Gratitudes with Joy
a year of gratitude – a lifetime in the making.
People in the South don’t have conversations. They tell stories. I know that because I grew up there. Our stories help us laugh, love the almost unlovable, and make the broken whole again. A lot of my stories are set in the South, a place where the past is never quite past, that twangs, jars, jangles, and rhymes; that is sometimes crass and hard, sometimes holy and whole, that sometimes speaks the King James English, sometimes Gullah, sometimes banjo, but always and forever is my home. It’s where I learned to tell stories.
I hope you enjoy them.
Three things converged to launch Gratitudes with Joy.
The first happened at a birthday party a few years back when a wise friend told me that the secret to a happy life was living it in gratitude. That stuck with me.
The second was my realization that, after my parents and my brother died, not only was I no longer telling my stories about them—hilarious and often unbelievable—but I was forgetting them. I couldn’t let that happen.
The final piece was the 20th anniversary of my father’s death, January 27, 2020, when I began my gratitude project, in part to practice gratitude, in part to bring my stories back to life. And what timing! Six weeks after I started, COVID hit, and gratitude was just the thing we all needed. For a year, almost daily, I wrote a gratitude and then posted it on Facebook where it seemed to fulfill a real need. Writing them became not just an anchor for me but, to my surprise, a lifeline to others during an historically difficult time. For that I am truly grateful.
Here is a sampling from my year of gratitude. Enjoy.
Gratitude Stories
Gratitude for Joy…
“Your stories are one of the best things to come out of this pandemic.”
– Charon B.
“The Gospel of Joy! I love your stories.”
– Elisabeth L. C.
“Each story made me laugh, or cry, or both. Each story reminded me of how beautiful life still is. Joy Cunningham probably was instrumental in my ability to make it through this most terrifying year.”
– Melissa V.