Yellow

 September 3, 2020

My nightly musings began in 2013 when I decided to focus on gratitude instead of politics. It took a year of deliberately doing so, but the following February, I woke up one morning to discover the cloud of melancholy that had dogged me for so much of my life was gone. Cloudy days still come, but usually because I have momentarily lost that focus. 

Tonight I want to revisit my gratitude journal. The listing for today is: “three things yellow.”

1.  Sunflowers. Our granddaughter came to visit today, and showed us photos of her in a field of sunflowers. She picked some for a bouquet, but with her smile and personality, she is the centerpiece of the centerpiece. 

2. Yellow pads. The newer generation is almost entirely digital. When I meet with the other pastors to outline sermons, they are pecking away at their laptops, able to instantly share with each other the edits they have made. I come with a pencil and a yellow pad. Pencil because I am constantly erasing things and re-writing. A legal size yellow pad gives me plenty of room to write, often at crazy angles, with circles and arrows that help me put my various ideas into a logical sequence. I can’t do that with a computer. I like yellow pads!

3. For dinner this evening, Linda prepared for us one of her favorite dishes: yellow summer squash, sliced, dipped in flour and fried in a pan. It is an incredible delight! 

None of these are life-changing or momentous in the grand scale of things. But most of life is made up of such small matters. People who were once close drift apart over the years when one moves and they are no longer able to share the day-to-day small incidents that pepper our lives from daily. Like grains of sand, they are tiny, but enough of them together make a beach upon which the waves break, and people find refuge from the rigors of life.