To Be Thankful

by Heidi Barr

Photo by Jill Dimond on Unsplash

I think it annoys God if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. –Alice Walker

It was late fall the year that my daughter was eight months old and didn’t care for the practice of sleeping. The leaves had fallen, the days were getting colder by the day, and I was tired. She wouldn’t take a bottle, and I was her only source of food and often times, comfort. The daylight hours were getting shorter, and the news headlines were getting more unsettling. Work days were tiring even without the extra challenge of never sleeping more than three hours at a time. There was plenty of anxiety, despair and disappointment to be found in all sorts of places if I wanted to find those things. I needed something to remind me of the good that underlays the challenges of life. So I started forcing myself to acknowledge the little slices of joy, even in the midst of struggle. I dusted off an old journal and began writing down those little slices.

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