August 3, 2023: I am grateful for friends who will drive me places I do NOT want to go, but need to go.
August 4, 2023: I am grateful for washing machines that work.
August 12, 2023: I am grateful for my dog Pearl and her Squirrel Scout friends.
August 17, 2023: I am grateful for lawns, projectors and ping pong tables.
August 18, 2023: I am grateful for cool morning walks through the trees with friends and our four legged friends. I am grateful for a good and a surprising dog who can scale a 4 ft. cement wall without any trouble.
August 20, 2023: I am grateful for an upstairs neighbor who is also a friend. Her kindness includes inviting me to do my laundry at her apartment when mine is broken.
August 21, 2023: I am grateful for smooth paved roads between my dad’s house and my home.
August 25, 2023: I am so grateful for the Willamette River. And the Great Blue Heron that I see there.
August 29, 2023: I am grateful for retirement accounts and potential home loans.
July 1, 2023: I am grateful for the number one, which does not exist on this typewriter. I use the Roman Numeral. Of course this leaves me so grateful that I am able to improvise.
July 4, 2023: I am grateful for friends who understand my sensitivity to sound as well as Pearl’s special sensitivities. This is a challenging day for us and I am grateful for friends who respect us and understand.
July 5, 2023: I am grateful for language. Also, I am grateful for a certain 2 year old who loves language so much that the words cocoon and raccoon, when said together, makes him laugh.
July 10, 2023: I am grateful for children who tell me what they think. I trust children to be real with me, which means when one tells me I smile ‘like God’ I feel like I’ve been given a gift.
July 12, 2023: I am grateful for walls. Being able to paint on them as a canvas brings me great joy.
July 17, 2023: I am grateful for wood, bicycle spokes, rake tines and railroad tracks, not to mention the trains that ride them. All of these materials and tools make good ingredients for kalimbas (if you know a creative soul who knows how to make them).
July 18, 2023: I am grateful for the ocean and sea life; for the moon that creates the tide; for the sun.
July 21, 2023: I am grateful for toilets. Life would be shitty without them.
July 22, 2023: I am grateful for antibiotics.
July 24, 2023: I am grateful for avocados and those who harvest them.
July 25, 2023: I am grateful for perfect, ripe blueberries.
July 26, 2023: I am grateful for rivers and the water that defines them.
July 27, 2023: I am grateful for tea, and Japanese made glass tea pots that allow me to watch the leaves unfurl.
July 31, 2023: I am grateful for fresh figs, ripe and straight out of my friend’s yard to my door. I have never tasted candy so delicious.
June 2, 2023: I am grateful that I can walk out my door and find friends to walk with at lunch time. I am also grateful for friends who ‘feed’ me names of other writers like A.R. Ammons and John Steinbeck to learn from. Steinbeck I knew, but never read. Ammons I never knew, but will as soon as I acquire his book, Tape, which was originally written on a roll of adding machine tape, just like this.
June 7, 2023: I am grateful for mornings that I get to wake up and visit Nathaniel. He is a bright spot in my life.
June 8, 2023: I am grateful for my friend Sara — she is creative, kind, smart and loves animals as much as I do. I have learned a lot from her and the friendship we share.
June 10, 2023: I am grateful for change and all the unexpected blessings it may bring.
June 11, 2023: I am grateful for Pearl. She is such a sweet, fuzzy girl with lots of love.
June 12, 2023: I am grateful for my friend Wolfgang who is one of the most kind and considerate people I know.
June 14, 2023: I am grateful for this typewriter — I enjoy using it to record gratitude. Muscle memory lets me remember good days at Western Mennonite School, like using my watch to reflect sunlight toward John Fillmore.
June 15, 2023: I am grateful for fresh peas from the garden, with lemon, ginger and garlic. I am also grateful for the friends who serve them in a cast iron skillet.
June 19, 2023: I am grateful for cool summer mornings. Pearl and I get to walk in a quiet city, before traffic begins to intensify. She sniffs, I watch store deliveries. I am also grateful for Juneteenth. I am inspired by the strength of my black and brown American friends.
June 21, 2023: I am grateful for good memories of growing up on Eicher Road — playing in the creek, picking mint for iced tea, eating summer sausage sandwiches with Dad in the field he was baling that day. Grandma’s house was only a hop, skip and jump away. I loved her house.
June 25, 2023: I am grateful for water color art. Looking at it makes me feel somehow refreshed.
