Ever get to the point of wondering how many more bouts to go? How many times have I freaked and feared a creek after a rainstorm? How many nights did I go to bed with heavier fears as a child? It’s a grey day and the goldenrod shawl with white daisies over my shoulders barely puts a cheerful dent in the grey shirt I’m wearing. It is a glum-dreary Wednesday and though I put in 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo to officially “win,” it is not a book, and the end of this dedicated writing marathon is hitting especially hard. Does anything ever get easier?

A magic eight-ball somewhere answers, “Check again later.”

Tomorrow officially begins the old holiday scrimmage to do a million things in 24 days and hope I don’t forget to offer holiday cheer to someone. Fun! What will help, what has been helping, is reading the tenets, thoughts, and truisms I’ve written out on a page I see every day. Two of the most helpful have been, “Do what is necessary, then what is possible, and soon you will be doing the impossible,” and “If being mean to yourself worked, you’d be thin and rich. Try loving yourself instead.” The first one is especially helpful in clumps and spirals of self-doubt when I’m faced with an overlong list, and in December, there are many. Triaging my needs over my wants ends up saving time, too.

For Thanksgiving, I realized I didn’t “need” to make pie crust when I had premade in the freezer. I didn’t “need” to set a table properly, but I wanted to and it all worked out to look like this.

And talk about gratitude this year! I want to cry from the beauty of it all. Nina Fosati, Gloria Berlinghoff, Susan Tepper, Natalie Condor-Smith, Joni Kalinowski – all of you have touched me deeply with your kindness this month. I’m inept in expressing the gratefulness I feel for those kind words and gestures recently. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And thank you for stopping by and for the read! I’m off to write the holiday letter, address envelopes, and make those cookies. Maybe I’ll even submit some work, too. Take care of you!