is something to be thoughtful about; pensive perhaps.  If I was only thankful for a menu and a dinner bill, I’d be dead this morning.  I should be thankful for breathing.  I’d be sitting here holding my breath until I turned blue and eventually pass out.  
 How many things do we take for granted every single minute of every single day?  I didn’t express gratitude for my home, my car, the gas in my car, or my closet bursting with clothes.  In the morning I would be sitting here all warm and.... no I wouldn’t be sitting here actually.. I’d be on the curb wearing rags. 
I didn’t express gratitude for my home.  I didn’t express gratitude in being able to draw or play my cello.  I wouldn’t have my cello this morning or my art.  I didn’t express gratitude for my pups—no wagging tails or happy licks for me this morning.   I didn’t express gratitude for the food in my refrigerator or the heritage turkey waiting to be roasted.  No, I’d be hungry this morning and all day today.  

The list is endless in what I should be grateful for… highest on my list would be breathing of course, but my wonderful family and dear friends come at the top of the list.  I can’t imagine waking up this morning without a single one of them.  They, are what I am thankful for.  I hope this means that tomorrow all these things will be here for me… 

💗

Happy Thanksgiving 2013

Home Again, Home Again.....

Jiggety Jig... 

 Where did the summer go? 

We had an odd sort of a summer up here in the beautiful north woods

of Minnesota.  

We arrived to witness the blossoming of 

Spring.   

A family of Canadian Geese go from goslings to full grown-ready-to-fly

geese.

A loon family raising their family of chicks and lose two of them to a mother eagle.

We traveled to Scotland in June.

Oh, such a splendid trip to Bonnie Scotland.

 It was a hot, dry summer by northern Minnesota standards.

Still lovely when one considers the alternative 

of 

the hot dry deserts of Arizona.

I grew beautiful sunflowers and oodles of heirloom tomatoes.

A funny Asian bean about a foot long 

and three cherries!

The birds or bears ate my beautiful blueberries.

And my raspberry bushes never produced a single berry.

We never fished.

  

We tell people, when they ask: 

how can you live on a lake and not fish? 

we simply love the view.

And I love my log cabin.

Alas,

The winds are changing, fall is around the bend 

and 

it's time to head back to where my other 

loves are.

I suspect many changes will be hidden 

in the winds

over the next nine months.