4/2

I walk because it confers—or restores—a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced.

i'm thankful, at one point, to have found myself in a neighborhood where all the streets were the first name of girls i went to school with in the 90s: jennifer drive intersected with laura way, down a hill from where heather drive became jamie lane. i'm thankful to have seen the first buds of flowers on the dogwoods up the muddy path from the trail. 

i'm thankful to have prepped burrito ingredients for our dinners last week yesterday. i'm thankful for chorizo and rice, for just-ripe avocados and slices of american cheese, for caramelized onions and peppers (for d) and pickled raw onion (for me), for restaurant style tortilla chips. i'm thankful that i bought the biggest bottle of cholula the store had and to have remembered when we were in grad school and i wouldn't buy the little bottle because it seemed too expensive and i would use it up too fast.

i'm thankful that at the grocery store this weekend, they were selling whole pineapples for eighty seven cents each. i'm thankful to know that it is an indictment of the problems of the global food system that in the middle of indiana at the end of winter i can buy a pineapple for eight seven cents and yet to feel that its presence here is something i have to celebrate. i'm thankful to have used our biggest sharpest knife to peel it and cube it so that we could have it as a side with our dinners.

i'm thankful that, with fresh raw pineapple (as opposed to the canned kind i grew up eating), there are gradations in texture and flavor—the core and the bits closer to the rind, less sweet and more firm, less likely to give, and yet still wonderful, a contrast with the easier pleasure of the best flesh that helps to heighten them (a juxtaposition i encourage by mixing all the cubes in a bowl rather than separating the core from the rest).

i'm thankful, in the episode of terrace house we were watching last night, to have noticed that the daycare where one of the characters works is called "ai child care" and to have remarked on how odd that seemed, so mechanistic and cold, and i'm thankul that d, who studied japanese when she was younger, told me that the character that sounds like "ai" in japanese is a word for love.