Here's
what I'm grateful for:
Standing on the top deck at Betsy's house on Ocean View Drive in Wellfleet, Massachusetts at the edge of the world, full moon bright orange rising in the eastern sky with bright Mars pulsing next to it.
Twilight. Just the word twilight. That someone thought a word was necessary for crespcule or the time in between sunset and evening and the variety of words: dusk, evenfall, and gloaming.
To have the ability to wake at sunrise and gaze on a wide swath of shoreline with
impossibly long rolls of waves bending in gently, and hearing the gentle crash on the shore as they recede. Wondering and appreciating how long these waves
traveled.
Gratitude for the Boston Museum of Science where I became fascinated with waves as a child because of the enormous transverse wave machine. Gratitude for the friends who helped make a field trip possible for my high school students, who then became fascinated with Harmonograph sand pendulum and lightning show.
The shifting sands of LeCount Hollow that reveals a perfectly intact leaded glass bottle marked with raised glass lettering John Doherty and Company, Boston, Mass found two weeks ago after a particularly windy day and night and, with another storm, the dunes having transformed shape again; massive sands pushed up against them, so much so, that whatever shards of broken glass and bottles I found in the same spot are reburied beneath at least two feet of pounded soft granules.
Gratitude for a new Ella Fitzgerald release, "The Lost Berlin Tapes", which anyone who loves Ella must have.
Gratitude for my parents who played music constantly in our house. Gratitude for a memory of my father and I singing the chorus to Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered in his old-man forest green Chrysler Lebaron convertible, a friend in the back seat laughing us after leaving a gig my younger brother had in Boston.
Gratitude for these detailed memories when there are many days when I can't remember yesterday.
The perfect circle of the full moon, the triangle of its glow on the ocean, and the straight line of the horizon as if an impossibly long yard stick ruled it so.
