We’ve been trapped inside, the snow drifts from my husband’s leaf blower billowing higher and higher against the glass window pane, never insulated enough despite what we stuff the cracks with or what we tape over it. The three days without turning on my car or putting on real pants started off as fun, a luxurious hibernation in which we’d play endless games of Uno by the fire, pausing only to knead the bread dough and check the roast, the hustle of regular life dulled by the steady fall of fat, wet snowflakes. This glee quickly deteriorated into an itchy skin feeling, for all of us, including the dog, as we grew a bit more snappish, a bit standoffish, spending more and more time anxiously pacing around the house touching various surfaces while gazing out the window and cursing all the whiteness. On the third day, I do my makeup in the bathroom mirror, not because I am going anywhere but because I’m sick of seeing the same tired face in the reflection. As we do not have full length mirrors, I keep the sweats and stained tee shirt on for reasons I tell myself are based on practicality, less laundry to fold, less wear and tear on the good pieces.

These lulls in energy and enthusiasm are harmless, they are human, and I accept them as such. I have developed a toolset to combat days like these. As anxious boredom sets in, I find the book that makes me feel good to read and knock on my teenage daughter’s bedroom door, negotiating quality time with a strong dose of humility and a few very minor ultimatums. Before settling down to begin, I remember the robe my mother-in-law recently purchased for me, the black velvety heap I tell my young son wearing “feels like a hug.” As I start reading from the text, I mentally remind myself to slow down, to read the pages like a play, coursing the intensity into some lines and pulling back at the others. In this way, I can become part of the story, and my similarly restless daughter stills, puts down her phone, folds her hands on her chest, listening quietly. After a few chapters, a half hour, I place the book down on the dresser with more gentleness, a solid layer of easiness having found me. The reading has emptied the air of its frenetic buzz, and while I don’t have bread dough rising in the kitchen, I go make a cup of tea and cut up an apple for the kids. It is in this way we get through the day, and it is in these moments that I truly feel thankful.

These three days stuck in the snow seem to drag by, but in early 2020, three months into the COVID lockdown, every day was an eternity. The initial burst of energy, of victory gardens and online yoga classes, virtual book clubs and exotic pen pals soon resulted in a tepid pool of discontent. The downy baby chicks we’d purchased during that first week of quarantine grew large and awkward, squawking raucously in our half bathroom, flapping their wings and defecating on the tile. My every paycheck was uncertain and my husband’s management job at an independent grocery store was suddenly held as essential, a frontline position wrestling with the moral dilemmas of selling every last box of toilet paper to one man with greed in his eyes and a Platinum Amex. Gradually, we’d taken to singing Happy Birthday to the kids on a Zoom screen and we began considering the effects this isolation will undoubtedly have on their developing brains. Gradually, we’d forgotten about our seed starters, our book club assignments, and our sourdough sat untended and abandoned. Gradually, we were faced with the limits of our interior walls and the image in the reflection of our phone screens.

It was at this point of acknowledging our limits that my mother and I made a pact to encourage a positive outlook by composing a list of five focuses of gratitude, once a day. We vowed to hold each other accountable with a morning text. It took time to ingratiate. My phone screen lit up at five each morning like clockwork with my mother’s diligent entries, but I slipped and forgot, only remembering the task hours into the evening and making the cutoff of that day’s submission just in time. My entries at first were unoriginal, the kind of gratitude we give around the Thanksgiving table, hands folded for grace. We are healthy, we have a comfortable home, we have enough. It took half a week to exhaust my acknowledgement of things I felt privileged to hold as standard, to look deeper within and begin to develop an awareness throughout my day of items that could be added to the following morning’s list. I really, really enjoyed listening to my new audiobook when I took the dog for a walk today. The new spray I used to clean the kitchen smells refreshing, even hours later. It was so nice to sit on the patio with my son this morning and talk for a bit before I opened my computer. I started adding these observations to my daily text, and with each passing day I began to feel a greater bounty of options, a wider armful of joy to carry from one day to the next. By pinpointing these fleeting moments of gratitude, I could more fluidly incorporate them into my days, I could fill in the spaces of idle frustration.

