My assignment for this month’s writing group meeting was to write a post about gratitude. It’s a topic I would usually find easy to address. I try to live as mindfully as I can, and that means being mindful of all that I have to be grateful for, and taking a frequent inventory of my overall incredible good fortune. This has been a hard week for gratitude, though, making me realize that I should have written this essay Before, instead of waiting until After. But since we always give ourselves the option to write about something other than the assigned, or rather, suggested, topic, here goes.

November 6, 2024

I knew what I’d done the second I closed the door behind me, but I tried twisting the knob, just to be sure. It didn’t budge.

It was 6:30 a.m. I was standing on the cold concrete doorstep in a long-sleeved t-shirt, pajama pants, and Crocs, and I was locked out of the house.

I had stepped outside to get the paper, and to take a photo of the sun rising, because, honestly, I was kind of surprised that it did, after the events of the day before. It would have seemed more fitting if the heavenly bodies had all somehow been cast out of alignment, and I had awoken to unrelenting darkness, instead of familiar constellations overhead and a faint lightening in the east.

But no. I had been awake for more than an hour, and I had spent most of that time glued to my phone, doomscrolling through one blood-red chart of election returns after another, when I glanced up to see that the eastern sky was washed in the subtler, less angry reds of sunrise.

Apparently, then, life was going to go on.

The election hadn’t been the only drama unfolding the night before. Six or seven miles away, at the other end of the road on which we live, a man with a semi-automatic rifle crashed his truck into his neighbors’ house, fired shots at the people living there, and set the house on fire before running off. Police issued a shelter-in-place advisory, which I received on my phone, after already having been alerted by social media and texts from my kids.

Hence the locked door. Unless I’m home alone at night, our door is rarely locked. To be honest, I’m not sure I even know where the key is. But, in the midst of dual dramas, one national, the other close to home, anything that could make me feel safer had seemed like a good idea. Maybe a part of me believed that by locking the door, I could lock out the other awful thing that was happening that night, and keep the other terrible news at bay.

I had gone to bed hours before my husband, who had stayed up, watching election returns and clinging to a last shred of hope, until after 2 a.m. Although I sleep with my phone on my bedside table, a holdover from when I had college-age kids and needed, for my own peace of mind, to be on mom duty 24/7, I knew Tony’s phone was downstairs on the charger. He removes his hearing aids at night, naturally, and without them, nothing short of a dynamite blast is likely to wake him.

Even so, I gathered a handful of pebbles from the driveway and started pitching them in the general direction of our upstairs bedroom window. I’ve seen a lot of movies and television in which this is portrayed as an effective way to rouse someone, and the few pebbles that actually hit the glass did make what sounded to me like a fairly loud noise, but I wasn’t surprised when no light came on and Tony didn’t appear.

With all of the unusually warm weather we’ve had this fall, and all of the opening and closing of windows we’ve done, I hoped that at least one of the five large, low, easily accessible windows on the south side of the house might have been left unlocked. But after I unsuccessfully tried the only one that wasn’t covered by a screen, I was able to discern that all of the sash locks were pointed in the same direction, securely latched.

That left only the two much smaller windows on the east wall of Tony’s office, each several feet above the ground, too high for me to climb through, even if I could get one of them open. But, by some miracle, Tony had been working on a project involving a stepladder the day before, and had left it conveniently outside, beside the door.

So I was able to fetch the stepladder, remove the screen from the outside without damaging it, and raise that rather tiny double-hung window to its full opening size, about 18 by 20 inches. All that was left was to climb through, and here is another way in which movies and television have misled me: crime dramas make this sort of thing look a lot easier than it is in actual practice. Suffice it to say that I now know that I do not have a bright future as a cat burglar.

There’s a table against the wall directly beneath the window. In spite of the fact that it was covered with piles of random crap, and in spite of bad knees that don’t bend the way they’re supposed to, I managed to slither headfirst through the window, ending up on my belly, amidst whatever boxes and books and papers didn’t get pushed to the floor.

I was back inside, and all that was needed was a couple of moves harking back to those days when I faithfully practiced yoga. Still on top of the table, I went from Awkward Cobra to Geriatric Puppy to Confounded Cobbler’s pose—or whatever that position is called when you’re finally sitting upright but not sure what to do next—before I was finally able to slide off the table and stand.

Maybe this essay is, in a way, about gratitude after all. Reading it over, I realize how much I have to be grateful for, and how many people throughout the world don’t share these privileges. Kids who care enough to tell me to lock my doors. The ability to feel safe in my own home. Stiff old knees that still work well enough to let me climb a ladder and squeeze through a window when necessary. A warm house to climb back into, and a good breakfast. A sun that still rises every morning, over a country I still believe in.