Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Giving Thanks

2014 is rushing to a close like the last run on a roller coaster ride and I'm grabbing for the hand break.

This year saw my last kid who lived near home, move to the sunny Keys, sixty miles from Cuba. That brought its own kind of adjustment, as I am a pack animal and prefer my cubs close to the den.

Grateful for texting and FaceTime and all the instantaneous ways I can touch base with my daughter and my son; giving me a quick fix of comfort as I touch in to their lives for just a moment. They're doing fine.
And...breathe.

This year, I finally took up the NaNoWriMo writing challenge: 50,000 words in 30 days. I finished, 59,000, in 20 days. That felt good. And it's gotten me on a solid storyline for a new books series, The Leelanau Chronicles. I also have a publisher who will be looking it over to see if we can do some business together. That feels really good.

I'm also seeing changes at my home; tearing out the old kitchen down to studs and sub floor, and dragging this 1933 Midwestern American house into this century. Barring any freakish hurdles to clear, I should be making holiday meals in a brand new space, after twenty two years of cursing the hideous linoleum and ancient cabinets I've been staring at that long.  That feels, really, really good.

So I'm grateful for my family flung far and wide and I'll pull them in tomorrow and share the spirit of pumpkin pie among the ethers.

I'm grateful for the words that came flowing out as I wrote the new book and how it felt like a phone call with the characters taking turns speaking their dialog to me. I laughed and I cried along with their defining moments.

And I'm grateful to even have a kitchen at all. Many don't. But especially grateful that we are able to give it the attention it so well deserves. After acting as my stage and workshop where more than 16,000 meals have fed from one to sixty people while I've lived here; from a solo sandwich to years of Holiday Open House parties where neighbors, friends and family gathered here to celebrate life.

Happy Thanksgiving from my home to yours.

A small Polaroid poem that came to me this morning as I started my day...


Hearts come home
On holidays
If only
On invisible wings
So they can whisper
Love
Into the ear
Of dear ones far away