Blue Ridge Country - July/August 2013 - 10

from the
farm

elizabeth hunter

The Gift of Days
simple drawings have come to be a way to recognize what
each day affords, whether it invokes joy or weepiness.
Back in 1995, when this magazine
was seven years old and I was
approaching 50, I wrote a column
entitled, “The Gift of Days.” What I
said struck a chord with many readers; we got a lot of mail in response. I
just re-read the column and – unsurprisingly – agree with the gist of it:
that what we can acquire with money
(faster cars and computers, clearer
TVs; this was before we all also had to
have smartphones, iPods, iPads and
the zillion other 21st-century bare
necessities of life) is poor exchange
for the time we devote to making
money to buy those things.
But there was one thing I wrote
that brought me up short. After listing a number of things we value that,
no matter how much money we
make, we can’t count on obtaining –
“abiding love, children who turn out
well, respect of peers, and a home we
love” – I said the one valuable thing
we could count on was “the gift of
days.”
How’s that again?
Two years ago, my brother
Graham, two years my junior, didn’t
wake up one morning. Nothing
brought the fact that my days are
finite home to me quite like his death.
And yet, the farther I get from March
24, 2011, the easier it has been for

10 | BlueRidgeCountry.com

me to forget to embrace the particular day I’m living in, and to look for its
particular gift.
Just before Christmas last year, I
undertook a project aimed at rectifying this oversight. At other times, I’d
created a file on my computer I’d
attempted to visit every day, to list
that day’s gift, but my efforts had
always petered out. This time, I tried a
different tack: I made myself a little
book with enough pages to get me
from December 23 to March 31 if I
allotted each day a page. I colorcoded the pages (blue for December,
tan for January, pale blue for
February, light green for March), and
numbered them in pencil. My idea
was to identify each day’s gift, and do
a drawing to illustrate it.
I assigned myself a drawing rather
than a written notation for a couple
of reasons. For one, I’ve been keeping
a journal for years – I have a whole
shelf of them – and I have never had
the least desire to reread anything I’ve
written in them. (Whenever I have
taken one down and tried to get
myself to read it, I’ve been bored by
its banality, and quickly returned it to
the shelf.) The only thing about the
journals that remains interesting to
me are the things I’ve pasted in – a
poem I liked from Writer’s Almanac, a

photo I’ve taken, a card from a friend.
But I didn’t want to make a scrapbook. I’d tried that too, and lost interest. I did, however, want to make
myself draw regularly. Drawing is
something I’d done a fair amount of
in my young middle age, and
acquired a certain proficiency. But
somehow it always fell to the bottom
of my priority list, whenever I got
busy (and sometimes even when I
wasn’t). Could I make my Gift of Days
book address both my lack of attention to each day’s gift and my seeming inability to draw regularly? I knew
I would fall behind on the drawings
when I was busy, so I made a rule: at
least identify and write down each
day’s gift. Catch up on the drawings
when I had time to do it.
In the four months that I’ve kept
this up I’ve fallen as many as 10 days
behind on the drawings. But I still
managed to keep the list current, and
devoted one soggy, dreary February
weekend to catching up on the drawings. Not wanting to do that again, I
set aside time now when a few days
elapse without drawing. Usually I
draw at my kitchen counter. I’ve had
to overcome other little barriers, not
the least of which was not to let a
bad drawing (or a major mistake in an
otherwise acceptable drawing) derail

Blue Ridge Country - July/August 2013

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