Thankfulness

I am thankful for my health, mental and physical.
I am thankful for my husband, his unwavering love, his patience, his endless zest for adventure.
I am thankful for my mother, her wisdom, her strength, her clear eyed intelligence, the model she sets for me to remain excited and optmistic and engaged with the world throughout your life.
I am thankful for my brother, his support for all I do, his sense of joy, his commitment to the small pleasures of life.
I am thankful for my sister, her energy, her love, her willingness to challenge me.
I am thankful for my in laws, their generosity, the fact they give me a home away from home.
I am thankful for all my friends, old and new, near and far, for all I learn from them, for all they give me.
I am thankful for my mentor, her commitment to my training as a researcher, her respect for my experience as a scientist, her friendship.
I am thankful for the career successes of the past year, and for people's recognition of them.
I am thankful that a decade of progress on gay civil rights means I can look at the next four years with some confidence our life will withstand them.
I am thankful to have been able, regardless of what happens next, to do what I wanted with my career for ten years. That's not a bad innings.
I am thankful for my dual citizenship, and my three languages.
I am thankful to have grown up in a city of 8 million people, to have gone to a school where students came from seventy countries, to have grown up immersed in two cultures.
I am thankful to have lived five years in Baltimore, to have learnt that America was both like and unlike what I knew from the movies.
I am thankful for three years in Ohio, and summers in Michigan, and all that has taught me about a life other than that I grew up to enjoy and expect.
I am thankful for the beautiful autumn we have had.
I am thankful for dinner surrounded by loved ones.

My thoughts have been dark of late, but I still have much to be thankful for. More than many, less than others, but by any standard, enough. Tomorrow I will be frightened, and angry again. But not all the time, and not today.

Happy Thanksgiving