A few of the things I’m thankful for, every day: French roast coffee, the smell of pine woods on a late fall day, my father’s enormous laugh, the beautiful oak box-beam ceiling in my dining room, the way my dog tilts his head and looks at me inquiringly when I say his name softly, the Metropolitan State students whose lives and hard work humble me, the falling-apart quilt I made 20 years ago and pull over myself every night, the way my mother cries every time she hears “Teach Your Children,” the fact that I have spent my working life spinning stories out of thin air and turning them into things you can hold in your hands, my beloved best friend of 30+ years, the way this gorgeous land of ours rolls and swells and flattens and breathes beneath us like a great living being, my sisters and my brother and the friends whose hearts I carry within my heart, my one-room toy house on the slope in Vermont, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and the little machine that’s playing it right now, and, more than anything, always, the three almost-grown youthful companions who have brought me so much love and laughter and joy their whole lives long.