I love Thanksgiving. I love the day–the cooking and house filling with fragrance, the resulting tofu turkey and stuffing and all the great sides, the friends and down time. And I love the day before Thanksgiving. It’s a kind of gearing-down day, shifting into a slower mode, dwelling a bit more on … stuff.

On my walk this morning, as I listened to Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe, I began to think about gratefulness, and how it’s so easy to get caught up in kvetching, or all the controversial things there are to rage about. It’s good to focus on what’s good, what you’re grateful for. As a writer, there are a bunch of down sides. But there are a bunch of up sides, too. Here’s my top ten list of writerly things I’m grateful for:

1. No nylons. I can’t remember the last time I stepped into a pair of pantyhose. Maybe it was for a funeral or something. I wore fishnets on Halloween, but that’s different.

2. Wearing jammies or whatever to write. Right now I’m cooling down for a walk and have on tennis shoes and workout clothes as I sit at my computer.

3. Working at my dining room table, or wherever I like, and not be forced to sit at a desk. I like desks and sometimes I use mine, but mostly I sit at the dining room table with my laptop. Right now my son is on the sofa, in his jammies, watching Wacko’s Wish on the tube. Which brings me to another thing …

4. … Learning to focus amidst distraction. I used to need a room of my own, and I had one for a time. I worked in the studio behind the house and it was quiet back there, but it became too quiet and I returned to the house.

5. And which brings me to another thing–being able to watch my son grow up. I may be the most grateful for this–being able to do work that has allowed me to be here.

6.