June 26, 2023: I am grateful for garbage service workers who take what we’ve thrown out, allowing us to distance ourselves from our own messes. Also, these important workers could have their hands crushed in the machines they work with. . . like today. May your hand heal swiftly.
May 1, 2023: I am grateful my eyes can see and my feet can take me places I want to go. (how’s that?)
May 8, 2023: I am grateful I can spend time visiting with my dad during this season of his life. Pearl is also grateful to sit on his lap.
May 10, 2023: I am grateful for Pearl. She keeps me on my toes. When she sleeps on the bed with me, I am comforted. I feel very lonely when she decides to sleep in her own bed.
May 11, 2023: I am grateful for Crystal Lake Park and the native plants that grow there– Fringe Cup, Native Plum, Trillium, Solomon’s Seal, Hawthorn.
May 12, 2023: I am grateful for old friends and neighbors who stay in touch with me and who invite me to the Uke Cabaret.
May 13, 2023: I am grateful for honest friends who acknowledge when things are painful and hard to understand.
May 15, 2023: I am grateful for challenges in life because it means I am continuing to grow. I am grateful for parents who wanted to help others and who taught me to care for others.
May 17, 2023: I am grateful that I grew up camping–Metolious, Beverly Beach, Seal Rock, Drift Creek. It’s not easy to get reservations these days and it seems so complicated. I am truly grateful for all the times I’ve had the chance to wake up in the cool, clean air and sleep in the comforting nest of a sleeping bag.
May 19, 2023: I am grateful for friends who share meals with me. Also, for friends who drive me through traffic jams without getting aggravated.
May 20, 2023: I am grateful for cool water on a hot day–the river and the misters at a friend’s yard in the evening.
May 26, 2023: I am grateful that I have learned I have no control over many, many things in this life–but that I can control or direct more than I think I can.
May 27, 2023: I am grateful for music–harmonicas, guitars and washboards; singing swine; dancing uninhibitedly with children.
May 30, 2023: I am grateful for the person who donated three pair of FLAX pants in my size to the Humane Society Thrift Store. I really love them.
April 5, 2023: I am grateful for friends that share food–taco salad–and watch good moves (Fantastic Mr. Fox) to help celebrate my 53rd year here.
April 6, 2023: I am grateful, so grateful, for Robert the laundry delivery person for the office below me. On my loneliest of days, he shows the face of God to my low spirit by stopping his work, sitting on his van step to give Pearl a treat and talk with me. I like to imagine God would do this very same thing, even on the busiest of days.
April 8, 2023: I am grateful for friends who encouraged me to keep going when I felt positive I could not.
April 10, 2023: I am grateful to have reached a point in my life at which I’m learning to leave cut flowers in the vase a little longer. . . even as the petals begin to collect on the table and dry. I’m finally learning there is beauty in aging and a certain grace in death.
April 13, 2023: I am grateful that I am getting better at recognizing grief when I see it, instead of mistaking it for anger or sadness. This does not remedy those feelings but helps me make sense of my internal landscape.
April 16, 2023: I am grateful for mornings because they bring me a chance to start over. . . to start again.
April 21, 2023: I am grateful for Nathaniel because he is a delightful little human and he can really make me laugh. He also gives lovely hugs.
April 23, 2023: I am grateful for Pearl. Almost every day she challenges me and keeps me on my toes.
April 25, 2023: I am grateful for this sweet clay whistle in the shape of a whale and which fits so perfectly in my palm. I love that I found it a second-hand shop near me and I love both of her flippers–the one that remains whole and the one that has broken off.
April 27, 2023: I am grateful that I can step out of my apartment and find more friends than threats on any given day.
April 28, 2023: I am grateful that I have no idea what surprise or delight is just around the corner. . . like this tiny, hand-knit frog in his sweater and holding a tiny Pearl-like dog.
April 29, 2023: I am grateful for the unusual set of stairs that lead up to my apartment. My friend recently told me that they may help me live longer. So far Pearl has been able to manage them also.
March 5, 2023: I am grateful for a team of friends who are so willing to help me look for lost treasure, and those who grieved my loss with me. Even in mud and hail my search team persisted even when I had given up the search. Tonight I give thanks for those friends who will celebrate with me, for finding lost treasure. I am grateful for friends walking this muddy trail of life with me.
March 7, 2023: Tonight I have new gratitude for everything in my home that holds something. Pots that contain my plants especially. I feel new appreciation for these vessels now that two are broken and I’ve had to re-pot some ferns. Keep on growing little ferns. I hope you like your new home.
