Gratitude List:
1.  Seeing my cousin Melanie again after so many years.  What a caring and tender soul.  I loved listening to her powerful stories of the children in her lunch line, of the ways she nudges them to be their best selves, to take themselves seriously, to exceed expectations, even when people have given up on them.  She doesn’t give up on her kids.
2.  This Mary Oliver quotation that my friend Heidi posted to Facebook today:
“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
3.  Oh, that oriole.  Orange fire swooping through the blue.  Yesterday I was riding up the hill on the tailgate of the truck, and the oriole flew along behind, keeping pace with us to the top, then swished into the trees.
4.  Fair trade chocolate with sea salt and caramel bits.
5.  Photographs of great-grandparents.

May we walk in Beauty.