After visiting my Grandmother and Uncles in Chicago, I knew I didn’t want to live and work in the big city when I graduated from Auburn. I’ve been offered some good paying jobs at large hospital labs, but I’m fortunate live in a great area in NW Alabama, and even though I live in the country on part of what use to be the family dairy farm, it’s only 5 minutes from town. The cost of living is low and my and co-workers at the hospital I work at are close friends. I’m thankful for my family, wonderful friends, great co-workers who even my Mom considers family.
We have a great musical heritage in the area known as the hit recording capital of the world in the sixties, so there is always something going on musically or some type of theater and the arts. I’ll go into one of the Mom & Pop grocery stores in Tuscumbia for a gallon of milk and spend an hour talking to people I know, some I didn’t know when we first started talking, but do when we are finished. I don’t take that for granted.
My three rescued Border collie hooligans are thankful they have a good home on three acres with all the mice, birds,
bumblebees, lizards and rabbits to chase. They are thankful their lives are now free of the abuse of the past, except when I yell at them to stop digging up a tree chasing mice.
I’m thankful that I learn something each day. Today I learned not to drive under a bald cypress tree after the frost hits it and the needles die. I’m still picking needles out of my yard clothes and hair. Today I learned a second thing; if Blackie, one of the hooligans who is on a mission to rid the property of all field mice and rats is tumbling a stack of landscaping pots around, it’s not necessarily a mouse in them. When I up righted the stack and pulled the rest of the pots out of the 20 gallon container at the bottom, a Carolina wren flew out, ran into the stack I was holding in my hand and fly off. After throwing the stack in the air, and picking them up and restacking them, I fed the hooligans and finished planting some daylilies still in pots.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten to appreciate each morning’s sunrise. It means I’ve gotten to see another wonder day.
As you gather with family and friends this holiday season remember those in the armed forces, police, healthcare and public service not able to be home with their families.
