Gray gets old, say the skies of this particular November. Sometimes you’ve just got to splash the sunrise with a bright band of orange and let it melt into a wash of peach and pink. Sometimes you’ve got to just drop everything and put on a show. Which suits my mood because lately, I have been waking up feeling grateful. Big G, little g, every kind of grateful.

Why now? In this month, in this city, where the days are getting shorter and darker so rapidly it’s hard to keep up? And yet here I am, bathed in gratitude. For so many things. Here are a few:

 The tiny, barely-pink-yet buds on my ancient Christmas cactus, which never ever used to bloom, because I neglected it for about three decades, until one day, about a year ago, when I decided to treat it with the respect it deserved, being so old and still inexplicably alive.

 The Cooper’s Hawk who perched on a branch right outside my window for a good long stare-down. He was curling and uncurling his claws. Unsure whether to stay or go. It was like we were having a phone conversation with our eyes, instead of just dashing off a good-morning text. I didn’t dare unlock eyes and reach for my camera. This happened days ago, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Those eyes!

All the leaves, gold and orange and red and now mostly gone from our block, but still lighting up the dark spots in the parks and woods. I’ve been in a swoon, day after day, over the beauty of it all. Rain or sun, the fall colors have been dazzling this year: bittersweet, tragic, like that Mozart clarinet concerto that gets me every time.

photo by Angela Sterling

And: seeing Pacific Northwest Ballet’s gorgeous contemporary program, In the Upper Room, on a rush ticket. Choreographer Dani Rowe’s program note for “The Window” captured the mood at McCaw Hall, on a mid-November afternoon: “The ways we share – and feel – one another’s brightest and darkest moments of life are what comprise our mutual existence.”

And: seeing Joachim Trier’s autumnal fugue of a film, Sentimental Value, at the SIFF Uptown. It made me cry. A good cry. A cry I needed.

And: the recent Everett Herald article about d’Elaine Johnson, who was once my high school art teacher, and is now 93 and still painting every day.

And: reading historian David McCullough’s posthumously published History Matters, a slim volume of eloquent essays selected and edited by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson. “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” McCullough wrote. “It’s a form of ingratitude. I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.”

Which brings us to the history we are living in now. And different kinds of gratitude:

For the helpers, like our neighbor who organized donations for Safeway gift cards, during the government shutdown, for the many immigrants who live nearby.

For the brave victims of Jeffrey Epstein, who have told their truths again and again until, finally, lawmakers listened.

And for the voters, here in Seattle and in New York, New Jersey, Virginia and everywhere else, who stunned our wary selves with something we haven’t felt in a while: hope. Scary to even type that word, let alone say it aloud. But we can say it. We can, because we can see it and feel it.

“I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist,” David McCullough wrote. “I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time. Let us hope so. Let us pray so.”

We can watch the sun rise day after day, in this November of 2025, as it lights up the inky blue cloudbanks, streaking an orange ribbon across the sky. We can allow ourselves to be grateful. We can dare to hope.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

 

I’m teaching Introduction to Memoir Writing online in January (through Seattle Central College). Registration is now open. I’ll also be teaching a three-hour seminar on scene-setting at Hugo House on January 24, in-person. Registration opens December 9. Writers of all levels are welcome in both classes.