1000 Gifts,The Three Sisters: A Modified Version

The grilled red peppers spit and deflated in the crisp morning sun, ready to be used as part of our Thanksgiving menu in Roasted Red Pepper Soup, along with Prime Rib, stuffing etc.

I had spent the dark of the morning looking through photo albums trying to find the Harvest picture that captured the essence of our years of celebrating this holiday. I came to the conclusion that we've had incredibly varied experiences. None better or worse. Just different.

Adapting to sports events, opportunities for short vacations, school schedules, and company.

This year just the six of us eased into the dining room at a leisurely late afternoon point. A daughter's voice on the speaker phone confused the dog as he tried to figure out where best to work his sad and starving look.

It was abundant and ordinary, quirky and routine.

Gratitude let's you receive it as more than enough.

Let's you see through Friday's stubborn rain keeping the day in a grey morning state while you head out of your city to the next . To joust for groceries, aisle room, parking spaces and turning lanes.

When the road has turned into a highway in what seems like just these past weeks, strip malls and stoplights and commuters clouding the view of horse ranches, farm fields, and crumbling mills.

You're in a slow motion trance, smelling the frying eggs as the audio book pages fill the car and seep out into the rivers where the ditches are inching up and you wonder if you could float alongside the cattails instead of riding the shopper ' s car in front of you.

No wiper speed seems to be right, and you're trying not to get cut off again, and at least the construction mess is finally behind you.

It seems completely normal when ever so quietly just then, with the warning of flashing lights dimmed behind the shower door, that you see 3 cows, possibly sisters, grazing in the bent green of the shoulder. Today the fence was finally in the way and it crumpled easily and freed them just enough so that when you get home to start doing what families do you're as thankful as they probably are.
Sometimes things just come one after the other, unfolding just as they can, and happening just when they do, and it fills you with a sense of peace. Like how the first frost dusting all the shingles like gingerbread will remind you that you always forget that it can, what with everyone wearing shorts just the hours before.

Seasons melt and wrestle and take turns whether you dance rituals for them or not.
It's routine and extraordinary .

Only the awareness of it as a gift for which you are about to receive sits you in the chair at the table of thanksgiving.

shared with the Gratitude Community @ Holy Experience. The routine and extraordinary.