Tag: thanks

Sigh

December 6, 2012 / / 4 Comments

Q: What goes great with cold weather?

A: A chimney fire, of course. Preferably one that leaves you unable to heat your house until many things are fixed.

Yes, that’s my week in a nutshell. On the bright side, because it’s really necessary sometimes to find one, we saw a fox on the late night drive away from the house. More than that, the kids, pets, and I all managed to get out the door in what must have been a kid-pet-mom world-record setting time. And everyone is fine. And the exciting flames didn’t manage to set fire to the house, so it will be fine once it is warm again. And many, many more things.

But all in all, I have to say that 2012 is a year I’ll not grieve to see come to an end. It’s been rough on most everyone I know, much harder for many than it has been for us. As we limp our way into the darkest days of the winter, my thoughts are on all those small blessings, the everyday ones that are so easy to take for granted. Not even small, though they can be easily forgotten, things like family, like the certainty that spring follows on the heels of these cold times. Like having enough to be able to share.

If this has been a hard year for you, you’re not alone. If this has been a great year for you, it’s okay to feel good about it. Tell me how 2012 has treated you.

Gratitude

February 23, 2012 /

Things have been chaos here this week. It’s meant little time for writing, or thinking about writing, or even much reading. I know life will quiet back down in a bit, and I’ll be grateful for it.

In the meantime, something else I’m grateful for: my support people. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you that it takes a freaking village to raise this particular writer. Writing itself is bliss much of the time. Not so much the experience of working toward being a professional writer. If there’s a line of work better geared toward encouraging depressive tendencies, I’ve not yet come across it.

So, thanks are in order to Desdemona and her boundless enthusiasm; to Clarissa (who better appreciate her code name, given all the possible options) and her willingness to listen not only to my endless monologues about what I’m writing, but my halting readings of the writing itself; to my kids, who pat me on the back and give me fingerless gloves to type with in the winter; and…and absolutely most of all, to my husband, who listens, and reads, and helps me brainstorm, and gets what I’m trying to do, and forgives me my writerly freakouts.

There are others as well, but this small group is the front line. From the middle of the night worries to the “please read this right this minute,” they’re there for me. If they’re not…well, easy enough to sit outside their doors until they are.

My pit crew. They’re the definition of the word awesome.

Thanks for all the…stuff

December 11, 2011 /

This time of year the sun doesn’t even rise above the pine trees in the backyard. It shines over my computer desk for a brief period of time in the morning and then is gone across the sky by midday. It’s a hard time of year for those who need the sun, and it’s made even harder by a preceding summer of endless rainy days.

It’s easy to write about a world devastated by drought when you’ve spent a summer watching your well slowly dry up. It’s easy to write about flood waters relentlessly rising when it’s rained continuously all year, or to write about slowly losing all connection with the world when your phone and power lines go down regularly. I live a life determined to provide me with an abundance of material, I suppose. 🙂