Our World on the Thankful Day

Tomorrow will be a month since we touched North Carolina land for the first time as a family. Although I have lived here before for 12 years, although we have known each other for 10 years, my husband and I, and although we have been married for seven of those, we have never lived in North Carolina together, as a family. This is our first Thanksgiving in NC together. In our new home.

Today is when I usually get melancholy about life. Never during a year do I feel the passing of time more palpably than around late fall, beginning of winter. I just look back at the year past and just sigh … so many undeserved highs, so many painful lows, I ask myself how we're still standing, and all in all, a life.

This year, I am grateful for the many trips and new places we got to experience, I am grateful for the new opportunities that have been open to us and waiting, patiently, for us to explore and expand. Most of all, I am grateful we're all here, on this side of the dirt, all the people who matter to us, and us, of course.

I am grateful for our new home and for my very old kitty who is spending his seventeenth Thanksgiving with us in it. I am grateful for our means and for the food we put on the table because of them. I am grateful for friends, near and far who care for us and wish us well. We give thanks to you all and hope you know we reciprocate.

The world has been a sad place for the past year particularly. But I am grateful for the handful of people who care and who still fight for what is right, for the less fortunate, and for the ones who cannot speak for themselves. Some days I am not sure this planet will see another day. It's hard to be an optimist anymore. Some days, I do not see the end of this darkness we seem to all muddle through, deeper and deeper, boggled down by confusion, disbelief, sadness and even desperation. So today, I am grateful that I can write this, uncensored and free. Still. This, I shall never take for granted!

I hope that this day has found you all grateful for at least one thing. The world might have a chance yet if it did.

Happy Thanksgiving, you all, and a happy and healthy start to your Holiday Season!

It's good to be back where our post-Thanksgiving feast walk is amongst tall, aging trees, and where it's quiet. No cars. No traffic. No wind. Just peace, trees, and soft Carolina light.