on-going thankfulness

When taking a short, afternoon-sized road trip this week, traveling along the by-ways of south Georgia, much of the ride was spent observing sundry changes in the landscape related to seeing spring inching into the fields and farms of my native state. Looking at the many shades of green and beginning of colors that herald the warmer season.



Decidious bare limbs of trees beginning to bud out with rusty red leaves on the tips of twigs. Dogwood trees greening up, showing yellow-turning-to-white blooms; wisteria blooms beginning to look like delicate bunches of lavender grapes, hanging on vines draped through the tree limbs; hillsides covered with trailing vines loaded with yellow, trumpet-shaped blooms of Carolina jasmine. Abandoned homesites with overgrown bushes of bright yellow forsythia, farm ponds with migrating water-fowl, feeding for the next stage of the return flight.

Some of the things I noticed and whispered 'Thank you' on viewing brought an awareness of what I am not, do not have in my life, and have never experienced: hard manual labor, constant anxiety about providing for a family, living in hard-scrabble circumstances, barely making ends meet month-to-month. So I am thankful for the family that raised me, and the benefits provided through the hard work of parents and grandparents, desiring to provide the comforts I enjoyed in my oblivious growing-up years.

I know now that it was a blessing I did not grow up living in hand-to-mouth circumstances, like many of the homesteads I noticed in traveling though some of the poorest counties in the state. I am thankful that my family valued education, and desired to invest resources in providing higher learning. Thankful for having grown up in a small town, but equally thankful I do not live in a place where the nearest groceries are at the end of a fifty mile drive. Thankful for dependable, reliable transportation, and equally thankful I do not live where all the family history of non-functioning vehicles is resting around the house, returning to the earth one rusted-out fender at a time, grown over with weeds, vines, saplings.

Thankful for parents and grandparents people still remember fondly, and think of as people of character, with high standards and unwavering convictions. Thankful for the influence of their daily lives, being the people who would hold me accountable in all the little things, as they knew that the little things are the ones that matter. Those small daily events and activities where families interact, directing and growing a generation of responsible, dependable, accountable youths and molding them into the future.