These are the things for which I am grateful today.

I am grateful that I have a home and that I am warm.

I am grateful that I have Facebook friends who could laugh at me and cheer me on yesterday as I crawled home with an injured back.

I am grateful for a long suffering partner who brought me a cup of hot chocolate this afternoon.

I am separately grateful for the milk and for the chocolate.

I am grateful for my daughter who hung a Santa Rosa marathon medallion around my neck as I lay immobile on the floor.

I am grateful to have two pillows to tuck between my knees and one behind my head.

I am grateful to have windows that allow me to see the fog and the sunlight and tonight’s epic moon.

I am grateful to Kaiser Permanente for their excellent back care videos.

I am grateful to have hot water and to have a shower with walls so that I can stand and brace myself.

I am grateful to have high speed internet so that while I’ve lay prone, I’ve been able watch no small number of documentaries about the European theatre in World War II.

I am grateful to the persons who perhaps without any foresight of the future shot film and took pictures and wrote words so that three quarters of a century later we have evidence of all the things great and terrible that occurred.

I am grateful to have guidance for what may come.

I am grateful to the mathematicians of Bletchley Park who broke and broke again the Enigma code so that we could keep open the American maritime supply lines to Britain.

I’m grateful to Alan Turing for imagining the impossible.

I am grateful to the ruthless Germans who invaded my mother’s country.  If it were not for them, I would not be here today.

I am grateful to the ruthless Soviet troops who brought an end to the Third Reich and in the process chased my family all the way to the Elbe.  If it were not for them I would not be here today.

I am grateful to each and every one of the boys who fell from the sky on the dawn of June 6th, 1944 across the hedgerows of the Cotentin Penninsula.  If it were not for them, I would not be here today.

I am grateful for my thrown out back that gives me cause to be.  And the aching back that affords a moment to be grateful.