It's another great day in an amazingly long string of them: Warm and sunny, early October offering encores in late November. I'm on all fours scratching in the plant beds, pondering the best way to get more acid into the dirt so the azaleas will be better next year.

        A bag of coffee grounds is mixed with the leftover mulch. Coffee grounds are acidic, according to the garden book. I'm pulling at the earth with a garden rake. The used-coffee mulch will go into the churned dirt beneath the azalea plants.

        It's a chore. Tiresome, boring yard work prevents playing golf. Some years, all the work gets wiped out by freezing rain or wind burn or, believe it or not, the shells from the black sunflower seeds littering the ground beneath the bird feeder.

        (Amateur azalea growers, beware: Black sunflower seeds will kill your plants.)

        Only this year, it's not. It's not a chore. The ground is cool, the sun is warm, the day is pleasant. Life is precious and not to be assumed.

        The thought occurs now, again, in the perfect calm of a late morning in this week of Thanksgiving, as it has every day since Sept. 11. In New York, they're still toting the World Trade Center away on barges. Thousands of families came to their Thursday table with an empty chair.

        We grieve now, especially now, for the people who died on 9-11. We grieve for those the dead left behind. We grieve for ourselves. It was a national death.

        “Bitter or grateful?” Time magazine asked last week. Angry at what happened? Or appreciative for what endures? It's a useful question at Thanksgiving, the most American of our holidays, and the answer is as simple as this:

        Grateful. Appreciative. Glad at the prospect of life.

        You can't appreciate joy without experiencing sadness. It just doesn't work. If pleasure is all you've known, how can you take its full measure?

        Death has its uses. One is to make the survivors feel more alive. Tragedy of the 9-11 variety sets the mind free from silly concerns: red lights, telemarketers, job frustration, inevitable ice storms killing tenderly loved azalea bushes.

        Life is built on days of insignificance, and that's if you're lucky and good and play by the rules. The trick is to slow down enough to stare at the days. Since 9-11, I've tried to live in three-quarter time. You can't see things clearly without pausing long enough to look at them.

        What the dead would give for another dull moment.

        The dirt moves easily beneath the garden rake. The coffee and the mulch smell like earth's mystery. The sun cuts angles between the sycamore and the shag-bark hickory, dropping needles of light on the grateful azaleas. What a day.

        For Thanksgiving, we went to Pittsburgh. It's where my wife's uncle died, six days before. Pete was a fixture at the holidays, always smiling and appreciative. He served in the Pacific in World War II. He earned a Purple Heart. He saw men die. He knew tragedy. Maybe that's why he was so gracious in life.

        We gather together. This is what the hymn says. The old people, the young people, sons and daughters and friends, each of us diminished by 9-11. And by Pete's empty chair.

        But we're here. Together, safe, healthy, connected. Happy. More attuned to it all than we've been in a very long time.

        Next April, hopefully, the azaleas will bloom like a five-alarm blaze. We will take time to pay them notice.
        Contact Paul Daugherty by phone: 768-8454; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com.
       

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