Behind the Puddle

I don’t think gratitude requires us to want something to last forever. Maybe it simply asks us to recognize that we were glad it was here. Summer is beginning to loosen its grip behind the puddle, but not dramatically. There hasn’t been an official meeting where everyone agreed the season is ending.

It is still warm, and the trees are mostly green. The birds still arrive, and the puddle looks very much like the puddle I’ve been watching all summer. But I can feel the change coming. I find myself thinking about everything this season gave me.

I’m not only thinking about the wildlife, although there has certainly been plenty of that. There were the baby geese, the mallards, Stella and Stanley, Shelly, Pinecone, and the various adventures involving feeders that apparently weren’t designed with squirrel determination in mind. There were birds, hummingbirds, a beaver, frogs, visitors I expected, and others I didn’t. But when I think about summer, those aren’t the only things I am grateful for.

I’m grateful for mornings in my chair, evenings sitting beside Brian, the girls wandering around the yard and seeing things I would have missed, and the dogs sleeping nearby. I’m grateful for neighbors stopping to talk, rain that changed the puddle overnight, days when the feeders were chaos, and days when almost nothing happened. I’m even grateful for some of the things that didn’t go the way I wanted. Apparently, those became stories too.

Maybe that’s what gratitude looks like when we’ve lived long enough to know that every season contains both beautiful and difficult things. Joy doesn’t wait until worry disappears. A good day can happen during a hard year. We can laugh while carrying something heavy. We can be grateful and still wish something had been different.

For a long time, I think I understood gratitude as focusing on the good. It meant counting my blessings, looking on the bright side, and remembering how fortunate I was. But gratitude feels different to me now.

It isn’t asking me to compare my life with anyone else’s. It isn’t telling me that something difficult shouldn’t hurt because something good also exists. It doesn’t erase disappointment. It doesn’t make loss less painful.

It simply allows me to say, “This mattered to me, and I’m glad I had it, even if it changed or ended, and even if I wish I could have had more.” The trees don’t need to remain green for me to be grateful for the shade they gave all summer. The baby geese don’t need to stay babies for me to be grateful I watched them grow. An ordinary moment doesn’t need to last forever to have been enough.

Maybe gratitude is one of the ways we learn to release something without pretending we didn’t love it. We don’t have to push summer away because autumn is coming. We don’t have to cling to summer because we loved what it gave us. We can simply stand somewhere between the two and say thank you.

We can give thanks for what was here, what it taught us, what we noticed, and what we didn’t understand until later. We can give thanks for the ordinary days we didn’t know we would treasure and for the ways they became part of whatever came next. There are seasons of my life I would gladly revisit. There are others I am grateful to have survived.

Some seasons, I still don’t completely understand. But every one of them brought something with it. Maybe gratitude doesn’t require me to call all of it good. It only asks me to recognize what was given.

Behind the puddle, another season is coming. I don’t have to rush toward it. I don’t have to hold this one back. For today, I can simply be grateful that I was here for it.