Gratitude

Giant Swallowtail grateful for the butterfly bush in my yard!

It’s been awhile since I wrote a blog. I just haven’t had any ideas and have lacked motivation. Odd, that, since folks seem to like what I write. But finally today, my muse is working again. Thank God.

Being grateful is the last thing we think of if we’re going through hard times. It doesn’t matter how old we are, what our circumstances are, or what our level of education is. When times are tough, all we can think of is “Poor me;” “Why is this happening to me?;” or “This isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair to me.”

Of course life isn’t fair. It seems as if it takes forever for us to learn that simple lesson. Life is not a court of law where God metes out a sentence for us to serve.  Life is, well, just life. We can take it as it comes and try to make the best of it, or we can complain our way into old age and then look back wondering what happened.

But gratitude is such an incredible feeling if we will wrap our arms around it, embrace it as if it is our soul mate, and look up to Heaven believing that we are blessed.

When I feel blue, I make a gratitude list. I start out with three things per day and keep it up for as long as two weeks. The things I’m grateful for can be typical, ordinary things that I often take for granted: arms, legs, fingers, toes (even if they do need a pedicure!), eyes to see, ears to hear, and a voice to speak (some may think I speak the wrong thing at the wrong time, but that’s on them!).

I move to other things like having a roof over my head, a bed in which to sleep, and food in my fridge. Once I get going on my list, it’s really hard to stop and to limit it to three things a day. I take my list, look at it each morning and concentrate on being grateful. And, of course, the people in my life: family, friends, strangers I haven’t met yet!

It’s amazing how fast my feelings of self-pity disappear when I stay in an attitude of gratitude. God has blessed me beyond belief. When I remember that, I’m much more likely to have a smile on my face.

What are you grateful for today? I’d love to read the beginning of your list.

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Flutter

Fall leaves outside of Waynesville, North Carolina

I took this a couple of weeks ago. Most of the leaves are gone this week, driven down to the ground by wind, rain and snow.

Last week, I saw a Swallowtail butterfly stopping off for a drink at my butterfly bush. A few minutes later, another one of these lovely creatures appeared.

Fluttering by – the leaves and the butterflies…on their way to the end of their lives. And not minding at all.

People mind the thought of their lives ending. We think we should be entitled to live forever as we gather more and more things, find fabulous clothes to show off our bodies, and compete for which set of toenails has the best nail art. Oh, forgive me. I forgot tattoos.

I’m glad I don’t have tattoos, because I don’t want to look at my wrinkled skin when I’m old and see crinkly tattoos. But it’s perfectly all right for others to have them. I really don’t care much what others do. And I’m not worried about the end of my life. I’m too busy trying to do the next right thing in my own life for today. That’s a job, all right.

People flutter by in our lives as well. My friend from high school and I went to see the leaves together last week. We hadn’t spent any time together in more than forty years. We had a nice trip, stopping off at the old general store (of course I had to buy some of my favorite old-time candies). The rainbow trout I had for dinner both nights was delicious. My only regret was that I didn’t have my fishing rod with me! Now my friend has fluttered back to California, and I am still here in South Carolina with my two constants – Annie and Bootsie, my rescued kitties.

I just celebrated my 64th birthday. What a lot of living I’ve done. And what a lot of living I still have to do. I wish you well, my readers. Have a blessed day!

The Chicken Soup Is All Over the Floor!

Spilled coffee courtesy of Stuart Whitmore, http://www.johnny-pixel.com/

Nothing like it, is there? Accidents happen to everyone. I’m talking about the kind of accidents that could have been prevented.

For instance, yesterday I went to the refrigerator to get some water out of my Brita pitcher. It was next to my blue plastic pitcher which happened to have chicken soup in it…delicious homemade chicken noodle soup with fresh veggies, no fat and lots of alphabet noodles. I thought I could pull the water out without moving the soup. Wrong. The blue pitcher fell on the floor, broke and there was chicken soup all over the floor next to the fridge, as well as in the bottom part of the cooling contraption. A few choice words left my lips and then I called out to my grandson to come to the kitchen.

He came, looked at the mess and muttered under his breath, “Seems like all I do is clean up messes.”

I shot him a nasty look and said, “What do you mean by that? You haven’t been doing nothing but cleaning up messes while you’ve been here.”

He said, “I mean since I came down to Atlanta and now here.”

“Well,” I said, “accidents happen. But most accidents happen because people aren’t really paying attention.” And then I proceeded to instruct him for ten minutes about one of life’s little lessons. When a mess happens, clean it up and make sure you look for the cause at some point to avoid it happening again in the future.

So, he learned how to use rags instead of paper towels for cleaning up big messes. He also wound up learning how to clean the bottom of the refrigerator under the veggie drawers. When I took one out to clean up the soup, I realized the whole bottom of the fridge needed cleaning. The stuff was like glue, so he learned how to use hot water, vinegar and a table knife to loosen the grime.

Bingo! At the end of almost 45 minutes, we were finished. I also explained that we really should thoroughly clean the rest of the refrigerator, but that we couldn’t because then I’d be late for my hair cut appointment. We had some laughs during our time together, shared a hug before I left and he went back to drawing.

Last night he decided he wanted some tri-chocolate frozen yogurt with brownies and chocolate sauce (that new wonderful kind that gets hard after a few seconds on cold ice cream). He fixed his dessert and then put the brownies back on top of the half-cleaned cooling machine. Then he opened the freezer door to put the frozen yogurt back into it, and you guessed it. The brownies fell to the floor, the plastic container they were in opened and there was another mess to clean up. This time a few choice words came out of his mouth.

I explained again how his accident happened the same way mine did. We weren’t really paying attention, and so we had messes to clean up.

All in all, it was a busy day made busier by our messes. I relearned the lesson about the fact that you should clean up your messes as soon as possible after they occur. That way, there’s no residue for later. That goes for all kinds of spills, including emotions that boil over during an argument, feelings that come out when we feel we’ve been wronged and chicken soup and brownies all over the floor.

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