It is early morning for a Sunday, perhaps 6 or 7, I dread looking at the clock. My one day to sleep in, and I can’t stop thinking. I leave the bed as weightlessly and quietly as I can. I step around the squeak-spot on the floor, turn and still end up with two wide-awake dogs — one twirling in circles, beside herself with glee that I am up already. I swoosh them out of the room so my husband can sleep.
Outside my office window, the snow, impossibly light, blows off the edge of the roof like a puff of magic from the tip of a magician’s wand. It is gone before I can finish looking.
I can’t stop thinking about prayer, about saying grace.
Maybe it is the ritual of Thanksgiving giving way into the December holidays. Perhaps it the proximity of Hanukkah to Christmas this year; images like Instamatic photos shuffle in my head. They are all pictures of how we settle into prayer.
Image one: My friend Charlotte’s mother from sometime in the early 1970s. She is at the table, which she almost never is, because instead she’d be in the kitchen hurrying the green beans that weren’t quite ready, getting another fork for Michael, her youngest, who dropped his, or retrieving a second gallon of milk. Tonight, it’s clear she’s not moving; she’s planted and calm.
She stands at one end of the table; her family of four children and her husband sit around her. She ignores Marlene, her teenager who, with her long sheets of swingy black hair, is head-tossing in “can we get on with this” frustration.
I sit with them. I have been included because I was in the backyard with Charlotte, playing tag around the above-ground pool, and it was dinnertime. This doesn’t seem odd. This family regularly tends me, as my family does Charlotte.
Mrs. Kresner’s quiet places “Shh”- like steam into the air. We bow our heads and she lights two candles, though she doesn’t look yet at the flames. She murmurs into spoken grace: “Barukh atah Adonai.” At their house, the sabbath has begun.
Image two: Across the same neighborhood, my family similarly gathered around a table. They raise their hands to their foreheads, their chests, left shoulders, right shoulders, and murmur into a different spoken grace: “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts. . . .” My mother glares quickly at my littlest brother as he rushes the words to get to the spaghetti first. He puts his butt back in his seat, his hands return to reverence. But, he quivers; he waits for “Amen” like a panther.
Image three: bits and fragments of many. A woman alone with a glass of wine, darkness spread outside her window, one moon. She tips her glass to the sky and says to herself, “Cheers.”
A family hiking with cranky kids and a too-fat Labrador huffing and puffing. No one remembers why this was a good idea until they come to clearing and see a red fox, as yet undisturbed and unaware, slip like a pulled thread through the reeds. The day implodes and all movement and noise ceases. They stare. The fox scents them, eyes wild, and is gone. The family hikes on, changed.
A father with his hand on the head of his sleeping son; he’s reading his notes to make sure he does the medicine right. He’s watching his son live and rubs the small boy’s head ceaselessly.
A woman sobbing and sobbing. Her body hurts from the effort. She snatches in a breath, but cries more. She begins to wonder how deep her pain goes, how much more she carries; she didn’t know she had such sadness. And then, the feeling begins to work in her. It is hard, but she lets it begin. She catches another breath and knows she’ll get up. She’s praying without ever saying a word.
Grace is different house to house, season to season, one time from another. Thankfulness can be gritty — and all that is left of a very bad day. Thankfulness can be full to popping with glee and bounty.
Pray what you have — it is always right. It is always accepted. It is always enough.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
