Little Things for Which I am Thankful

I know these posts usually come out on a Friday, but I wanted to be able to write this post from a place of gratitude, you know? And that’s how I am feeling today. Yesterday, well, in the words of someone who commented on my blog recently, I was just “waiting until Friday.”

1. I was lamenting with a colleague how it seems like libraries have changed so much over the past few years. To me, they seem to have become very corporatized (well, some of them, anyway) and I look at my own library and see how it’s changed. When I started there, I was by far, the most inexperienced person. And I mean, BY YEARS, I was the least experienced. And knowledgeable. Now, I’m the one who has been in the department the longest. It’s scary, and it’s sad.

But, someone decided to make my day yesterday, and it came in the form of one of the reference librarians with whom I worked in the very beginning. Naomi came into the library yesterday for the first time since she had retired, back in 2006. She’s the only librarian in our library who has a plaque dedicated to her near the reference desk. At first when she walked in with her family, I asked “are you here for the reunion?” and then I looked at her and was like “oh my God, Naomi!!” and immediately ran at her.

That woman has probably forgotten more than I will ever learn in my life. She reminded me of a time in my job when I was always, always learning. You’d think you had exhausted every avenue you knew of, and every resource, and you’d go to one of the more senior librarians and ask, “is there anything I’m missing?” and inevitably they would come up with something. (I still have that today in a colleague or two, but it’s just not the same. When you add up all the years of experience in my department these days, we probably add up to about 1 to 1.75 of the library reference librarians’ experience before, and that was a big department of about 7.

When she left, her husband turned to me and said “you made her day,” and I said “no, she made mine.”  We just kept giving each other hugs.

2. I may be dating myself by bringing up this movie, but does anyone out there remember the movie, Legends of the Fall? Back from around 1994? You may remember it had Aidan Quinn and Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins? Well, there was a line in the movie where the old Native American says something about Brad Pitt’s character, Tristan, coming into the “quiet stage” of his life. That’s kind of how I felt earlier this week when we had all that rain, and the shortness of the daylight seemed to be strikingly obvious to me, much more so than normal. It made me really start to think about things and get some things sorted out in my mind. And I have felt kind of “quiet.” It’s kind of like the feeling that comes over me when all I can hear in the apartment is the sound of the bubbling pet water fountain and maybe a snoring animal or two. Like right now, as I sit here typing this, every single furball in this place is sound asleep. It’s a feeling of contentment, of just feeling like everything is right as it should be, right now.

3. I am grateful for having good friends and for having good friends who give me good advice. Not necessarily what I want to hear, but good advice in that it comes from a good place inside of them and because it’s honest.  One of them told me to think of my dreams or life as a sentence that you diagram – think about the big picture, and then see the parts that make up the whole. Think of what you want the end result to be, and then you’ll figure out how to get there.

4.  I am grateful that the weather today is absolutely gorgeous. The sun is out, and lots of people are walking and running around the reservoir out back. It’s one of those days where I wish we could just freeze the calendar and not move forward.

5. I am grateful for quiet, peaceful days like today, where there is nothing on the schedule unless I want it to be. So, I’m going to the movies tonight with my best friend and her husband. We’re a movie watching trio – Gone Girl is what we will be seeing. I’ve read the book, so I can’t wait to see how it translates to the big screen. Definitely one of those books that is hard to put down.

6. I am grateful for young adult fiction about vampires. Yes, I said it. There, I admit it!! It’s what I like to read! It allows me to escape into another world and reminds me of what I loved about reading as a child. I used to lose myself in books, and now I”m doing it again.

7. I am grateful for views like those pictured above. And for coming home and seeing my two boys, Max and Sebastian, curled up on the loveseat (see below.)  I wanted to sit there, but I don’t have heart to make them move. Could you??

What are you thankful for this week? Please drop me a line below. And if you’ve liked this post, please hit like or subscribe! Thanks for reading.