What made my life better this year that no one arranged?
Picture a man standing in his garden the morning after the first hard frost. The tomato plants have gone black and limp overnight, and he's holding the last two green tomatoes, one in each hand.
He's thinking about the spring, when he pushed a handful of seeds into the dirt and did nothing remarkable. The seeds took care of the rest. In a good year, his little patch turns out more tomatoes than his family can eat (and more than the neighbors want, too), but in a bad year it barely turns out any. After all these years, he still couldn't tell you why one year is good and another isn't, and he suspects nobody really can.
Standing there, it occurs to him that he has nobody to send a card to.
He puts the tomatoes in his coat pocket, looks up at the sky for a moment, and goes inside to make dinner.
Some of the best things in a year arrive without a sender. Friday's and Saturday's leaves went to people. Today's circle, the Cosmos, is for the parts of a good year that came with no return address.
When the "who?" question has no easy answer, the noticing still deserves somewhere to go. A leaf can be addressed to God, the universe, the harvest, your own body, or the year itself. Nobody has to settle who or what they're writing to. The only ask is that the noticing gets written down.
Remember the five words from the Preface: give thanks, then give back. November is the first half, and the giving back begins in December. We'll get there. When we do, this week's question gets turned around. Instead of asking who made your life better, you'll get to ask whose life you can make better, and how.
Today also sets up next week. This week asked what got better. Starting tomorrow, the Important days ask a harder question: what did it cost?
Look back at what you wrote on Wednesday, and at the pictures you found of things that arrived without anyone arranging them.
Write Cosmos leaves. Each person writes at least one. The name on the front can be "Whoever is behind this," a word like "Morning," a place, a season, or "God," whatever fits.
On the back, start with the same line, "Thank you, ___, for making my life better," then write what arrived and what changed because of it.
Hang them with the rest, writing to the wall.
Stand back and look at the trunk together. It started the week bare.
The trunk now holds Core, Community, and Cosmos leaves, and the backs stay private for now. The Core leaves get read on Thanksgiving morning, and the rest go out, or come down, on the schedule from your plan.
Kids' story: read "The Leaf With No Name" from The Thank-You Adventure in Wanderful Woods together.
Time: 15 to 20 minutes for the writing, then a few quiet minutes looking at the tree.
With kids: a Cosmos leaf can be a drawing of a sunset, a dog, a cloud, or even a favorite food.
Any name works on the front: the gift itself, "The universe," "God," or a single word. Noticing it is the practice.
For the whole household: end with one sentence together, such as, "This year got better in ways we didn't plan."
Bridge to tomorrow: tell the household, "Starting tomorrow, we ask what it cost."
Hello, my wonderful story friends! Last time, Bruno’s quietest whisper was a boom, and Benji found a honey-bunny leaf with his name on it. Today Mr. Monkey wants to thank somebody he has never met.
Have you ever watched the sun come up? Let’s go wake up early in Wanderful Woods.
It was still dark, and every star was still out. The air was so cold it made Mr. Monkey’s nose tingle, and the grass in Sunny Square was stiff and white with frost.
Mr. Monkey stood at the door of the big maple, hopping from foot to foot. “Mr. Moose!” he whispered. “Wake up! The sun is coming!”
From inside came a long, slow snore. Hrrrrmmm. Pfffff.
Mr. Monkey went inside. Mr. Moose was curled up in his bed of leaves with his long legs folded and his nose tucked under his tail.
“Mr. Moose,” said Mr. Monkey. “Wake up.”
Hrrrrmmm.
Mr. Monkey hung upside down in front of Mr. Moose’s face. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
Mr. Moose smiled in his sleep. “Five more minutes, Daddy,” he mumbled.
Mr. Monkey thought. Then he went outside, scooped up a pawful of icy dew from the grass, came back in, and let one cold drop fall right on the end of Mr. Moose’s nose. Plip.
Mr. Moose’s eyes popped open. He jumped straight up, legs everywhere. “The BROOK! I fell in the brook!” He looked around wildly. “Twenty-four!”
Then he saw Mr. Monkey, holding his dripping paw.
“Hee hee hee!” went Mr. Monkey. “You didn’t fall in! It was one drop!”
Mr. Moose looked at the drop on his nose, cross-eyed. “Ha-ha-ha,” he laughed sleepily. “Twenty-three and a half.”
They ran across the frosty square to Learning Land and climbed all the way up to the lookout on Fort Friendship, where you could see over the trees to the hills. A few friends were already there. Hazel was stamping her hooves to stay warm. Dottie was wrapped in a pile of leaves.
And Bruno had come up the night before so he wouldn’t miss it, and he was curled up in the corner of the lookout, snoring.
“Is the sun up yet?” asked Mr. Monkey.
It wasn’t. Over the hills, the sky was pale gray. And right across the place where the sun should come up lay a long, thick cloud.
“It’s covered,” said Hazel. “The cloud is in the way.”
Mr. Monkey stood on the railing and cupped his hands around his mouth. “SUN!” he shouted. “COME UP!”
Nothing happened.
“SUN! IT’S MORNING! YOU’RE LATE!”
Nothing.
