A couple of weeks ago I woke up thinking about a man who is not my husband. He’s someone I went out with over a decade ago and there was no reason he should have popped into my head, except: Dr. Jill Biden.

The night before, with my children safely asleep and my husband in the living room, unwinding with some incredibly stressful show about a.) deep space b.) escaping near-death circumstances or c.) prison, I decided to do a little doom-scrolling before bed. While scanning Twitter I noticed the first shouts of scorn—some chump had written a Wall Street Journal op-ed urging Dr. Jill to drop the Dr. since she earned the title by way of a PhD, not an MD. (Naturally, said chump has neither.) I wormed my way around the paywall—and I wonder why journalism is a dying field—to read the op-ed, rage-snorted a few times, and fell asleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I had somehow relived that so-called date in my sleep. I was marinating in memories of that time, when I was running around New York with a gaggle of great friends who had nothing but our wit and each other to protect us from the slings, arrows, and not-so-helpful advice of men who were all too eager to tell us what we should and shouldn’t be doing in order to make them more comfortable. Those guys were mansplaining before it was a verb, and all we could do was laugh.

I started writing in notes mode on my phone (something I NEVER do), then switched to my laptop in the still quiet hours while the rest of the house slept. And I downloaded those memories into this call-and-response op-ed essay which ran on oprahmag.com. I meant to repost as a blog sooner, but I’ve been busy with my current-day life, so here it is now! Thanks to Dr. Jill for reminding me of great friends, long-gone times, and the bestseller I never wrote.

To read the essay, click here.

The post Memories, Mansplaining, and the Bestseller I Never Wrote appeared first on Eleni Gage.

And yet, I want to discover new places too. I’ve never been on safari or seen the pyramids or watched the northern lights, for example, and with two kids in school, it’s harder and harder to find time to do so.

Even our summer trips to Greece are fraught with this same dilemma, only all in one country—each year, I want to go someplace I haven’t been before (The Pelion peninsula! The Samaria Gorge! Amorgos! Anafi! And countless other islands). But I also want to spend time in our mountain village in Epiros, and return to Corfu, to see my cousins and revisit the scene of the crime.

And each time I fall in love with a new spot, the list of places I long to revisit grows longer. I know this counts as #greekpeopleproblems (we invented nostalgia, after all) and it’s a very good one to have. But I recently realized I’m passing this same travel fever on to the next generation. “Mommy, can we go back to the place in Greece with the baby tomatoes and the really nice pool,” Amalia asked recently, hearkening back to last summer’s trip to Syros, which I visited for Travel+Leisure.

The island bewitched all of us—Emilio loved the clarity of the sea, I’m still dreaming of the architecture and ice cream, Nico likes the toy cars kids can ride around the main square, and for Amalia, it’s the mini tomatoes and the pool at White Key Villa’s Villa Evelina, our home for part of the trip. Which brings me to a #travelwriterproblem: The places you stay while researching are so much nicer than any place you can afford on your own, or have any business bringing your sunscreen-slathered, crayon-wielding children to, that you find yourself dreaming about them year round.

“We can definitely go back to Syros,” I told Amalia. “But probably not to the same villa.”

Amalia pointed out, “But then we won’t have the jacuzzi,”—which Nico, our three year-old, kept calling a karpouzi, the Greek word for watermelon. That’s right. Or the infinity pool. Or the blue kitchen I see when I’m cooking in my own apartment and I close my eyes for a minute.

I feel guilty about filling such a small child with unrealistic expectations and yearnings, for letting the travel bug bite her. But Amalia is seven, old enough to learn some of the main lessons of travel: unrequited love. Unending yearning. And finding joy in both old and new pleasures.

I promised Amalia, “Wherever we go, there will be baby tomatoes.” And that’s more than enough.

To read about Syros, the island that has us all longing to return, click here.

The post Young Love: Spellbound by Syros appeared first on Eleni Gage.

It’s the most wonderful day of the year: Lunar New Year. Although I’m not Asian and don’t follow a lunar calendar, I can’t help but get excited about this holiday because it involves so many of my favorite things. It’s not just the dragons and fireworks and lucky red and gold everything. (Some people walk around with a theme song in their head; since working at Martha Stewart Weddings, I roam with a palette in mine, and my signature colors will be that auspicious combo for the foreseeable future.)

