The Warmth of Blessings

Ember Glow

When winter’s winds blow bleak and bare The silhouettes of frozen trees,

Deep within my heart I go And warm myself within the glow

Of love’s bright embers burning there, Upon the hearth of memories.

                                                                                                                                                                             –Blanche Day Manos

This morning as I write, my thoughts meander here and there but mostly they center around the fact that I am blessed. In so many ways, the Lord is good to me. I, like everyone else, go through times of feeling like I’m in winter’s bleakness, as the poem says. And when those bare, cold times come, I can go in memory to other times and relive many warming moments. I remember walking  in the  door of Mom and Dad’s house and seeing them standing there watching me come toward them, smiles on their faces. I remember three of us washing dishes in my mother’s kitchen: my sister-in-law, my niece and me. Carlene and I were wondering why it was taking so long to wash them and then realized that Missy was just in “wash” mode and was taking the clean dishes Carlene had dried and dunking them back in the suds. Could be that we were all chattering and not thinking about what we were doing. I remember the red roses my husband always brought me on Valentine’s Day.

But these things are in the past, happy memories as they are, and today is filled with blessings of its own and will be the warm memories of tomorrow. Yesterday my son, daughter-in-law and I were talking. I mentioned that I would feel more at home in Ma and Pappy Latty’s Etta farm of 75 years ago than I do in this bewildering maze of technology. Matt reminded me that I might feel more at home there but after I had finished each day’s worth of hard work, I would have very little time or energy left for writing. Which is certainly true. And he and Dawn are the ones who enable me to navigate through this digital age. For example, my neat little digital camera had a temper tantrum and refused to snap pictures. It didn’t take Dawn long to re-route its internal workings and it is now in a good mood again.  A blessing. And while technology to me  is like being in a foreign country and not knowing the language, I am fascinated by it and thankful for it.

It seems that many of the things that lift my spirit come with risks. Writing is my passion and when Barbara and I wrote The Cemetery Club and Grave Shift, we put a lot of ourselves into the stories. It was exhausting but exhilarating. When books are sold, there are those things called “reviews”. Most reviews are of the kind that make my heart sing but occasionally there are those that don’t.

Then there is the love and warmth of family and friendship. Love comes with a good many risks of being hurt but it is worth the journey. Of all the blessings of today, my family and my friends top the list. They are the glow that warm my heart, even more than the “hearth of memories”. So my meandering mind centers around one truth this morning: I am blessed. And, I am thankful.