The Finger by Milou Koenings

No, I'm not giving anyone one of those.  

I'm hoping to get mine back.

I've always thought of myself as someone who doesn’t take things for granted.   

Even as a kid, when leaving the house, I was the one who ran back to give whomever was staying behind a hug – just in case.  When my parents or siblings were the ones going out, I'd walk to the door with them to make sure we had happy memories of our parting.

I suppose put like this, it sounds a bit morbid.  As if I was expecting anyone of us to drop dead at any moment, Heaven forfend.   

Perhaps people who grow up in a quiet, peaceful little town don't think like that. (Maybe that's why I like to write about them!) I grew up in East Africa in the midst of a civil war, with neighbors who often were there one day and gone the next, and where I went to sleep each night to the sound of shooting in the hills punctuating the rhythmic song of toads.  So maybe I'm a little paranoid.  But paranoid or not, when my kids leave for school in the morning, I walk them to the street, makes sure, (as much as possible and educationally wise) that no matter how mad we might have been at each other over breakfast, we are back on good terms before they disappear for the day.

I try to appreciate people around me.  I am grateful for the little things, too - a warm sweater on a chilly night, a gorgeous flower.  I'm always counting my blessings and being grateful for them.  But I've learned this month that there are an infinite number of blessings that I've never given a thought to, things I've been taking for granted all my life and never really appreciated.

What brought about this somber train of thought?

A simple thing. A slip of the knife while making dinner. 

Only it was a sharp knife.  

And it sliced right to the bone. 

In the grand scheme of things, some stitches on the tip of a finger really aren't a big deal, even if an index finger out of commission for a few weeks is a bit of an inconvenience when you're a writer, a touch typist who works at a keyboard all day.  And it's a temporary inconvenience, too.

But I never gave a thought to how important that finger is to me – it isn't even my dominant hand!  And yet, because of it, I've had to push back several projects – including a long-awaited book release – that had been planned for months.  Everything takes so much longer to do. 

On the bright side, I'm not allowed to get that finger wet. I can't say I'm not enjoying being relieved of dish-washing duty.  I'm exploring Windows' speech-to-text capacities. I never knew before that my computer could do that. So I'm learning new things and the results, when my computer translates my voice into written words, are often pretty hilarious.

One of the best thing, though, is that I'm finally appreciating each one of my fingers individually.  I'll not be taking a full hand for granted ever again.  

And maybe each day, I'll try to think of one other thing I've never thought to be grateful for before.

Milou Koenings writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.
 

Her sweet romance, Reclaiming Home, A Green Pines Romance, is available at Amazon.  You can find her on her website, www.miloukoenings.com, on Facebook, or Twitter. 

Her newest novella, Sweet Blizzard, is included in  Sweet Christmas Kisses 2, a USA Today bestselling anthology of  19 sweet Christmas novellas by award-winning authors.  

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