I also appreciate Lunar New Year’s focus on luck, inviting it, sharing it, and spreading it to others. Aside from embracing the propitious palette, you can eat fortunate foods such as dumplings (which are said to resemble lumps of gold), noodles (which invite long life with their shape), or a whole fish (because the word for fish sounds like the one for abundance). People exchange lucky gifts, with adults giving children cash in red-and-gold envelopes, and sending each other citrus fruit such as pomelos and mandarin oranges, which are traditional temple offerings because the round shape and golden color symbolize abundance; or sugared fruits to invite a sweet life. Gift-giving is always fun and thoughtful, but there’s something especially meaningful about the idea of wishing someone good fortune with a present. (Come to think of it, a red and gold copy of Lucky in Love, full of auspicious hacks, would be a great Chinese New Year gift, especially for an engaged couple, if I do say so myself.)

But the real reason I love Lunar New Year is because it’s a do-over. And by late Jan or early Feb, I usually need one, having broken most New Year’s resolutions and still reeling from the holidays, the colds and flus felling my family members one by one, and your basic winter doldrums. (Truth: I’ve been working on a Harry Potter puzzle I bought my kids for Christmas since then, and still haven’t finished–and that’s just the most tangible of my goals.) I spent Jan 1 in the ER with three-year-old Nico, who had an ear infection. We’ve all been sick. My mom broke her nose. I got trapped inside my winter coat during the Polar Vortex of 2019 (true story). There’s drama all around, and life is full of reminders that most of what happens is well beyond my control.

Which is why I’m so grateful for every folkloric ritual that allows me to invite good luck into my life, and makes me feel like I’m doing all I can to help my family, and by extension, the world at large, feel a little safer, kinder, and more fun. In 2019, I’ve consumed a total of 5 magic cakes. Those included three vassilopites, the Greek cake for New Year’s Day which contains a coin inside hidden for good luck; I ate the first the day after Christmas the last in late Jan when Amalia found the coin in her piece at Greek school. There were also two galette des rois, the French King Cake served at epiphany, with a magic charm inside. I didn’t get the charm this year (just the calories), but I felt lucky every time, sharing a sweet moment with people I love.

And now, I get to reboot. I will finish the Harry Potter puzzle—and, you know, everything else I vow to do to be a better mother, writer, friend, wife, person. How could I not? I’m wearing red and gold earrings. I just ate a satsuma. And I will keep looking for luck wherever I can find it, in dragons, fireworks, fruit, and everywhere else a hopeful new beginning can be found—and wishing you all the luck in the world.

The post This Little Piggie Loves a Do-Over appeared first on Eleni Gage.

Traveling with a toddler is a challenge under any circumstances. Add heat waves, time differences and long lines and it can be a recipe for disaster, as I learned when I brought 3-year-old Nico and 7-year-old Amalia to see the Acropolis. (It’s never too early for ancient monuments is it?)

Luckily, even these difficulties can be overcome with some Playmobil deities for the kids, a water bottle of rosé for mom, and a user-friendly taxi app. As a cold snap settled over New York City, Fathom helped me throw it back to summer in Athens with this article that was part of their Travel with Kids package. Read all my misadventures, and maybe pick up a few tips, here. I’m just mystified as to why they didn’t use the charming photo of Nico, above, to illustrate the article. Just makes you want to grab a three-year-old and get on a plane, doesn’t it?

The post Mamma Mia III—Acropolis Tantrum! appeared first on Eleni Gage.

Right now it feels like everything is happening at once. Between the holidays, end of the year, my book coming out next Tuesday and regular work and #momlife, I walk around constantly feeling like there’s somewhere I should be and something I should be doing that I’m not. And pretty much everyone I know feels the same way.

But that’s the way life is…everything tends to happen at once. And sometimes, that’s a good thing.Take today. It’s the last extra-lucky day of the year 2018, when the date 12/06/18 adds up to double chai. If that sounds like a new Starbucks special to you, allow me to explain: Every Hebrew letter has a numerical value; the letter heth is 8 and yod is 10, and together they spell chai, the word for “life.” For this reason, Jewish grandparents the world over have been known to stuff gift envelopes with sums of money ending in $18 as presents—or even better, $36, double chai! (In a romantic coincidence, 18 also happens to be what you get it you add up the numerical value of the word “ohavi,” or beloved.) 

