Gratefully Thankful

ProfessorRoush is fully aware, and mildly abashed, that it has been quite some time since my last rose posting on this blog, but I promise that I'll get to one soon.  The next victim has, in fact, been chosen and is waiting in line.

Today, however, I awoke uncharacteristically grateful and I would be distinctly ungrateful if I ignored the feeling.  I'm not given to displays of random emotion, but I can't shunt aside the contented feeling warming me up on this cold Kansas morning.  I'm grateful for my life and my home and my love with Mrs. ProfessorRoush.  Grateful for my children, now almost grown and gone.  Grateful for the donkey's and the new barn cats and my garden. 


I'm grateful for the plants and life of the prairie.  I'm particularly grateful for the native blue sage that pops up randomly in my garden beds and provides a cooling reflection of the clear summer sky in the doldrums of August.  I'm grateful for the prairie grasses, and for the ample sunshine that makes it all possible.  I'm grateful for the mornings given to my life, fields dewy and golden with the rising furnace.

I'm extremely grateful for the Internet this morning, ready with all the information of the world at my touch-typing fingertips, including the origin of the word grateful.  ProfessorRoush's mind doesn't work in a straight line, often taking bends and u-turns through a maze of thought, and somewhere along this little piece of writing, I began wondering why we say that we are "full of grate."  There is no definition of "grate" in the English language (to sound harshly, to irritate, a frame of metal bars to hold wood) that seems pleasant.  Happily, a short search informed me that "grateful" derived from an obsolete meaning of grate as "pleasing", from the Latin grãtus as in gratitude, and that the first known use of "grateful" was in 1552.  It seems odd that "grateful" would have survived in the English language while "grate" no longer is defined as "pleasing."  It seems odd that I would even wonder about it.

But, strange as it is, I'm also grateful just to wonder about it.

Thankful Vistas

Looking through a group of photos that I've saved for the blog today, I found in reflecting on my garden year that I'm most grateful not for the closeups of my prized roses, but for the largest and smallest of those living things that exist in my garden.

Living, as I do, just outside the city limits of a major city in Kansas (if the phrases "major city" and "in Kansas" are not mutually exclusive), I occasionally am quite thankful that my garden, lacking large trees, still has vistas that are separate from the chaotic civilization that surrounds it.  For example, the view (above) from the western side of my garden past the formal rose bed on the left and the viburnum bed on the right, was particularly fetching this past October as the 'Tiger Eyes' Sumac began to add red to it's normal yellow palette, and the remaining fuchsia-pink 'Earth Song' kept merrily blooming on.  In a similar fashion, the overall view from another angle towards that same formal rose bed (below) includes my crude handmade gazebo and my vast southern horizon towards town, the city itself hidden from view except for the roofs of a few houses now visible on the horizon.

I'm thankful as well, for things that the smaller life of my garden teach me, learning industriousness from the examples of bees, and patience from the spiders who lie in wait inside some open blossoms.  Without the killing influence of insecticides in my garden, the faunal world inhabiting every plant expands till sometimes, I don't know if I'm bringing flowers or a menagerie in to Mrs. ProfessorRoush.  Unfortunately, she is not as open to the beauty of both as her gardening husband, and so, for my own safety, I must shake out the buds and wash off the leaves before depositing them in the house, destroying the homes of thousands of creatures to keep the peace in my own.