So full

The boys visited a flint farm in Licking county earlier this week, collecting rainbow colored rocks to create stone tools. Flint Ridge is an eight-mile vein, long mined by American Indians and still attracting rockhounds today. Tolliver came home with buckets full of Ohio's official gemstone, with a big smile and even bigger spear point dreams. The boys are actively interested in Native Americans and, naturally, the tension in how history has been portrayed. They are beginning to recognize the enduring relationships between people and their territories. They are teaching us to do the same.

We worked through a little six degrees of gratitude exercise, beginning with grandparents who still cook for us at all three houses, moving on to hard work and secure incomes that provide means for groceries year round. We acknowledged the chefs, the shelf stockers and cashiers, extrapolating back to the truck drivers and the asphalt layers and the infrastructure, to the factory workers packaging and butchering, the farmers laboring, the animals and plants and the fields in which things grow. 

Pausing to give thanks like this allows the turkey time to rest and the wine time to breathe (and me to wonder if a parent can envy a dead bird or a bottle, just a little?) Feeling tired, though, means that we are alive, like the trees and the stars, and that we are lucky.

We are so full of gratitude. 

And of turkey and tenderloin, taco soup and lamb stew. Of curiosity and creativity.

May all this thankfulness, and all this learning, be more of a lifestyle, and not just a holiday.