Thankful

"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone."
-Joni Mitchell

With time on my hands last evening I pulled a cardboard box from its corner and began to rummage through it.
The box holds our personal memento papers: cards, letters, photographs both loose and framed behind glass, scribbled notes and some newspaper clippings.
For twenty minutes I plunged through the box with enthusiasm. Every few months I try to reassess the contents and it usually happens that at least some papers can be discarded.
I found a good number of printed essays from community college days in California: those would stay, as would my notes from a very successful math class I took in Texas.
But those are not what I want to muse about now.
I instead want to state unequivocally that I am thankful, more so than I was before I began to dig in the box.
As I excavated items and every few minutes sorted them into various tidy piles, I gradually moved toward the bottom of the container.
At the last moment, as I stuck my wrist and hand in to scrape the last few things away and as I shook the box a bit, a dreadful noise made me pause. I lifted, ever so slowly, the remaining papers and revealed what was hiding underneath.
One of the glass frames had splintered and the upright shards were like teeth, cruel and crafty. I very nearly, with an inch to spare, did not see them at all.
The number of fragmented pieces, the speed at which I had happily been examining the box and the force with which I had been grabbing things and flinging them onto the carpet meant that I surely would have been injured and I doubt that it would have been superficial.
Spouse is not here and so the whole thing left me feeling both thankful and rather shaken. It might have been so very different.

I ask though, how much consideration did I give to my health and my hands before yesterday? It is the same, I suppose, with headaches: when I have one, I am miserable, but during the days that my head is clear, I never once consider how wonderful it is to not have any pain.