March 10, 2023: I feel infinite gratitude for friends who celebrate; those who are willing to dream of an accordion on the moon, among other whimsical ideas. Keep on dreaming.
March 11, 2023: Tonight I am grateful for friends to share ice cream with. I am also grateful for vegan ice cream. And of course I’m ever thankful for chocolate.
March 15, 2023: I feel grateful for this–even though I am feeling anxious today, mostly it is good because there are so many great things happening and so many fascinating things I want to try.
March 18, 2023: I am filled with gratitude that I keep company with toddlers and other young people because they pay attention to what matters–potential energy, gravity, mud puddles and ducks. They are awe-filled without having to describe why of how.
March 19, 2023: I’m gratefully realizing all things I’m still not good at, like communication at times, because these things give me something to work on again tomorrow.
March 25, 2023: I am grateful for birthdays and chocolate cake, made at home with half the sugar and three times the amount of cocoa. I am also grateful for sisters and cousins who were also born in the spring time. I am grateful for daffodils.
March 29, 2023: I remain eternally grateful for spring sunshine and daffodils. I’m so grateful for small white terriers named Pearl E.W. even after she rolls in stinky stuff at the park.
March 30, 2023: I am grateful for Vintage 1972 across the street–for neighbors who help move beautiful, rustic dressers up winding flights of stairs, and who turn out to be friends of Pearl too, offering her sweet scratches just where she loves them.
March 31, 2023: I am grateful that I don’t have to do this alone–life. There are friends who are ready to help. . . take care of Pearl, set up long-awaited art displays, say prayers, light candles, send texts, listen, share wisdom. Thank you friends.
In early February of 2023 I launched my first successful gratitude practice. Finally. In the past, my practice ended almost as soon as it began. I would think quietly to myself after a couple of days, ‘gratitude shmatitude’ and gave up because I couldn’t honestly find much to be truly grateful for.
Then I found a vintage typewriter at a local charity shop, along with a roll of adding machine tape and it struck me that I could keep track of my honest gratitudes each day and watch them literally ‘add up’ throughout the year. Some days I still had trouble seeing any joy. Sometimes the search for what I could be grateful for ended up making me laugh.
Here I document my year of typewritten gratitudes, one month at a time.
February 10, 2023: Brenda and Laurel visited. We walked in the sunshine at Crystal Lake Park with Pearl. I am especially grateful for friends from long ago.
February 11, 2023: Dad and Jann visited church and met the people I work with and the beloved community surrounding me. Today I am grateful for the people and the work of First Congregational Church in Corvallis.
February 12, 2023: I am also grateful for the sweet babies in my life. Not to mention their amazing parents.
February 13, 2023: I am grateful for my sweet dog Pearl who shows unconditional love to her people, and also for my good-hearted friend Wolfgang.
February 14, 2023: I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my friend Kathy who prepared my taxes for me as a gift.
February 15, 2023: I am grateful for music by Typhoon and the opportunity to paint a dog portrait (I donated a gift certificate to the Smith Fine Arts fundraising auction).
February 16, 2023: I am especially grateful for canoes and all that they can carry--lost dogs, young girls who love their fathers, dogs and lost souls.
February 17, 2023: I remain grateful, as always, for second hand stores which hold treasures galore, and which allow me the great pleasure of reclaiming and re-purposing art and textiles. Bless the volunteers who work there.
February 18, 2023: I am grateful for sleep; naps in particular.
February 19, 2023: My gratefulness abounds for connections between people, and for blue heelers who enjoying my greeting as they walk past me.
February 20, 2023: Pearl buttons leave me feeling so grateful today. Each time I button up my blue jacket I think of how beautiful they are and how lucky I am to live with them.
February 21, 2023: I am so grateful for the little ones in my life. Those little friends who feel so free to join me in wonder and awe. Also in laughter.
February 22, 2023: I am so grateful for my job that encourages me to show love to others, which is all I really ever wanted.
February 23, 2023: I am grateful for language, all of the intricacies that allow me to attempt an understanding of what is happening inside the heart of another fellow traveller.
February 28, 2023: I am grateful for music, particularly music played upon a second hand RCA Victor record player from 1960. Like a do-it-yourself radio station, it can play anything for hours without advertisements. Packed into the listening experience are thousands of memories-- the sound system underneath the grand piano, the juke box that played my favorite 45s and the hours of my childhood spent poring over record covers as I immersed myself in a musical world.
Jaqui Eicher 