Stacey Vaeth Photography Today I Am Grateful For
73. Today I’m grateful for the 31 family members of mine on an email chain, sending photos of their daily lives under this “new normal” quarantine. For my small home filled with sunshine and plants. For my partner, who made me and his Dad chicken soup, then hired his sometimes-gardener, whom he met in a Home Depot parking lot a few years ago, to pick weeds and make more than minimum wage, when there is no other income to be had. Today I am grateful for my courageous fellow business owners – who are navigating this uncertainty and financial mayhem with grace, creativity, flexibility, and most of all camaraderie. Today I’m grateful for the internet and those who use it to it’s best, to give us bagel recipes, guitar lessons, classes meant for in-person, shops meant for entering and perusing, schools meant for a building with hallways, and for connectivity. Today I’m grateful for the health care workers, the bus drivers, the cleaners of airplanes, the mail carriers. I’m grateful for the sunshine which came early to Seattle, because the Earth, despite what we continually do to her, must have used her intuition to know that we couldn’t handle another two months of rain and this too. Today I am grateful for our political leadership, although this is hard and complicated and full of things I am not grateful for, but instead resentful of. Today I am grateful that I can feel the people around me in this world, despite being so far apart , by 6 feet or 6,000 miles, experiencing with me the simultaneous fear and silver lining in all of this. Oh. And hmmm. Today I am so, so grateful to the hummingbird whom I’ve never seen, who just fluttered and hovered at the red rose bush now beginning to bloom just outside my window, at the very moment that I was about to finish this. We may be socially distanced, but today I feel closer to many than I have in a long time.
Stacey Vaeth Photography 