Thankful Thursday

By Belinda

With apologies to Ann Voskamp at Holy Experience for not posting from my gratitude journal on Multitude Mondays with the rest of the gratitude community. I am instituting Thankful Thursday for Multitude Monday, at Whatever He Says. Since Mondays is when I share my memoir posts I am hoping that the main thing is to be thankful; in all things and always!

So far my formal list is not very long. Okay, it has only one entry. But I have made a start! Here goes:

1) I am grateful for central heating. I remember how it was back in England, before central heating became more common in houses there relatively recently. The bitter cold of winter chilled houses and gnawed at our bones. Our shoulders would be tight with the effort of withstanding the shivers. When it got very cold in Mum and Dad's house (they took longer to arrive at that opinion than the rest of us) they would confer about whether or not to put on two, or three, bars on the gas fire. If it was three; oh joy; then our legs would scorch and roast, but our backs and shoulders would still be tense with cold. The temperature in their house was not helped by the fact that Sam the cat, ruled the roost. There was no cat flap but he would pop in and out through the pantry window in the kitchen. If he was out, the window was open several inches, even at -3 degrees outside. At night in the bedrooms it felt like you were camping out on a hillside. Brrrr.

Here and now, our whole house is blessedly warm and snug against the cold outside. And, although during the night, the thermostat is programmed to a much lower temperature, when we get up in the morning, the furnace is already pumping warmth into the night-cool rooms. When I step from the shower, I wrap myself in a fluffy towel, warmed by the air blowing up from the heat register--no shivering goosebumps as I dress for the day.

I realize though, that the degree to which I appreciate the blessing of a warm house, is directly related to having experienced a cold one. I doubt that our grandchildren give a thought to the miracle of a house that is warm in every nook and cranny. Perhaps the number one entry in my gratitude journal should be that I have experienced the ghastly, damp, draughty, cold of an English house in winter!

Of course, I am thankful for Christmas--the real message of Christmas. My blog friend Deidra posted this on her blog Jumping Tandem