Perhaps six months from now, none of this will feel particularly remarkable. The house will be settled enough. Soccer will simply be what we do three nights a week. I will understand the rhythms of the board and will have finished my class, and I will no longer need to think quite so hard about every ordinary piece of our days.

There are seasons in this life when miles stretch longer than we’d like—deployments, TDYs, or even the ordinary separations of being scattered far from the people who know us best. In those seasons, I’ve learned that gratitude behaves like a seed: small, intentional, sometimes planted in rocky ground.