Gratitude

I was recently convicted that I complain a lot.

My blog is ample evidence. I could justify it by saying this is my place to vent, but the truth is I vent other places, too, so it's not like I save it up for a big release here. The ugly fact is that I'm a whiner by nature. And it kind of makes me sick when I realize how much whining I do about my pampered, overindulged, middle-class American life when there is so much pain and suffering in the world. (Yes, this train of thought was partially put on-track by the Haiti earthquake, although it had been sitting in the station for a while before that.)

So today, in an attempt to put off the old, I am adopting a better attitude. To begin with, I am no longer going to gripe about living in this state. It is my husband's job that keeps us here, and while it is never gracious to complain about any situation involving gainful employment, it seems particularly ungrateful right now. We live and work in a place most people have to save for years just to visit, there seems to be no imminent danger of his losing his job, and I should be...I AM...thankful that we are, for now, secure.

True, we have no appreciable seasons (although the recent cold snap had the natives wondering, and don't think I didn't enjoy every frostbitten minute of that). But this climate has its benefits. I just hitched Deuce on my back, walked a quarter-mile down the street, paid a sweet old man three dollars at his front door, and picked twenty pounds of oranges in his orchard. I ate four as soon as I got home. Holy mother of citrus, they are good. I have enough fresh oranges sitting in my fridge to cure a ship crew's worth of scurvy, and they are pesticide-free, undyed, ripened-on-the-tree-not-by-exposure-to-ethylene.

Not bad for something that a hundred years ago was such a delicacy in most of this country that getting one in your stocking at Christmas was such a big deal that you ate the whole thing, savoring skin and all.

So thanks, God, for oranges. For 57 degree days in January. For a job that pays the bills and that my husband enjoys. For healthy kids who are going to get all the vitamin C they can handle, ha. For warm beds and a comfortable home and the love of family and the abundance we share. I am grateful.