Bolstered by our improved moods and satisfaction with the exercise, we added in a sixth line, dedicated to our spouses and something we valued in them. Some days, this was an easy thing to add, others felt harder. My mother, apparently nearing her limits with my father, resorted to texting “All I can say today, is I’m thankful your dad is not, nor has ever been, a circus acrobat.” Some days the entries were purely transactional. “C brought my car in for an oil change” or “C helped me by picking up Lena because I was running late with work.” More often than not, they were telling of the character traits which made our husbands beautiful humans, reminding us of why we chose them. “I know that C values family time, he makes it a priority” and “C mowed our elderly neighbor’s lawn without being asked to.” I felt an attentive shift to the things I loved about my husband every day, even if they weren’t always dramatic proclamations of love or glamorous exhibits of exceptionalism. They kept me seeing the father, the neighbor, the friend, the man I fell in love with, calling my neurodivergent sister every week to talk about bowling and our pet cats, shooting basketball hoops in the driveway with our son, noticing again the strength of his arms, his chest, the way his eyes break, light shining through when he laughs authentically.

Finally, we once again pushed our threshold for gratitude and took on a seventh line, this time turning the focus of our gratitude onto ourselves.  This felt the hardest for me at the onset, after I’d exhausted the obvious lines of “I’m a really fastidious worker” and “I am disciplined with exercising every day.” Getting creative, looking deeper, I started recognizing pieces of me that I admired that had previously been overlooked. “I was patient when my son was up most of the night last night, I was able to be comforting despite my exhaustion” or “I’m a mindful shopper and make efforts to support small businesses over corporations or Amazon” and “I sent an encouraging text to a struggling friend, and offered solid advice and time to listen when she needed it.” Recognizing these moments throughout the day in which I portrayed an upstanding human made me in turn feel worthy, made me want to do more, be more. I was able to identify what made me feel full, and I was able to emulate it more easily.

During this search for moments in which to give thanks, regular life started to creep its way back into reality. It became time to dig out my neat blazers and low-heeled boots, office attire from a life before social distancing and the need for an N95 face mask to pump gas. I could feel the familiar push of schedules to keep and agreements to be reached across physical tables, and I could hear their emergence, a keening pitch growing nearer as my pulse began to quicken. I watched as the soft spots of slow isolation retreated, and it felt like something I thought I wanted very much but was suddenly ill-prepared to receive.

It was a decision made to maintain gratitude, to retain some of its tiny bounties, that drove me to the station a full forty minutes before my train was set to arrive that first morning back to work, the world seeming to stretch out in front of me vast and unfamiliar. I set out for a solitary bench along the Hudson River, glancing over my shoulder, still conscious to leave a six-foot orbit of space between myself and passersby. I sat, and I looked out at the water. The sun hit the brackish surface in a way that warmed my face against the dawn’s cool edges, and while I’d been unsure of how to begin, I realized it was in front of me.

A barge made miniscule progress on its course paralleling the west bank, and I watched as little ripples of its wake brushed the rocks near my shoes. Each wave offered up bits of glossy gelatinous weeds and water caltrops, the same ones we’d refer to as “devil heads” when we’d play farther north along the river’s wooded edges. I was making time to be here, I was offering it to something bigger, bigger than the emails I could have been reading or the texts I could have been answering, the videos on my Instagram feed made to summon a feeling inorganically. I was honoring bits of time and action that brought me gratitude. I was making it a priority, and that, to me, was a form of worship.

Maybe I wasn’t doing this “right.” My thoughts slipped and wandered, feeling nervous about the time well before it became warranted. Despite it, I remained conscious of my place in this specific fragment of time, placing purpose on the bench. I focused on acknowledging the estuary stretched before me, its oily surface pungent in familiarity, nostalgic tides pushing and pulling memory. The tang of dead fish and industrial discharge was, to my native senses, sweet. A single gull picked through the wet rocks nearby, stopping its pursuit to regard me with a quizzical tilt of head before returning its focus to the treasure in the muck.

The coffee in my travel mug was by this time lukewarm, but I could still detect the amber trim of the vanilla extract I recently took to adding as a small nod to simple pleasure. I sipped and made plans with the day, agreeing that within the hours allotted, between the collision of new and old, I’d attend to the opportunities to feel grateful. I finally allowed my hand to reach for my phone, and after glancing at the morning rush of notifications I’d missed, I opened a new text to my mother, and began my list.