Not only is today a double-chai day (Play your numbers! Apply for a job! Ask someone on a date!), it’s a double-chai day that’s also the fifth day of Chanukah. AND, it’s St. Nicholas’ day, honoring the 3d century bishop in Asia Minor who was so generous he inspired the idea of the other St. Nick, Santa Claus. St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children, sailors, and unmarried women (because he dropped gold down the chimney of his poor neighbor’s house so that the man’s daughters would have dowries and could get married—the gold fell into a stocking hung in the fireplace to dry, making it the original stocking stuffer). He’s also the namesake of my father and my son, the not-quite-so-saintly Nico who threw a tantrum and refused to wear the safety restraints in his stroller, making us late for school, so that I bumped into a friend on the walk home. (See how that turned lucky?)

When I got home and checked my emails, along with notifications of various holiday sales and requests for donations, I got this from an astrology site notifying me that today is also the last full moon of 2018: “Have you ever wanted to start over? Today you get the cosmic do-over you’ve been waiting for. New moons are a time of rebirth, and this one in daring, forward-thinking Sagittarius is just what you need to take advantage of new (and maybe surprising) opportunities.”

Since I’m not St. Nick, sitting around surrounded by bags of gold to pass out, I’d like to offer you this news-you-can-use info as a holiday gift instead.* It’s the luckiest day of the year, a festival of lights, a celebration of generosity, and a fresh-start-friendly new moon all in one. Seize the day! There will never be another one quite like it.

*No returns or exchanges but feel free to re-gift this info far and wide.

The post It’s Your Lucky Day…And Everyone Else’s Too! appeared first on Eleni Gage.

“If everybody loved flowers, there would be no war.” That’s what George Psailas, the caretaker of the British cemetery on the Greek island of Corfu told me and the English-speaking visitors I brought to see the rare wild orchids that grow in the graveyard. I just smiled, thinking something had been lost in translation. I love a wildflower as much as the next tree-hugger, but it seemed a bit of an overstatement that if you care about nature, you’ll overcome the drive to hate, kill, and dominate.

Later, George showed me a grave marker with his name on it, under a shady tree. He was born in the house on the cemetery grounds, because his father was caretaker before him. And he’s already reserved this spot for when it’s his turn to be buried, because even in death, he wants to be able to watch the seasons change.

That’s when I understood a bit more what he means—that if you strive to look for beauty, even when surrounded by evidence of human frailty and your own morality—it changes who you are. The instinct to destroy weakens as the drive to celebrate good strengthens. Sure, George, who grew up protecting the wild orchids and stray cats who live in the cemetery, has tunnel vision when it comes to flowers. But, I thought, he’s onto something.

Since the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday, October 27th, when a white supremacist gunned down 11 Jewish people, most of them elderly, in their spiritual home, I’ve been feeling a bit like George Psailas. Because the minute I heard the name of the synagogue, I thought: If everybody knew folklore, there would be no war.

The gunman hated those old people, who had lived lives devoted to making contributions to society, because he felt they were different from him. And yet, the purpose of their synagogue’s charity work was to help others, no matter their background.

Still, it was the name that got me. My upcoming book has a chapter on lucky folkloric symbols. In it, I write,

Another natural symbol that’s universally understood as auspicious is the tree of life. It calls to mind a family tree, rooted in the past but spreading toward the future and up to the heavens. The Koran refers to the Tree of Immortality, and in the Bahá’í text The Manifestation of God, it is written, ‘ye were all gathered in My presence beneath the shade of the tree of life, which is planted in the all-glorious paradise.’ Virtually every indigenous group in the Americas, from the Aztecs to the Zunis, holds trees sacred

All over the world, different cultures find specific types of trees auspicious. Hindus favor a banyan while Buddhists believe that the Buddha was born under a pipal tree, making it lucky. Orthodox Christians view cypress trees as representations of souls ascending to heaven and plant them to mark sacred sites. Norse mythology refers to the Yggdrasil, or “world oak,” which may be a yew, an ash, or the oak tree sacred to the god Thor. And fruiting trees are a global symbol of fertility.

That’s what I love about folklore—it’s so specific, but so universal. Each culture manifests its hopes in different ways, but we all hope for the same things. The past two years have been such dark ones for our country, with so much hatred and violence being fostered. It was a comfort to me to be working on a book of folklore devoted to bringing luck to couples getting married because, as I collected customs and rituals and toasts from all over the world, I began to feel that deep down, we all want the same things: For our children to be happy. To have the chance to offer hospitality to others. For future generations to continue.

I don’t know what makes it impossible for people like our “president” and the gunman, whom I refuse to name, to understand this.

