(Sometimes it’s tough to feel at home in your own city. Which is why I’ve given myself a challenge: each day, for forty days, I’m going to find *one* thing I love about this place. And then I’m going to tell you about it. If you want to follow my journey, start here. Today is Day Five.)
Today, the Star City gave me much to be grateful for:
I got up early, when the light was very yellow and hard-angled and my breath came out in clouds, and I went to the Grandin Village Farmer’s Market. Left loaded down with good gifts.
In the afternoon, my husband and my friend and I hiked up a mountainside past Eagle Rock, and we talked about art and God and how it is that great trees can grow out of sheeny gray rock, seemingly without any soil at all. How they lean without falling. How they put down roots in hard places.
And I came home, to my snug little house on a tree-lined city street, and I walked the dog in the thickening dark, and I listened to the way the wind rattled the dry leaves in the tops of the trees, and I realized that winter is coming, but it isn’t here yet. It isn’t here yet. And my, that’s a comfort.
And I wanted to pick the very best one of these things and really tell you about it — maybe about my favorite Ethiopian Yirgacheffe from Red Rooster, or about the wood mushrooms I found and the recipe I have planned for them, or about the children at the end of the street who have spent all this week shrieking and hollering in the russet light, scuffling around in piles of bright-gold maple leaves, throwing a football back and forth.
I meant to tell you about just one of these things, in words that would capture it properly. I meant to take photographs and tell stories, make the whole thing sing.
But the whole wash of it overwhelmed me. And so instead, for now, I’ll speak only this:
I am so grateful.
I am so grateful.
I am so grateful.
ASHLEY WILSON FELLERS 