Dottie stood up out of her leaf pile, pointed her nose at the sky, and howled. “AWOOOOOO!”
“Dottie,” said Mr. Moose, “that’s for the moon.”
Dottie stopped. “Oh,” she said. She thought about it. Then she pointed her nose at the sky again. “Arf,” she said politely. “Good morning.”
“Hee hee hee… SNORT!” went Hazel.
Hazel couldn’t stand still any longer. “I’ll go get it!” she said. She galloped down the vines and across the meadow toward the hills, as fast as she could, as if she could catch the sun and bring it back.
She got smaller and smaller, until she was just a little dot, and then she came galloping back, out of breath. “It’s farther than it looks,” she panted.
So they waited. Mr. Monkey wanted to make it happen. He wanted to push the cloud out of the way with both hands. But you can’t push a cloud. You can’t call the sun. All they could do was wait and watch.
And then, without anybody doing anything at all, the cloud split open, right in the middle.
A line of gold came pouring through. It spread across the hills. It spilled down into the woods. It lit up the frost on every branch until the whole of Wanderful Woods sparkled like it was made of sugar. It turned the river pink. It touched the lookout, and Mr. Monkey felt it warm on his face.
Nobody said anything. Even Hazel was still.
In the corner, Bruno stopped snoring, opened one eye, said “Mmm, warm,” and went back to sleep with the sunshine on his tummy.
Mr. Monkey felt the warm, big feeling come up in his chest again, the same one he felt for Mama Monkey and for Ricky’s knot. But this time there was nobody to give it to.
“Mr. Moose,” he said. “I want to make a leaf for the sunrise.”
“Who would you give it to?” asked Mr. Moose.
Mr. Monkey didn’t know. Nobody had made the sunrise. Nobody had pushed the cloud. It just came.
They went back to Sunny Square, where the friends were making leaves for all the good things nobody had arranged. Hazel painted a leaf for the wind that she raced across the meadow. Shiloh painted one for the rain that made the clover grow. Benji painted the tiny oak in its ring of stones. Mr.
Moose painted the golden river from the day of the treasure hunt.
Mr. Monkey painted his sunrise. On the back, he painted the long gray cloud, split open in the middle, and the gold pouring out, and frost on the trees like sugar, and a little monkey on a lookout with his face all warm.
Then he turned it over to paint the front. The front was where you put who it was for.
He held his painting finger over the leaf. He didn’t paint anything.
“What goes on the front?” he asked.
Ricky came over and looked at the empty front. He looked at his list. “Rule four,” he said slowly. “Nobody gets left out.” He scratched his head. “But who IS it?”
Nobody knew. So Mr. Monkey left the front empty. It was the only leaf in all of Wanderful Woods with no name.
“Where should it go?” asked Mr. Monkey. “Every leaf goes next to its somebody. This one doesn’t have a somebody.”
Mr. Monkey didn’t want it to be left out. It was the biggest thank-you he had ever felt.
Mr. Moose looked up at the Wishing Tree, all the way to the top, where the branches got thin and pointed at the sky. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “it goes as high as it can go. The closest place to where the sunrise comes from.”
“The very top!” said Mr. Monkey.
But the very top was too high and too thin for anyone to climb. Even Mr. Monkey. When he got close, the branch bent and wobbled and dipped.
So Mr. Moose made a plan. Mr. Monkey climbed as high as he safely could and tied one end of a long vine to the leaf. Then he threw the other end up and over the very top branch, and down the other side. Mr. Moose caught it in his teeth, way down at the bottom, and walked slowly backward across the grass.
The vine pulled. The leaf rose up, up, up, past the wishes, past Mama Monkey’s leaf, past Benji’s honey-bunny, past Hazel’s SWAMP, all the way to the very top of the tree, where it hung against the blue sky with its empty front facing out.
Mr. Monkey tied off the vine with Ricky’s knot. Then he climbed down and stood next to Mr. Moose, looking up.
That evening, Orion woke up and looked down from Pilgrim Point at the Wishing Tree. “Hoo,” he said. “There’s a leaf at the very top with no name on it.”
“It’s for the sunrise,” said Mr. Monkey. “Whoever makes it.”
Orion blinked his golden eyes. “And at the Thankful Feast,” he said, “who will take it down?”
Mr. Monkey opened his mouth. Then he closed it. He didn’t know.
Mr. Monkey looked at the tree. There were wishes all over it. But there were leaves now too, lots of them, so many that he could hardly find his big banana wish.
On the way home, Mr. Moose was quiet. “Mr. Monkey,” he said. “Daddy stood in the cold brook twenty-two times. I wonder if the water was cold for him, too.”
“I bet it was,” said Mr. Monkey.
“I never asked,” said Mr. Moose.
“What a day!” said Mr. Monkey. “I woke you up with one drop, and you thought you fell in the brook. I yelled at the sun, and Dottie barked good morning. The cloud opened all by itself. And we made a leaf with no name and pulled it all the way to the top of the Wishing Tree.”
Mr. Monkey whistled, and Mr. Moose hummed, and together they sang:
We are better together,
Moose and Monkey forever.
And at the very top of the Wishing Tree, the leaf with no name swayed in the evening wind, catching the last pink light of the day.