I hate that this needless tragedy happened, but I take comfort in the fact that the community that was affected is named for the Tree of Life, which can never be destroyed or uprooted. I know that this specific Tree of Life will continue to grow.

This morning I watched a video of a young man who grew up in the Tree of Life community, in which he explains that the synagogue is devoted to public service and the Jewish ideal of tikkun olam, which literally means “to repair the world.” Today is election day, which gives each of us a little chance to do just that. I can’t wait to go out and vote for candidates who feel we’re all different branches of the same world tree.

The post Wild Orchids, Trees of Life, and Voting to Repair the World appeared first on Eleni Gage.

When I was single, I always imagined that if I didn’t marry someone Greek, I’d marry someone I could steamroll with my culture. After all, that’s what my dad did. My mom is from Minnesota and was Presbyterian before she met him, converted to Orthodoxy, got married in the Greek church, moved to Greece, learned Greek, and fulfilled her dream of becoming a Yia Yia.

Then, one day, I came across Emilio, the first Nicaraguan I’ve ever met. Reader, I married him. In two churches (Catholic, then Greek Orthodox, one ceremony after the other as is common on the island of Corfu where we got hitched). The back-to-back weddings were a sign of things to come. I haven’t steamrolled Emilio with Greek culture, but I have made it a big part of his life, with yearly trips to Greece and a steady diet of spinach rice. And the bonus is: I gained a whole new culture. Basically, I’m Latina now, which is great because, if you’ve seen J. Lo lately, you know we age incredibly well.

Now Emilio and I have two Greekaraguan kids, who go to Sunday School and Greek school, but also speak Spanish. They have a Yia Yia Joanie (not technically Greek but Greek by marriage, the same way I’m Latina), a Yia Yia Neni (my aunt, also named Eleni, and as Greek and indispensible as feta cheese), and an Abuela, my mother-in-law, Carmen. So when  Parents Latina asked me to write an article that shares the results of their reader survey on the importance of abuelas in a Latin family, I was thrilled.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of grandmothers in my life. I’m named for mine, and wrote a memoir about rebuilding her house in Greece. Then I wrote a novel inspired in part by Emilio’s grandmother, Tina, who lived through, and continues to live through, the sweeping changes in Nicaragua’s history.

And I am so #blessed that my children have the most loving grandmothers in any country (in my humble opinion). So while neither Emilio nor I are steamrolling roads, we’re building bridges between cultures and generations. Which, if you read the article, is what abuelas do best, too.

Here’s a link to what appears in the September issue of Parents Latina magazine as “We Heart Abuela.“

The post Just Call Me J. Lo appeared first on Eleni Gage.

I owe my vocab lesson to a kind soul who follows my author page on Facebook. Every Rosh Hashanah, when Amalia, who attends public school here in New York, has two days off because her Jewish classmates are celebrating the Jewish New Year, I think of what an article I read—and I can’t remember who wrote it—told me about the holiday. That forgotten sage wrote that it’s the time of year when the hours of daylight and the hours of darkness are equal, and therefore, the world of possibility and the world of reality are most open to each other. Every year on Rosh Hashanah, the person said, you should sit down and write a scene, in the present tense, from your life as you would like it to be a year from now. The theory is that the act of writing the life you dream of, as if it exists, will put that vision out into the universe, and the powers that be—including yourself—can set about making that vision a reality.

I’ve only tried this twice in my life, when I felt that I really needed to take advantage of the cosmic opportunity Rosh Hashanah presents, and both times much of what I wrote out came to pass. With results like that, naturally I felt the need to post a PSA on my Facebook page, passing on the tip! Someone wrote in and said, “We have a word for that in Greek—Ισημερία.” Which, to me anyway, sounds so much more poetic than “equinox.”

I started researching, and realized that Rosh Hashanah isn’t exactly timed to the equinox—this year the holiday was celebrated on the 10th and 11th, and the Ισημερία isn’t until tomorrow, Saturday, the 22nd. But I love a new year of any kind (Tet? Back-to-School? New Year’s Eve? Sign me up!) precisely because it makes me consider new beginnings, and the world of possibilities, again. I’ll celebrate anyone’s new year! It’s that cross-cultural, auspiciously ambitious, spirit which inspired my upcoming book, Lucky in Love: Traditions, Customs, & Rituals to Personalize Your Wedding.

