The dream machine of the '70s, an IBM Selectric...oooohhhh
Yes, again, 5 things for which I am grateful. Believe it or not, I have persisted with this exercise–admittedly on a somewhat intermittent schedule. Maybe I’ll even get in the habit of exercising something other than my typing skills, er, keyboarding skills, I guess it’s called now. Anyone remember typewriters?
1. Mark. While I love him at all times, there are moments when gratitude is not the first thing that leaps to mind during the day to day operation of our married life. Sometimes I am thin skinned and 
other times a touch self absorbed. He reminds me there is also a time to suck it up, a time to accept criticism and correction as something positive and at all times to remember there are other people in my life who deserve consideration.
2. Winter. There is something special in the mid-afternoon of winter. It is wistful, reminiscent of childhood walks or sitting in a bright warm kitchen looking out at a world suffused in a dark blue light. It is a time of watching my mother through clouds of flour as she rolls pastry and checks the roast, washes potatoes to bake and peels apples for pie.
once upon a time momma had magic shoes & leather pants
3. Shoes. Proper ones make walking a joy – I love to walk or, at least, I used to when my feet could roam unfettered even by flip flops to leap sprinklers on the front lawn or run across the street to Laura Kelcher’s house for an apres-dinner game of “kick the can”.
Now I have to make sure engineered, reinforced and strategically arched shoes are on my feet so I can extract a little forbidden pleasure in the puritan discipline of counting steps. The correct shoes for walking, for playing, for keeping my feet warm inside the house – I think those are called slippers and may have been covered already but, damn, shoes are important enough to need a repeat moment of gratitude.
4. Books. Both electronic and paper. It is the words that are important, the story. It is magic, just marks, smudges really, but they contain entire worlds.
5. Tape. It holds so many things together and has the amazing property of disappearing at the precise moment I need it. No matter how many rolls I buy or how often one of them falls out of a cupboard when I’m looking for something else, the moment I need just a piece of tape for a parcel or to patch up a box, they’ve all been called to some great and mysterious cellophane coven. Except the green masking tape, which is the poor cousin, I suspect, of the tape world and not allowed into the club house for these important impromptu clan gatherings.
waiting for the call