Thank you.

There are too many people to thank specifically, but there are an equal number of things to be thankful for.  Here are a few:  I am thankful for simply being alive at this moment and healthy.  I am thankful for the health of those I love (and even those I like) and for all the love that comes my way.  For being able to sit in a warm house with gingerbread muffins cooling on the table, for having enough money to live comfortably for this moment. For living in a beautiful area, in a lovely little cottage on an amazing property.  

My children, Jenn and Gabe, and their mates Dar and Annie, my world would not be half as good without them buzzing around my life. I am grateful for their love, their help and their advice, their criticism and their praise, for the future they want for me and for themselves. And my additional daughter Stacey who is a shining star to me. 

My siblings, as much as they might make me crazy at times, they also are part of my life foundation and therefore important in that genetic shorthand sort of way that only siblings can understand. Friends: old ones like Flip, whom I have loved since I was 18 years old, and new ones like Cath and Dawn and all the ones in the middle, Tom, Kara, Pat, John and Diane, and so many more. People who will call me when they need me because they know I will do the same. People I love, pure and simple.

I am thankful for the past and the present and I hope to be thankful for the future, although that sometimes looks dicey. I am so grateful for all the traveling that came my way, all the countries and cities I have seen and hope to see again.  (Paris has been calling me recently, like a siren, urging me to walk its streets again soon. I need to answer that call.)

Bottom line, thank you to the universe for letting me have such an abundant amount of things to be thankful for.  (Bad grammar!) 

Be grateful, be kind, be happy.  

Smell this! What do you see?

We smell something and immediately our brain conjures up a memory, a picture from the past. How this happens isn't a mystery, at least from the scientific point of view. It all relates to the olfactory bulb which connects smells to the area of our brains that store memories.  (How our brains can even store a memory when memory is so mercurial is an amazing feat.)  So when we smell a certain scent, our brain wakes up the memory and we can see it as an immediate, almost tangible thing.

At this moment my house smells like Thanksgiving. There is bread rising so it's a bit yeasty but there are turkey legs in a pot being slowly turned into turkey broth that will end up being delicious gravy for Thanksgiving dinner. Sage, parsley, rosemary, garlic, onions, so many aromatics infuse my small cottage with the smell of so many past holidays. All I need to do now is bake a pumpkin pie and it would be perfect!  Cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cloves would round out the scent menu and my mouth would be watering all day long.

But think of all the things we smell that trigger great (or not-so-great) memories: the smell of freshly cut grass evokes long, hot summer days. Pipe smoke (very rare these days) reminds me of my Dad who occasionally smoked a pipe and mixed his own tobacco.  After-shave lotion reminds me of Macy's department store, walking past the aisle that sold men's personal care products. Incense brings back memories of the late 1960's, sitting cross-legged on someone's bedroom floor, listening to Jefferson Airplane albums and drinking cheap wine.

But some smells go both ways: wood smoke always smelled like winter to me but now it also has the frightening connection to wildfires. Both of those memories are triggered at the same time.

Right now I am enjoying the smells of the holidays coming out of my kitchen. Turkey stock and baking bread definitely invoke the beginning of the holiday season and I am enjoying every memory the smells create. 

Bond. James Bond. Shaken. Not Stirred.

One of the first movies I saw independently, without parental oversight, was "Goldfinger."  In a theater, with my brothers and another boy. We were all probably 15 -16 except maybe Steve, who had to be old enough to drive.... so maybe 1965. Every detail of that movie (the ones I remember) are so clear and precise to me now, more than 55 years later.  (I am fainting as I see the number 55, all those years gone by.) Sean Connery was so young, thin, debonair, carefree. That the movie was just that, a movie, a fiction, nothing anchored in reality, didn't matter one tiny bit. 

The James Bond movies have always grabbed me, especially the early ones and now the last of the line. Daniel Craig isn't Sean Connery but it really doesn't matter.  James Bond is still James Bond. Even Pierce Brosnan was fine for a short while because it is all about the adventure, the incredible action sequences and the gadgets, the girls and the gritty escapes that make Bond Bond. (And the martinis.)

The new movie is good, packed with everything one wants in a Bond movie and more. The scenery is gorgeous, the explosions are huge, the sex is hot, the Aston Martin is so cool, the intrigue is confusing and the villains are what they should be: evil and cunning and death-defying. It's a movie to see on the big screen, but only if you like Bond movies. There's nothing about it that is redemptive or cozy and warm. But then, Bond movies were never about that. You like them or you don't.

I do.