Gratitude practice

#blog52 #week47

The first thing I was thankful for today.

“always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Ephesians‬ ‭5:20‬ ‭

I didn’t do the whole “Thankful November” thing. Unlike my more disciplined Facebook friends, I’m going have to try to cram it all in at the last minute, hoping to get my spirit of thanksgiving on just in time for the big day on Thursday. So I took the day off work, and in addition to running errands, packing and trying to clean the house before leaving town tomorrow, I practiced gratitude today.

The first thing I was thankful for was the hot cup of coffee above, with just the right amount of half-and-half. It appeared on my bathroom vanity while I was in the shower.

I’m thankful for Soujouners, for giving me a bite-sized morsel of truth and wisdom and a prompt to engage with God every morning. And thankful for the healing, warming Spirit of God Himself.

#fallforever #tightsandboots4life

I’m full of gratitude for November weather; for bright, cool days and the cozy feeling of cable knit tights and suede booties.

#nofilter

For colors and art and reflections and juxtaposition. Some days I can just sit at a stoplight and be blown away by the beauty and creativity all around.

I’m thankful for my physical therapist, Marcia, who kindly, gently, causes me great pain as she works to restore my injured elbow to its full range of motion.

Sorting the browns and greens

I’m very grateful for a strong, agreeable husband willing to take a break from his work to do the glass recycling with me. (PSA for City of Atlanta peeps: I hate to break it to you, but if you put glass in your curbside recycling can it ends up in the landfill.)

Lunch date!

Fried chicken livers and onions!

You know I’m thankful for lunch, always. Especially today. Thank God for a local restaurant serving fried chicken livers with onions, mashed sweet potatoes, coleslaw, cornbread and iced tea. (Rising Son in Avondale Estates. Check it out.) And for a lunch date with my favorite person.

I’m conflicted about this one. I don’t want to love Target as much as I do. I want to support small businesses, and buy quality products made by local artisans and craftspeople, and to consume less overall. But if I’m honest with myself, I’m also thankful to have a Target just under a mile from my house. I’m thankful for anything that makes my life easier on a weekly basis. And I’m not at all conflicted about the fact that our Target now sells wine. #thankyoujesus

This may seem silly, but hear me out. I think the automatic washing machine may have been the greatest invention of the 20th century. Consider the alternative. My mother grew up in a home with a manual wringer washer. Think of the generations of (mostly) women who washed all their family’s clothes by hand, and the many who still do.

I still remember college dorm laundry rooms, and a year or so of early adulthood when I schlepped dirty clothes and towels to the laundromat every week.

So yes, I am thankful to be able to push a button and have a machine in my own home wash my clothes. And then to be able to throw them into the magical drying machine right next to it. It’s an amazing time to be alive.

So grateful for my four remaining chickens, who give me joy and eggs.

A perfect Tuesday night

And I am thankful to end my day with This Is Us. Even though it is breaking my heart. I am thankful for a warm house, a soft bed, a glass of wine, and quality television.

And rest. Thank you, God, for time to be still and rest.

Farmers’ daughter

#blog52 #week46

This will always be home.

“a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot” Ecclesiastes 3:2

I am not a farmer’s daughter; I am a farmers’ daughter. Because I am not the daughter of just one farmer; I am the daughter of two farmers. And the granddaughter of four farmers. Some of the land my family farmed had been owned by my great-grandmother, and by my great-great-grandfather before her.

My dad is a farmer.

My mom is a farmer.

I am not a farmer. I knew very early on that I would break the chain. I didn’t mind helping out on the farm — feeding pigs, driving trucks, picking vegetables — but I had no intention of being either a farmer or a farmer’s wife. I was planning to live in a city and have a career.

After a long, meandering journey through suburbs and unsatisfying jobs, I’m finally there: I live in a city. I’ve worked in the same field long enough to call it a career. Also, I raise chickens in my backyard, so I like to call myself an urban farmer.

Left to right (back to front): Ruby, Lucille, Chloe

But I’m not really a farmer. I’ve always thought I fled the farm because I was drawn to both the grit and the glamour of the city, and that’s true. But it occurred to me this week that I am also temperamentally unsuited for farming. Because I’m a squeamish wimp.

We lost a chicken this week. She died a horrific, violent death. A mean neighborhood cat pushed his way under the fence and attacked, disemboweling my sweet, helpless hen.

Her name was Sennua. Well, I’ve never been sure how to spell it. Orchid named her when she was a baby chick. She said it was an African name from a song she was singing in middle school chorus, and that it meant “happy,” but I think she misheard it or made it up; I could never figure it out.

Orchid with Baby Sennua

Full-grown Sennua, in the foreground

So it was awful. I went out to feed the chickens Wednesday afternoon and noticed there were only four of them. I started poking around the pen, and quickly found the mutilated body of the fifth. I gasped and immediately went back in the house and called Allen. He was out of town, selling lawn and garden products in Knoxville. He’s never gone overnight for work, but this week he was.

“We really don’t want to leave her body in the pen with the others,” he said. He was right, of course. I steeled myself, found a long shovel, and managed to scoop her up. (This was particularly challenging because I broke my left elbow about a month ago and can’t really lift any weight with that arm. I know, I wrote in an earlier post that it wasn’t broken. Turns out it was.) I didn’t even bury her. I just tossed her in a pile of brush in the edge of the wooded area at the back of the yard. It was absolutely all I could manage. When Allen came home the next day and went out to bury her, the body was nowhere to be found. I hate that damn cat.

