I Am Grateful for What I Had

I am all sorts of grateful for what I have.  I have a lot of new things in my life...things I wanted and ended up getting, things I am currently enjoying.  A new house, a new baby, a new town.

Getting into this house, in this town, was a long and bumpy ride down a long and bumpy road.  But no matter how bad I wanted OUT of the old place (and, um, it was pretty bad), I am still grateful that we lived there.

Our home in the country was just what we thought we wanted when we first moved to Texas.  In many ways,  it was exactly what we wanted.

But it was also more than we bargained for (and this didn't become apparent until we had Jack, and all of a sudden driving an hour to the pediatrician or forking out another $200 to mow the front pasture started to get...old).  We thought that raising our kid in the country was just what we wanted...until we tried to actually raise our kid in the country.  That fifteen acres of land and the pond in the backyard?  All of a sudden, I realized that it was less "free-range children playing in the forest and fishing in the pond" and more "snakes in the trees, scorpions in the bushes, and a giant drowning hazard surrounded by mosquitoes and more snakes in the backyard."

The time we once happily and easily invested in cleaning stalls and driving to the feed store with the best deal on grain suddenly became precious.  Who had time to clean stalls when the baby needed to eat (again)?  Who cared if we were saving $1/bag of alfalfa pellets when the baby was fussy (again)?  Literally overnight, the things we had enjoyed took second fiddle to the new little person in our lives.  Even feeding the horses was a chore, and I had always cherished those moments in the barn with my grateful herd.

Once we decided to sell the place and move, we didn't look back.  Some would even think that by the time we had packed our last bag, I hated it out there.

But that would not be the case.

I am grateful for our time in the country.  I am grateful for the balmy July night I went out back and jumped on my horse, bareback, and cruised around the pasture under a full moon.  I am grateful that my beloved Mo, a horse I bought not once, but twice, was able to live out his days in a pasture with his horsie pals rather than isolated and in a small corral back in California.  I am grateful for the donkeys, who I never expected to own (and who I never truly did own...I would say they owned US).  I am grateful for the sound of the cicadas (not the actual cicadas, those things are NASTY) and the leisurely strolls I took down our country road.

It was a chapter in my life that I will someday look back on fondly (once we finish paying off the foundation repairs on that house, most likely).

I am grateful for where we're at and for what we have, but I am also grateful that I used to have this:

I think Seamus pretty much sums it up here: