Quack if you're grateful

It happens probably every day. Usually a fleeting thought that I push away as it comes. I wonder for a moment if I ever will live in the tidy little cottage of my imagination. The one that sits on three acres, tucked off the beaten path, with lots of flowering trees and a picket fence and an enormous raised bed organic garden. The one that is always tidy. I push the thought away because that house is far. It's far from soccer and dance and the airport and Starbucks. And all my kids don't fit in that house.

So, it's pretty much a silly idea.

I live in suburbia. I can have an iced soy latte in exactly seven minutes after I decide I want it enough to go get it myself. Seventeen minutes if I dispatch a teenaged driver. More importantly, I can be sitting at the pedicatrician's office within ten minutes of discovering a child is sick. And I can be at the airport, kissing hello, within 20 minutes of the phone call from the runway telling me he's landed.

But I don't have flowering trees and a great big garden and quiet. I have neighbors. Lots of them. And not nearly enough nature outside my front door to suit me.

I live in suburbia. There are opportunities abounding for my children.

But I don't have wildlife.

Wait! What's this? "Come quick Mommy! The ducks are back. The ones that were here yesterday and the day before and the day before that! They're eating the bird seed!"

We live no where close to the water.

These ducks are a gift. We sit quietly and watch them. Until suddenly Sarah figures out how to say "Quack" and she talks to them. They don't leave. They talk back.

Oh my goodness, Mama Duck is coming to visit! Right up to me, tiptoeing through the tulips.

Well hello to you too, dear.

I think I might be Beatrix Potter.

Ducks, in my front yard. Fancy that.

I can almost see the picket fence.

We're catching up on a couple of weeks worth of notables in the gratitude journal:

~blooming tulips (Patrick saw them)

~blooming bluebells

~rose bushes and peonies promising May flowers

~sunflower seeds, morning glory seeds, sugar snap pea seeds, spring lettuce on the way

~Nicky reading to me as I knit

~Katie chattering to me as I knit

~homecomings

~holding my boy as tears gather and fall

~Patrick home for just a day to say goodbye to a coach and hold his family close

~watching him reach out and touch an unimaginable grief and help to heal a friend

~Mike home on Monday night. Good night.

~Beatrix and Sarah and hugs so powerful they're tackles

~boys who hit it off (at last) and the nature that united them

~sunshine on my face

~godmothers, godchildren and annual reunions in the mud and majesty

~six meals made on the weekend. now we don't have to be home until dinnertime.

~sweet friend who is tinkering around on my blog, sprinkling happy dust, while I'm off playing in the woods.

~a holy week ahead