A Very Thankful Poem-a-Day Friday

I’ve missed our Thankful Tuesdays, friends! So much so that my mind has been filling over with thankful bullet points and I keep thinking: Scratch that on a list! It just feels too far away to wait till Tuesday. So…

I’m Thankful for:

• The gift of walking through Holy Week with all of you
• Being married to a man whose eyes are always a little red and shiny after Easter services
• A deck where we can host an Easter meal
• Easter egg hunts and Easter-clad children in the backyard
• Eating boiled eggs a bit dye-stained on the white and for how little I mind
• Happy happy news from my brother-in-law
• Prayers sweetly answered for friends with health scares
• My baby’s near running skills
• Looking from the kitchen sink toward the living room and seeing both my boys on their backs on the carpet, holding their blankets and laughing at each other.
• A baby who can’t stop smiling even when he’s sick (and making fake coughs and fake nose snorts in an attempt to make me laugh)
• A migraine Sunday night: The small reminder of the suffering so many people live with in daily life. A husband who stays awake rubbing my shoulders and gets up with the kids.
• August’s love for gardening
• The joy of trimming back overgrown plants. (Cutting stuff off and pulling stuff out of the ground! So therapeutic! Even though I have no idea what I’m doing!)
• Austin in the springtime (It’s really so lovely…I know, I know…summer will be rough.)
• That feeling when the dishes are clean (no matter that it only lasts three hours)
• Reading a book with both boys in my lap
• Windows open, birds singing
• And this Someecard that makes me cackle (yes, I said ‘cackle’) every time I see it.

And now, a poem from my favorite Jane Kenyon (whose poems I should really just quote here every Friday):

The Suitor

by Jane Kenyon

We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.

Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1996