Front Porch: Quietly giving thanks for all the good in life

My husband’s birthday comes late in November, so every year it arrives near or actually on Thanksgiving itself.

One year when it was on Thanksgiving I got him an ice cream cake with a turkey on it and an inscription: Happy Birthday, Turkey. Fortunately, Bruce has a good sense of humor.

This year it came before Turkey Day, so we have already celebrated and will spend today quietly at home, watching movies and probably having popcorn for dinner. Sometimes we go out or join friends or family for this day of giving thanks. But this has been quite a year, and, frankly, we’re a bit worn out.

Still, we’re thankful.

Bruce is in his 80s and still working. He loves it and is putting off retirement as long as he can. He operates a small business, and I mean really small. It’s just him, as he never wanted to manage people, just do the work. That has limited the size of the workload, which is pretty physical, but he’s made it happen, and made a decent living.

As an analog man living in a digital world, he also does the daily invoicing and enters everything in the pen-and-paper ledger and makes out the bank deposits – all by hand. I do the banking and bill paying, including taxes.

He couldn’t be happier. He doesn’t advertise any more. All his work is from repeat customers and sometimes their neighbors. When some of his long-time customers ask if they can refer friends or family to him, he asks them to please not do so, as he’s begun a slow-rolling retirement.

It’s a very nice position to be in. And, yes, I’m bragging on him.

But time does take a toll, which he recognizes. He’s got a bad back and isn’t as strong as he was in his 70s. He’s had to turn certain jobs away and no longer does some of the more physical ones. I have laid down the law and insisted that there be no more three-story ladder work and threatened him – “if you die out there on a ladder, when you get home, I am positively going to kill you.”

His Washington State Department of Agriculture license expires at the end of 2025, and he’s decided not to renew. He will officially retire in just over a year. So we’re about to enter a countdown year in which it will be the last spring he gets his trucks ready for the season, the last time he interacts with suppliers he worked with for decades, the last time he sees his customers – the last of everything involving his lifetime of work.

It’s a bittersweet thing to wind down a career that has brought him such contentment, and he’s going to struggle with how to fill his time, since he’s not a hobby guy – a bridge we’re considering now how to cross successfully a year from now.

Still, so much to be thankful for.

As mentioned, this has been an odd year. The politics, no matter where you stand, have drained just about everyone I know. Also, Bruce and I have navigated some health and medical issues that had the potential for not turning out well, but – thankfully, once again – we came out the other end of the events in pretty decent shape, considering.

And we lost our nephew recently, but there is gratitude involved there as well. Shawn was a strapping 6-foot -4 railroad engineer living in Wenatchee. He was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, and it wasn’t long before he was in hospice care – at the home of his mother (Bruce’s sister) and where our niece (Shawn’s sister) took compassion leave from her job in health care to tend to him, along with their mother.

We went to visit a few times and usually had good conversations with him, did some reminiscing and actually managed to have some laughs. Bruce and I were both surprised at how serene he was about his coming death, mostly because serene was not a word usually associated with Shawn. His mother and sister are women of great faith, and, unbeknown to us, his faith was quiet but present, too. That helped them all.

All the while I prayed that he not die on his mother’s birthday, which would come toward the end of what had been his estimated maximum time of survival, and that when the time did come, death would arrive gently.

He lived a few weeks past his mother’s birthday and when he passed, it was peaceful. Prayers answered. And we are thankful. We will be attending his memorial service next week.

On this Thanksgiving, we hope all of you are surrounded by love, along with all that good food, and that you have much to be thankful for as well.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at [email protected].