the last gift

Seven months ago, I started a list. 

Twenty-six pages of my composition book later, I am loathe to end it.  I have listed, in the last 200-some days, nine hundred and ninety-nine gifts:  noticings, lifted up from the ordinary into glowing shafts of gratitude, till their origins are obvious:  they are good and perfect gifts, showered down on me from the Father of lights, gift after gift after gift.

Seeing each gift required a stopping.  A stillness.  A savoring so difficult to come to
in life's swirling current.  Each gift was an island of quiet.  

They didn't come gift-wrapped.  No bows to alert my attention.
Some days I wrote nothing down; I never stopped to see.

Other days, craving more proofs of His love, I'd stop a long while
and write out a dozen or more.  I averaged four or five a day.  

How many did I miss, intent on other things?

: : :

My gratitude goes on, whether the list does, or not.
Maybe I'll just stop at #999, to leave room, always, for one more.