This morning, I am stirring my tea with a fork. All the spoons are in the dishwasher. Or in my teenage daughter’s room. My 5-year-old matter-of-factly using a fork to stir his hot cocoa earlier this week reminded me that A. We need more spoons and B. A fork does the job.

I ordered some spoons. They’ll get here eventually. In the meantime, I’ll stir my tea with a fork. By “tea” I mean two tablespoons of two different powdered chai tea mixes, and a dash of oatmilk.

In the absence of energy and a trickle of creative mojo, the making around here has been VERY slow, but I’ve been reading voraciously. The Chaplain has noticed. It struck me that when we met, I was in nursing school and had a 3 year old. For over a decade of our marriage I was gestating and caring for babies, and had zero brain cells to spare.

Now that the youngest is five, I finally have some bandwidth back and I’m reading a LOT. It feels good. And it gives me hope, because there were many times in the past number of years when I wondered if I would ever have the time and space in my life to read again. Over the course of the past few years, I’ve slowly ramped back up to my goal rate (it’s not a number, it’s a feeling).

Life now looks like tea, not enough spoons, and just the right number of books. I think that makes this post about gratitude.

Children spend a lot of time in school learning about these amazing people who gave their life to a cause that pushed the world forward in a big way. They spend their early years full of possibility and then enter adulthood and all its mundane insults. They encounter a thousand things that slow them down. They go from a filly galloping wildly across a grassy field to a dusty cart horse plodding down a loud and dirty street.

I recently read a something about how each of us are just a part of a generational movement forward. Each person is part of this greater movement. Of course, there are stars who shoot ahead of the rest of us, but most of us are somewhere on the other parts of the bell curve, moving forward in a way that sometimes feels like standing still or moving backward. But what is happening encompasses the whole of humankind and we are all part of it.

I find that encouraging. It’s Monday, again. My most energetic and outgoing child is off of school this week. The rest of the kids are going to expect to have school off, too, and I’ll have to negotiate every day to get anything done. That kid who is not in school is going to drive me totally batty this week. Then this weekend I’ll work the night shift and feel like crap for three days afterward.

Right now, though, I am sitting here with a good book and an empty mug with a fork in it, and life is good.

If you missed it, “What the fork?” is a reference from The Good Place, a show recommended to me by a friend I met through this blog (Thanks, J!) and my 13 year old daughter. It is the most extraordinary exploration of philosophy, ethics, and humor… and the tendency of humans to defy expectations.