This is a periodic blog feature I call “grace notes.” It occasionally captures my jottings of incidental gratitude. My hope is that this practice will make me and you more aware of the constant flow of amazing good we are perpetually steeped in, which we are surrounded by all the time. It is here only asking to be noticed and amplified.

So now I am furthering my ongoing goal of appreciating such a continuous, overflowing abundance of random good. I’ve taken photographs of some of them with my iPhone, which you can see in this post.

It’s been a while! Let’s start this gratitude list with:

• I’m grateful for the opportunity to have my current one woman show, and grateful to my husband for all the work he did to make it possible. I’m grateful for everyone who has attended– and will attend!– and for those that bought–or will buy!– paintings.  I’m grateful for a job that makes painting avidly around the edges of my life possible. I’m grateful for all the inspiration I have to paint, all the beautiful locales I have to paint in, and all the top-notch materials I get to paint with.
• I’m grateful to have had four incredible International trips in the past year, which was totally a rare and precious privilege. The one recently to Turkey, Greece, and Sardinia was particularly a remarkable gift. I’m grateful for so much quality time there with my husband’s family in beautiful and interesting places.
• I’m grateful to have had a painting in the University of Connecticut Museum recently, as well as one juried into the IAPS international pastel show, the National Renaissance in Pastel show, as well as in Lyme Art Association, and the invitational show at New Pond Farm.
• I’m grateful for our local church and the dedicated band people there that feel like family. I’m grateful for the logic, truth, and efficacy of Christian Science, and that my prayers help other people too, not only myself.
• I’m grateful we got to go to Annual Meeting, and that I got to go plein air painting twice with friends in Maine. I’m also grateful to have gotten to visit our daughter in Sacramento and to have met her boyfriend’s dad and uncle there.
• I’m grateful for our amazing garden produce, particularly some abundantly vigorous tomatoes. I’m also grateful for farmer’s markets everywhere.
• I’m grateful to be a reader and to regularly experience the blessing of reading good books. I’m grateful for all good book recommendations, for all the thought and work authors put into writing excellence, for publishers, bookstores, audio books on libro.fm, and for book groups. I’m grateful we don’t have a TV in the house, as it promotes more reading.
• I’m grateful for my travel sketchbooks that I kept this year, and for my artist journals that I’m looking forward to getting back into this winter. They are a wonderful way to preserve memories and ideas, and is also pure fun, just for me.
• I’m grateful for great hiking I got to do in both Sardinia and Lake Tahoe; it felt great to be vigorously out in nature.
• I’m grateful we got our picnic table refinished, reclaimed after 30 years of hard use, and a spring of abuse by our resident robins above in the umbrella (as fun as it was to have them, we will discourage them from nesting there in the future!). It feels great to have saved our dear table for the next 30 years. I’m grateful for all the amazing meals and times we’ve had around it.
• I’m grateful for my new podcast (see here) already having over 40 episodes. I’m grateful my husband’s podcast continues to do very well, is so appreciated by others and gives him so much satisfaction, as well as great interaction with his listeners.
• I’m grateful my is sister going through my parents photos, organizing them, and finding shots like the one of me at three, above. She’s scanning them in and making a photo book of family history. It is a lot of work and I’m grateful she’s focusing on it so assiduously. I’m also grateful my other sister put money down on her next (downsized) home. I’m grateful my family all got together (we missed it since we were in Sardinia) for a Castorama this year (photos of them in purple shirts below).
• I’m grateful a blog reader sent me that boiled wool purse she thought I’d like and look how it goes with the scarf I bought myself in Turkey. Bought completely separately, without knowing of the other, this reads to me of one Mind, and you can’t make this stuff up. See that coincidence (?!) in the first photo below.
• I’m grateful for new cookbooks from the library, for fountain pens, converters, and ink, for handmade table runners given as thank you gifts, for our daughter jam session group, for our bathroom light getting fixed, for our new Turkish rugs, for friends visiting, for Facetime keeping us connected with our daughters, for new oil paint in stick form, for our sweet small town, for sunsets out my office window, for pumpkins with good stems, for chestnuts fallen underfoot, for homemade jam, for painting outside in my makeshift setup in the driveway, for cool cars and cool vanity plates, for our younger daughter’s new dulcimer, for the fact that my husband and I play cribbage most nights after dinner, for my nephew’s wife taking a glamour shot of herself on her recent birthday, for friends at No Kings rallies, for a new journal, for sculpture gardens, for gelli plates, for our Savory Tuna Burgers, for my office/studio space, for water reflections, for flowers, for my new metal box for my Conte crayons, for joyously anticipating a winter going nowhere, and for work I love.
• I’m grateful for spiritual qualities we all share and have access to, like kindness, wisdom, prudence, satisfaction, perceptivity, flexibility, generosity, mercifulness, decency, unselfishness, activity, functionality, and worthiness.
• I’m grateful to you blog readers who have made this daily project of mine for the last 17 years possible. Thank you for reading, subscribing, sharing, and financially supporting this positive little corner of the internet. Thank you for joining me in amplifying good in this needy world.

Put you own grace notes in the comments!