Thanksgiving

I am thankful that it's finally snowing in Tisovec.

I am thankful for my health and safety.

I am thankful for my students (like my beloved third years), who are funny and smart and kind and frustrating and always surprising.

I am thankful for Hobbits—the kind you eat, not the kind you walk into Mordor with.

I am thankful for the Middle Ages.

I am thankful that we just celebrated 21 years of the fall of Communism in the former Czechoslovakia.

I am thankful for Johann Sebastian Bach.

I am thankful that I have eaten halušky at 10:30 PM and kapustnica at midnight.

I am thankful to be teaching history again, and I am thankful for my old Barron’s AP European History study guide.

I am thankful for bryndza cakes, and those little meringues with the chocolate cream.

I am thankful that I don’t have to use the ř.

I am thankful for my past and present friends/colleagues/traveling companions/co-conspirators.

I am thankful for my family. I am really very spoiled by them.

And I am super duper thankful for the lovely, effective new dryer in the basement.


One day my life may actually get hard, but it hasn’t yet, and I’m thankful for that.


i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
--e.e. cummings