truly grateful

Our Thanksgiving long weekend is over, but can thankfulness ever be over? Can we afford the blindness of thinking that we exist in complete isolation, immaculately free of any support, islands unto ourselves?

In a state of romantic nostalgia, Wally made his father's green tomato soup,

which turned out to be stewed tomatoes, thick and somewhat tart. ok...

I think it wasn't quite the way Wally remembered it, but you know what? It was worth the try.

 

 

We spent a good chunk of the weekend  continuing with our fall clean up, tidying the garage, trimming hedges as well as taking advantage of the beautiful weather to hang laundry and open windows. No sooner had I brought the laundry out than this unusual stripey bug was sitting on the first item I went to hang. I scrambled in the house for my camera.

 

By dusk, I was drawn out to take a few parting shots of the hayfield,

 

the colours glowing in the failing light.

I took a picture of the tomatoes with their guardian

 

then the dark beauty of the hollyhocks that have made a last stand,

or rather droop as they have grown downwards.

I lay a hydrangea stem down on the bench by the composter

 

as I photographed the green tomatoes that are thriving inside the composter,

 preventing us from using it this year.

 

Here is the hydrangea stem in a vase of Ninebark that Wally pruned.

It spent the night in the vestibule to keep the cats from destroying it, 

as if it was in a florist's refrigerator.

 

Are you still feeling the wistfulness of autumn as I am? This is a time of contrast, great beauty, abundance and loss. This quote by Mark Twain keeps helping me to put things into perspective:

 

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.

 It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

 

The ego resides in our attachment to sadness, timidity and false modesty as surely as it does in arrogance, disdain and pretense; the trick is to catch it before it does more damage. My impression is that "it's what [we think we know] for sure..." that gets us "into trouble." Once we realize we can never know the ultimate "Reason", whether it's the proverbial missing the flight that goes down, or losing the chance of a desired job that will be made redundant 6 months later, we eventually learn to "roll with it". 

 

Identifying the ego in most of what we "think" suppresses its importance.  

This makes me truly grateful.