The book is a cross-cultural collection of rituals from all over the world that are meant to bring luck to couples getting married, and there are traditions for every stage of the wedding process from getting engaged and picking a date, to favors, farewells, and moving into a newlywed home together. The theory is that you make your own luck, but why not tap into age-old customs designed to bring good fortune if they speak to you, the way every type of new year speaks to me? (Another reason I love the idea of equal hours of light and dark? I’m a Libra: I balance.)

I’m so excited about the book—partly because it’s a return to my roots as a folklorist, since I studied Foklore & Mythology in college, and partly because I LOVE the illustrations that bring these beautiful traditions to life. Plus, what is a wedding if not a new beginning?

Book aside, whether you’re long married, never plan to marry, or married many times over, I think everyone is always looking for a little extra luck. Luck is like love—you can never have too much of it. Which is why I’m committed to pointing out opportunities for adding a little magic into your life wherever I see them. So here’s my second PSA of September, in case you missed the first: The Autumnal Equinox is tomorrow, Saturday, September 22nd (at 9:54 PM, if you want to be precise, when the sun pauses, balanced, in its transit). And while day and night aren’t exactly equal (they never are, because: twilight), they’re as close as they’re going to get. (Luck and life are not exact sciences.)

The way I see it, you have nothing to lose by taking out a pen and paper and making a little magic. Write down what you’re grateful for, give thanks for the good things you’re already harvesting in your life, and if you want to throw out some possibilities for the future, who knows? Maybe the world is listening.

The post Looking for Luck in All the Right Places appeared first on Eleni Gage.

After my parents moved our family back to the US from Greece, where we lived for five years, we returned most summers. I know there were mishaps—my sister, Marina, sat on a jellyfish and went temporarily blind from taking anti-seasickness medication, while I got mortally offended when well-meaning, but ill-advised, relatives would comment on my weight, height and changing body. But overall I remember those summers as a golden time, singing camp songs in the car with Marina, making up our own lyrics, and discovering an infinite number of colors the ocean can be.

Working for a travel guide in college, and studying Modern Greek Folklore as my college major, I basically rigged my life so that I could spend part of every summer since I was 14 in Greece, with one exception: the year I gave birth to Amalia on August 26. Now that I have kids of my own running naked on the (so far, jellyfish-free) beach, I consider it a privilege, and, to be honest, a headache, to bring them to Greece every summer. There was the time I blew out the wiring in a 15th-century apartment building on Corfu with my breast pump, the year Amalia burst into tears at the site of a larger-than-life Dora the Explorer balloon, and, last summer, the year the kids gave my seventysomething mom hand, foot, and mouth disease and all her fingernails fell out. Good times.

But I still think of our times in Greece almost daily, and I remember them, traumatic moments notwithstanding, in the same golden haze as my own childhood summers. As we prepare to fly off tomorrow, (may the Force be with us), I want to reprint this little essay that appeared, in Greek, in the Athens Voice last month. For the Greek version, click on this link. For the English, just read on about last summer on Milos:

“Next time, we’re leaving the kids at home,” my husband, Emilio, said at virtually every cove on Milos. We didn’t hit all 70 of the island’s beaches, but we managed to swim off of more than our fair share in the week we spent there last year. I was researching a story for a travel magazine, and had chosen the island in part because of the stunning photos I’d seen of the coastline—the lunar-like landscape of Sarakiniko beach, the freestanding sea cliffs and caves of Kleftiko, and the sandy shores of Fyriplaka. But since the research on Milos was part of our annual trip to Greece from our home in New York, I had not only my adventurous husband, but also our obstreperous toddlers—aged four and one and a half—in tow.

We love our kids, and we love traveling with them. But once we arrived on Milos, Emilio suddenly had visions of swimming from one beach to another all day long, eating when we saw a seaside taverna we liked. And I would have so enjoyed the one-hour hike from the Roman amphitheater below Trypiti down to the waterfront village of Klima, if only we hadn’t had a stroller with us. If it had just been the two of us, maybe we would have rented one of the syrmata on AirBnB, the whitewashed buildings with brightly colored wooden doors on the ground floor and an apartment on top, so that fishermen could dock their boats below and rest easy above. When you have a son eager to practice his newfound walking skills, the idea of a ground floor leading straight into the ocean loses some of its charm.

