attitude of gratitude

Walter H. Williams, Butterflies (1973)

Yesterday I grabbed a post-it note and wrote, “I am american/but not the way you are American.” Then I stuck the note on my bulletin board and went back to writing The Return. I managed to get 2000 words down before turning in for the night, and all in all had a pretty wonderful Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving is in October and I’ve never really observed the holiday here in the US; I don’t have family in NYC, it’s too close to Christmas, I hate to shop, and spending the day with someone else’s family can be an agony. This year I picked up some traditional fare from a gourmet deli in Brooklyn Heights and planned to spend the day on the couch with my laptop. I went for a run in the morning, then heated up my feast and wrote about Nyla and Keem’s adventures in Senegal. I was tempted to start a new picture book inspired by the work of Walter H. Williams (1920-1998); I saw one of his paintings in DC and immediately a story began unfolding in my mind. Children appear to be picking cotton but beyond the dead tree, the cotton field transforms into a child’s paradise filled with butterflies and sunflowers. A little online research let me know that Williams was from Brooklyn and took art classes at the museum, but spent most of his life as an expat in Copenhagen. Orange is the color of my childhood and these paintings from the late 1960s really resonate with me. I’ve opened a new file but will try to get a few thousand words done on The Return before I switch gears.

This morning I received another terrible Canadian review, this time for The Phoenix on Barkley Street (the reviewer said the phoenix looked like “a buffoon”). I have many things to be grateful for, and the immigrant/expat in me will ever be thankful for the chance to trade my life in Canada for this american life. I’m lucky to have been born and educated in Canada, but I thank God my late father gave me a way out…

Walter H. Williams, “Roots, Southern Landscape”