Today I am thankful for...
natural beauty and light.
I like having a vase of flowers in the front hall. It makes me smile when I come in the house, normally in a rush with my hands full, always to the craziness of barking dogs, sometimes dragging carrying a protesting child. Truthfully, it is the only place in the house that I can leave a vase of flowers for more than two minutes - any longer than that and the cats somehow find it and either knock it over or chew the leaves over a period of days, resulting in tattered dying flowers and cat vomit on my sofa. My garden does not have many cutting flowers in it - the Obedient Plant has taken over this year and smothered everything in its path - so I picked some purple phlox for this bouquet even though I knew the petals would fall off almost immediately. And they did. And instead of picking them up right away, I intentionally left them lie on the sill, because the way they looked in the late afternoon light was just as beautiful as if they had stayed on the stem.
Everyday I hang laundry out to dry on a huge behemoth wooden drying rack. During the past week, I have only had an hour or two of direct sunshine on the back deck. Then I have to move the whole rack into the sunny spot on the grass. Before this week, I had a full afternoon of sun on the deck. In the earlier weeks of Summer, the best time for drying on the deck was right away in the morning. It is something so simple - noticing the shift in the Sun's rays throughout the changing seasons - but I am thankful for being aware of it. There are several reasons that I hang my clothes to dry - keep the electric bill down, use less fossil fuels. Yes, it can be quite the hassle, especially on rainy humid days, and it definitely takes more time to hang the clothes rather than just throw them in the dryer, but it just feels like the right thing for me to do. Normally at naptime, I'll go outside to rearrange the clothes, moving the damp spots into the sun. Most days, along with the chicken and duck noises, I also hear a hawk calling far overhead and will turn my face upward, squinting into the light, to see him slowly circling under the sun, just like a scene out of an old Western movie. (Except this is definitely a hawk, probably a Red-tailed Hawk, and not a turkey vulture.) It has become such a regular part of my day that I notice an absence if my laundry companion is not there. So much light fills my day - I am thankful for all of it.
What are you thankful for today?
*We do have a dryer and I normally throw the clothes in for 5 minutes when they are dry, just to take out any last moisture or tumble off any bugs.