Everywhere we swam on Milos we saw fit young couples swimming, diving, snorkeling. They would smile at our fat baby boy being pulled around on a raft by his bossy big sister, and I knew what they were thinking “Someday, that will be us.” In the meantime, we were thinking, “Enjoy the moment! Shimmy down the rope ladder to Tsigrado beach! Brave the current at Papafrango! Take risks now, when you have no responsibility. Or at least enjoy having dinner on the water without having to run after a rogue kid.”

But something changed by the end of the week, a feeling that grew stronger after we left, each time I thought back on our trip. Sarakiniko stopped being an otherworldy natural phenomenon, and started being the place where Nico, our son, splashed naked in the sea. The village of Mandrakia was where Amalia dared herself to walk up to the octopuses drying in the sun outside Medousa restaurant. And the cave at Fyriplaka was where we swam in to take selfies, risking our Iphones in search of a Christmas card photo. I realized that Milos isn’t just an ideal island for when you’re young, bikini-ready, and thrill-seeking. It’s simply an ideal island. Maybe one day we’ll come back to Milos without the kids. But for now, I’m awfully glad they got to see such an incredible sight, and that we got to see it with them.

The post Suddenly, Last Summer appeared first on Eleni Gage.

I am trying to practice the art of gratitude. For obvious reasons, what with Thanksgiving around the corner, and also because I’ve been so devastated by the examples of hate that I keep hearing about from friends and reading about in the news. I am trying to practice gratitude for selfish reasons, to light a candle for myself in a time of darkness.

I am grateful for novels which offer escape but also introspection. I keep coming back to an op-ed I read by the brilliant Ann Patchett in which she asserts, “Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.”

I couldn’t agree with her more and it makes me want to hug an English teacher today, to thank him or her teacher for training young minds to imagine the life of another, or even the other. When a person is capable of doing that, they are less likely to think of other humans as entities that should be registered, spat upon or sneered at; they are more likely to pick up another novel than a can of spray paint.

So I am grateful to English teachers everywhere. And, as a novelist, I am grateful to my readers who constantly amaze me with their examples of empathy. Which brings me to a message I received from a Turkish woman living in New York, which I found so beautiful I feel compelled to share it. It was a response to The Ladies of Managua, but also an incredible story in its own right.

She wrote, “My Grandma was your Bela. I can spend days talking about how amazing she was. I can say that she was the strongest person I knew and also a fragile young girl at heart. I can tell you how it was rumored that she was the first woman in Istanbul who wore navy blue with green (when most women her generation could not move past unoriginal color combos such as black and white) and that she read all seven Harry Potter books—just because she was my best friend and she knew how much I had enjoyed them. But none of that would do her any justice. So I simply say, she was all that and a bag of chips.”

“Grandma fell in love at 15 and never quite got over it. He was an up-and-coming opera singer who came from a ‘very good family,’ as she did. After he graduated high school, he won a scholarship to study in Paris. The night before he left for school, he brought his family to Grandma’s house to ask for her hand in marriage. But apparently, a ‘singer’ could never be good enough for her family, who locked her up and would not let her leave the house for a year. Grandma escaped that night to get word to him, but somehow froze when it came time to stand up to her family for good. The two wrote to each other for years but would never be together again.”

“At the end of 2013, Grandma got sick and I spent 13 days in the hospital with her. At some point, she lost consciousness and started hallucinating and calling out names, and called his more than a few times. A couple days later, she came to—though she was clearly no longer at 100%—and started talking about him, saying, I would like to find him when I get out of the hospital. I googled him and found out that he had passed away only recently, at 97. And that he remained incredibly adorable until his last day. The journalist who wrote his obituary wrote that although he was frail and could no longer walk much, his voice was still as strong as ever and that his neighbors loved hearing him practice. We never told her. She passed away a few days later, at age 95.”

“It breaks my heart every day to know that they could have been together for 80 years had they somehow made it. I have always wanted to write Grandma’s story. But here you are, a stranger who has gotten it so right.”

I wrote the author of this beautiful letter to say that although her grandmother’s romance never got a happy ending, she clearly was blessed with another great love—the deep bond she shared with her granddaughter.

I received this letter months ago but I can’t stop thinking about it. It reminds me that, above all, today, I am grateful for love in all its forms.

Hug those who are close to you—twice if they happen to teach English! Reconnect with those who no longer are but who live in your heart. And when you’re feeling particularly dark, look for new love and understanding, in the pages of a book as well as in the world around you.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The post On Love Lost and Found—Counting My Blessings appeared first on Eleni Gage.