Thanksgiving

I am thankful for a season that has crimson red and crisp clean air, yellow leaves and brown and blue yarn. I am thankful for a place that is a little labyrinth, a place like home, but older, but newer. I am thankful for thrift shop sweaters, for incense, plane tickets and technology, for chocolate, for rosemary and for Polaroid photographs. I am thankful for two long legs, for lungs and something similar to freedom, at least. I am thankful for the stirring, shuddering, all across the world, and the people who have thrown themselves headlong into hopefulness, and been hurt for it, too. I am thankful for boots, for five-subject notebooks, for salt. I am thankful for Gypsy King, my MishkaMoo, Daisy Dooper Dog, serious Buster with his mustache, and Badger with his blue eyes, too. I am thankful for markers, cereal boxes, scissors. I am thankful for open-late Chinos, full of beer and bobby pins, chili sauce and glue sticks, full of junk and everything else. I am thankful for my tongue, for words and words and words, even if they never seem like enough. I’m thankful for a boy who is patient, that dog whispering boy, for breakfast in bed and shower sex. I am thankful for blankets, for poetry, for literacy, for tomatoes, music, what little patience I have, for the redwoods. I am thankful for the ocean, for dreaming, for dish soap, body lotion, for driers, when I had them. I am thankful for a best-friend mother, that unbreakable bond made of different kinds of love, for four parents, really, strange and different and wonderful people, artists and adventurers, I am thankful for their logic and their passion, for their quirks and their lessons, for their homes and their heads. I am thankful for twenty years and almost one more, for waking up, for phone calls, I am thankful for a voice, for my copper ship necklace, for comfortable silences, raspberries, collarbones, chapstick, and cider. I am thankful for windows, for eggs, for leggings. I am thankful for a grandmother who read me Nancy Drew and taught me how to knit, I am thankful for my family, for a spider-web of support, for love that comes steady even miles away, even though I am as strange as a deep sea creature, and almost as pale, too. I am thankful for a brother with big deer eyes, a brother with a mind as raging and curious as the sea, who can draw airplanes and tanks, volcanoes and castles, a wild drumming fiend. I am thankful for wings, for films that make my heart ache, for friendship, mail, my faraway car, reusable grocery bags, freshly made bread, graffiti, strangers, sales, coincidences, surprises. I am thankful for open eyes.