I took note of Father Sky’s marbled sky canvas, all the faint colors of the clouds this morning, myriads of gray and vanilla and a pale, pale blue, as I sat in the porch swing for a while. You glance up and just see an overcast sky but sit still a few moments and really look and you’ll see a kaleidoscope of colors mingling in the sky, the clouds so pretty and so faint in their layers of color. I’m excited about my family gathering today to celebrate Thanksgiving.

We had a delicious meal and enjoyed visiting with each other. The children played ball and tag and hide and seek, squealing and laughing with the carefree joy of childhood. My heart is so full. My family is all under my roof tonight, full as ticks after a delicious dinner, sleeping soundly. Tomorrow morning we’ll have a big country breakfast and linger around the dining room table laughing and talking. I enjoy family togetherness and I’ll file away these glorious memories in a special place in my heart to light the dark days.

I’m thinking about a quote about a piano. “Life is like a piano. The white keys are happy days, and the black keys are sad ones. Remember that you need both to make music,” Suzy Kassem. I certainly pinged out a delightful day on the white piano keys of my life today with my family. I took piano lessons as a child but never could get my left hand in gear with the right hand. Those lessons taught me to read music and helped me in learning to play the trumpet.

Everyone plays their piano of life differently. Some of us just ping alone with one note at a time being careful not to play out of tune or lose the melody. Some of us bang out the notes like a child, charging down the keys of life, stumbling on some of the black keys, but not lifting our feet from the notes. Some of us get lost in the melody and need help getting back on right page of the music.

Gods gave us free will so we can play our own unique melodies, choosing our own notes based on our hopes and dreams. We live our lives with a melody we choose. We may not all put our fingers on the notes the same way and sometimes we’ll get an interesting melody that only we can appreciate. You might think of the white keys as happiness and the black keys as sadness but together they can produce a beautiful melody.

I was sad today, watching the birds and looking up at the beautiful blue sky, longing for Chief to be sitting by me in the rocking chair by the swing. You wonder sometimes how life just keeps on going when things happen that rock your world. I have so many blessings and I’m grateful for everyone of them, but the holidays are melancholy when you are missing loved ones around the holiday dinner table.

But as we keep up with our piano lessons in life we learn to sight read the difficult melodies and realize there is beautiful music in grief. Great loves have great grief and we learn to navigate the difficult melodies with songs of memory in our hearts. These memories comfort us and help us place our hands on the piano keys again. I know these happy children in our families are running up and down the white keys of their pianos and I pray their lives are always beautiful melodies.

Through prayer and thanksgiving we learn to trust that God is helping us in our musical choices of life. He helps us turn sorrow to joy, tragedy too blessings, and despair into hope. We are God’s chosen instruments and God is conducting the symphonies of our lives.

“Life is like a piano; what you get out of it depends on how you play it.” — Tom Lehrer