I am thankful for synonyms for thankfulness

But antonyms are another story

I am thankful for synonyms for thankfulness, words like grateful, obliged, gratified, beholden and appreciative and yet they don’t quite match the depth of feeling I have as I walk beneath this slate autumn sky, beholden and appreciative for each breath which inflates the old bellows set awailing outside my mothers womb nearly 3 score and 7 years ago.

I am thankful for my beautiful smart as a whip 12-year granddaughter Emma who is visiting us this week of giving thanks and charming me into a puddle of sentimental goo as we labor over mashed potatoes and gravy and boiling cranberries . Her young spirit reminds me of when I was a young father and her adult mother was a small tween Emma’s age some thirty years ago and my daughter Sarah would let me brush her gold hair and read her the last bedtime story before she became a young woman. And now I tell Emma terrible fables about her perfect mother to make her giggle and wonder.

I am thankful for another rose colored sunrise and the arrival of the chattering cactus wrens, the clucking quail, the cheeping Gila woodpeckers and the hungry humming hummingbirds that gather for breakfast on our porch and quarrel over turns at the seed block, the feeders and the suet with glorious trilling, squawking and bickering while up high a tiny finch with the biggest song weaves her spherical nest.

I am thankful for the spectacle that costs but seeds and nectar.

I am thankful to be growing old with a partner as lovely, kind and perpetually forgiving as Ellen who must possess a wand and secret gossamer fairy wings that match her mermaid hair and winsome smile.

I am thankful for my sons, Matthew and David, who have become fine good men who carry their name proudly, good humored kind men who daily surprise me with their natural gifts and outbursts of virtue.

I am grateful for the poets modern and ancient who speak to me of seasons that turn, turn, turn and to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, and a time to be grateful for every season, good and bad, in between.

I am thankful for our good neighbors Jody and John, Dave and Kathe and Christy and Frank. We’ve known Frank and Christy so long they have become family. My sibs are all gone. I am grateful for old Frank because he has become like an older brother to me.

And we are wounded because Frank was felled by a heart attack two-weeks ago. And Frank and Christy are both very talented freelance photographers who have always scraped by as gig workers, hard working souls for whom retirement was never a possibility. Two-weeks on Frank remains intubated, in limbo, while his partner, Christy, soldiers on between bedside vigils and gigs, terrified of what bills may come, and, worse, of losing their long-time home. And we are family through this. We created this Gofundme because Frank and Christy would do the same for us.

Frank and Christy

Frank Simon Gofundme

And I am grateful for having crossed paths with the brother I wished I’d had, my good neighbor Frank. He took these images of me and gave them to me as a gift:

The work of photographer Frank Simon

I am grateful for our funky humble rambling chaotic home on the range, our ticky tacky hacienda, our roof, how blessed we are to have shelter from the rain to share with our wolf spiders and kangaroo rats. And after the autmun drizzle laughing friends around a mesquite fire cannot be taken for granted.

Above us I study the magnificent panorama of Stars from Orion’s Belt to Andromeda to the Pleiades coursing across heaven above, in this season of giving mandatory thanks. I thank my stars, my Ellen, my Emma and light candles in my heart for Christy and Frank and I thank each magical heart beat for keeping me in my place, humble and awestruck, grateful, obliged, gratified, beholden and appreciative, moving ever onward.

Look for Thanksgiving Day cartoons in your inbox tomorrow morning, friends. Here’s to better days ahead!