This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is a Thanksgiving freebie, so I’m going to share ten of the things I’m most grateful for this year:

1. Shelter and food: I know it sounds trite, but I pass by people living rough all the time, literally with their coats thrown over themselves, sleeping on the sidewalk. And I was up at a soup kitchen on Friday night, and we served people for hours, including a family whose child was celebrating a birthday. It’s just not possible to take a roof and meals for granted.
2. Rudi and my family: Rudi and I have been together now for 30 years. If our relationship were a person, it could run for Senate. (It would do a better job than some actual people currently serving in that role.) I love him more every day, and I’m so lucky that he loves me back. Add to that that I am still lucky enough to have both my parents and my brother. You don’t get to be my age without understanding that’s not a given.
3. My friends: How are there people who I met 35 years ago, who know me inside and out, and still want to hang out with me? Who call, and have lunch, and walk me home even though I tell them they don’t have to, and text, and find me coaching jobs, and answer my insecurities with kindness over and over and over again? And how are there people I’ve known for only a few years who want to continue getting to know me? Some people don’t have a single friend and I have more than I can count on my hands.
4. Coal and Ember: Our cats have lived with us just over a year now, and I cannot think of how we existed without the color and love they add to our lives. I walk into the bathroom, and Coal is asleep on the bathmat on his back, lying like a drifting otter and hoping for a belly rub. Ember naps on the router, running the internet, or curls up tight against me in bed after Rudi has given her breakfast. They chase bubbles and lasers and balls and fruit flies and steal my hair ties because Ember figured out that rubber bands make a satisfying twanging sound/vibration. And they are so happy to have found us, and we them.
5. Volleyball: Honestly, who would have thought a sport could bring someone so much joy — and particularly so many decades after I first started playing it? I love playing it, I love coaching it, I love watching it. It has brought me a team I hold dear and a group of friends who love me off the court and forgive my missteps on it. It gave me a work-study job that led to a real job. It provides me with structure when few other things do. If someone said you’d have to take up jogging in order to keep playing volleyball, I’d seriously consider it.
6. Libraries: There is no way I could afford to buy all the books I want to read. But libraries do that and then let me borrow them, sometimes for months at a time, for free. They let me print things and answer questions and download music and stream movies and tv shows and have free restrooms and meeting rooms and just come in from the elements space. And because the libraries around me are cool, I have access to all of that from three separate systems, and could utilize others.
7. Writing: I know I don’t write as much as I mean to. But when I craft something I’m proud of (to be fair, these days it’s usually a particularly nice email to the volleyball team), man, does it feel good! I hope to be more disciplined moving forward.
8. Books: I’m on my way to reading 60 books this year, and while I haven’t grooved with all of them, I have enjoyed the vast majority and loved a solid handful or so.
9. Knitting: I knit way less than I used to, but I have lots of yarn, so I expect to cycle back to it, hopefully this winter. (Maybe the sweater I’d planned to make when I sprained my wrist over the summer will finally become reality.) In the meantime, there is a pair of socks that needs maybe only 100 more stitches I hope to finish this week so I can wear them on Thanksgiving.
10. Gardening: There is something really satisfying about eating food you’ve grown, be it a pod of peas or a squash or basil or purple potatoes. Or seeing the pop of color of flowers that have finally bloomed. Without my community garden plot, I would not be able to grow much of anything.

How about you? What are you grateful for this year?