Grateful, on the Way to Something New

A story about a tree

Last Thanksgiving, near Vail, I brought an idea to my family that I'd been thinking about for a while and never mentioned. I had leftover scraps of fabric from a local fabric shop, free samples my daughter uses to decorate her fairy houses. We were hosting Thanksgiving with our best friends, Leslie and John, and before they arrived, I cut the fabric into strips, set out some markers, and decided I'd bring the idea up at dessert.

After dinner, we wrote down what we were grateful for and tied the strips of fabric to a little tree in our yard.

Almost a year later, the fabric pieces with our words of gratitude are still out there. They made it through the winter. They made it through such a dry summer that our grass turned to straw, and I found myself worried about a forest fire starting in the national forest just behind us. Now they're holding up in the rain. Somewhere along the way, the birds discovered them, and started pulling threads loose to line their nests. This summer, I left birdseed and fresh water out each morning, and the birds took to the tree more than I had expected. Some days there were twenty to thirty birds crowded in the branches of the tree and in the grass just beneath it. I like to think the tree recognizes it has a purpose. We now affectionately call it the Gratitude Tree.

I'm taking that same idea to Headwater Athletics.

This Tuesday is our first Big Chill. From here on, every practice will start the same way. A kid will write down one good thing, or tell it to me if writing feels hard that day, and tie it to a thread of their own. We're collecting them as we go. Somewhere out there is a tree in Boulder that's perfect and will hold our gratitude scraps. We haven't found it yet, but we will.

Tonight, a few days out from that first practice, I sat down to write what I'd put on my own piece of fabric.

And I thought of my daughter first. She's the reason any of this exists. I am so grateful I get to be her mom.

I thought of my dad, one of my biggest cheerleaders. He tells me often how proud he is of me. He makes me feel like my work is important and has value, and that my dreams are within reach. I always feel deeply loved by him.

I thought of Dave, my stabilizing force through this whole startup. There were moments I thought the whole thing might go up in flames, moments I thought I simply couldn't do it. He always believed in me anyway.

I thought of Leslie, my best friend, who was there that very first night, when this was still just an idea I'd been carrying around and hadn't yet said out loud.

I thought of the parents and coaches and total strangers who found my posts on Facebook and stopped scrolling long enough to tell me what the water meant to their own kids. I never expected that, and I certainly never expected to become a writer because of it, but somewhere in the last year, it happened.

I thought of Kim and Skyler, two coaches who are thinking carefully, right now, about what that first day should feel like for a kid walking into a brand new group, wondering if they'll find their people.

I thought of Paul, who opened a pool to a program that didn't exist yet, and believed in it before there was much to see. I thought of this whole town, Boulder, which has shown up for us again and again since before we had anything to show for ourselves.

And then I thought of my grandfather.

He gave me the poem this whole ritual borrows its spirit from, Desiderata, the one that ends by saying that despite everything, it's still a beautiful world. He never told me why that line mattered so much to him. He never spoke of his past at all. Whatever he fled as a boy, sometime in the early part of the last century, he carried alone, quietly, for the rest of his life. It wasn't until years after he was gone that my dad took a DNA test, and pieces of the story began to surface on their own. Poland. Russia. The Balkans. Even Greece, which surprised all of us. My grandfather lived out his later life crippled in a wheelchair with a glass eye, and somehow, impossibly, his humor and his spirit never once left him. I still think about him. How much a person can survive, and still choose, every day, to be gentle and funny and warm.

All of that, when I finally sat down to write it, turned out to be one word.

Community.

On Tuesday, a group of kids who don't know each other yet will tie their first threads to a tree we haven't found. We'll keep every one, the way that scrap of fabric from Thanksgiving is still out there holding on, through snow and drought and now the rain.

Somewhere, there's a tree big enough for what we're about to start, Tuesday, the search begins. If you know of a special tree in Boulder County, let us know.

The Big Chill begins Tuesday, September 22, and runs every Monday from 3:30-4:20 (Ages 6-8) , 4:30 to 5:30 (Ages 8-13) and every Tuesday from 5:30 to 6:30 (Ages 8-13), through December 14, 2026 (no class on BVSD holidays).

If your kid is curious, drop-ins are always welcome.

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