Please join me for Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for things small and large, from the puny to the profound. Because attention attracts gratitude and gratitude expands joy, let us gather thanksgivings.
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Where I live, the land is now flush with fresh food, an abundance of orchards and vineyards. Every field is thick: blueberries, blackberries, apricots, peaches, apples, pears, grapes.
Further on, the fields turn dry in a sepia patchwork of wheat as solitary tractors crawl across hill and slope. A different kind of plenty. A different sort of beauty.
Closer to home, neighbors share their garden bounty, come to me with arms full of tomatoes, cucumbers, and kindness. I am filled.
On morning walks, the sun burns bright. I pass thickets of bachelor buttons and sunflowers with heavy heads. The wind calms and I move into stillness, break through the racket in my head.
At night when windows are wide open, soft air arrives, wraps me in sleep.
Oh this world, this aching beauty.
SEPTEMBER
This far north, the harvest happens late.
Rooks go clattering over the sycamores
whose shadows yawn after them, down to the river.
Uncut wheat staggers under its own weight.
Summer is leaving too, exchanging its gold
for brass and copper. It is not so strange
to feel nostalgia for the present; already
this September evening is as old
as a photograph of itself. The light, the shadows
on the field, are sepia, as if this were
some other evening in September, some other
harvest that went ungathered years ago.
— Dorothy Lawrenson
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