My parents deal with dead cows regularly.

I couldn’t do it. It’s too gross. If I have to, I can handle blood, poop, puke and spiders. I can not cope with dead animals or live snakes or rodents. I can put a worm on a hook, but I have never taken a fish off of a hook. We are going to visit my folks on the farm in just a few days, for Thanksgiving. If we happen to go fishing, and I happen to catch a fish, my mother will take it off the hook for me. And dress it (meaning gut it). I could cook it.

So next week I’ll be back on the farm, basking in the peace and quiet and beauty of the place. And being thankful for my hardworking, tough-as-nails parents. And thankful that I have a house and a job back in the City of Atlanta to go home to.

My son is turning 30 and nothing makes sense and everything is beautiful

#blog52 #week45

Alexander Quincy Hart

“May your father and mother rejoice; may she who gave you birth be joyful!” Proverbs 23:25

This is going to be the shortest, most off-the-cuff, stream of consciousness, unproofread post I’ve shared, because this week has gotten away from me and I basically have a twenty-minute window here to upload a couple of photos and write and post a blog entry, which is too bad because the subject matter deserves better.

That subject matter being the fact that my beloved firstborn son, the boy who forever changed my name to Mom, is turning 30 years old this Sunday. This does not seem possible, but I’ve checked the math and it’s true.

Somehow that sweet, gorgeous baby right there turned into a funny, handsome, wicked smart, super-responsible, full-grown man with a wife, a job, a dog and a house in the suburbs. It is the craziest thing.

Do you remember the scene at the beginning of the movie City Slickers, when the Billy Crystal character is asleep in bed when his mother calls?

Mitch: Hi, Mom.
Mom (on telephone): It’s September 8th, 1952. We’re driving back from your Aunt Marsha. My water breaks. Your father jumps the divider of the highway and races me to Doctor’s Hospital. And… [laughs] … at 5:16, out you came. Oh… happy birthday, Darling. Here’s your father.
Dad (on telephone): Hello, boy. Happy birthday.
Mitch: Hi, Dad. How you doing?
Dad (on telephone): I’m losing feeling in my left leg. Here’s your mother.

I could be that mom. I never get tired of telling his birth story. Because everything changed for me that day in 1987. I get the whole things about your heart walking around outside your body.

We met up for early birthday dinner last night, and instead of retelling his birth story, I retold his first birthday story, about how he got so sick so suddenly and nearly died from bacterial meningitis just a few days before his birthday, but then once he was diagnosed and got on the IV antibiotics he got better right away, and we spent his first birthday in the hospital, so incredibly relieved and thrilled that he was alive and trying to climb out of his steel cage of a hospital crib.

And he likes hearing the story just as much as I like telling it, and every year I feel grateful all over again at the miracle that I get to be his mom.

I’ve got to run now. If you see this guy, tell him his 30s are going to be amazing.

Alex in the middle, with his brother Logan. They have my heart.

Notes from Paisley Park

#blog52 #week44

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.” Luke‬ ‭16:19‬ 

Guess where we went today?! 

First of all, when they say “no photos or videos inside Paisley Park” they are not playing. The security staff at the entrance watched us power down our phones and then placed each phone in a padded sleeve and locked it shut. This is my only photo from this morning:

It was my idea to make this our Minnesota outing today. Allen and especially our hosts Hannah and Cameron were sweet to indulge me. 

Over lunch afterwards, I asked them what they found most interesting about the tour. 

Allen geeked out about the guitars: the walls of Fender Stratocasters, the double stack bass amp, the guitar from Purple Rain with the leopard skin strap. 

It wasn’t just the guitars themselves that were impressive. It was the way they reflected Prince’s choices: his immaculate taste, attention to detail, and commitment to quality.

Hannah was struck by a couple of quotes that revealed Prince’s confident approach to life and art. The first was from a short video clip played during the tour, and I can’t find the verbatim quote, but the gist of it was that nothing intimidated him. Rather than being intimidated by anything, he was inspired. 

And this, from an interview as he embarked on what would be his last series of concerts, the acoustic “Piano & A Microphone” tour: “Why do this now? For several reasons. For starters it is a challenge…. You have to try new things. With the piano it is more naked, more pure. You can see exactly what you get.”

My own love for Prince is rooted in the way he ignored boundaries and celebrated his uniqueness in both his musical and sartorial choices. His androgynous sensuality, his spectacular shoes, his outrageous and prolific creativity — there was nobody who looked or sounded like Prince.

Like David Bowie just before him, Prince blew open the doors to the possibility that the kids who were different, who dressed weird and did crazy things for attention, could be cool. Even boys who danced like girls, and girls who talked about sex, even in rural, small town America in the 80’s.

Also, I will never not stop whatever I’m doing to sing and sway and potentially tear up a little bit whenever I hear Purple Rain. I don’t even know why.

“So, Cam,” I asked my step-son-in-law, “What stood out to you?” 

“He was really short. And he had a nice car. (Referring to a white 2006 Bentley.)

Yes, both of those things are also true. A genius, an artist, a complicated flesh-and-blood guy who lived and died in suburban Minneapolis — Prince was multi-faceted. We could all look at him, listen to his music, and come away moved and changed in different ways — or not. 

We bring our own history and experiences to our experience of art. Today, I’m just feeling grateful to Prince for adding bright colors and funky beats to my world.

My Paisley Park souvenirs