I dreaded cleaning out my freezer. What I found there was priceless.

When I opened our kitchen freezer one recent morning, a batch of persimmon fruit dropped to the floor and barely missed my toe. Persimmon pulp is a lovely, golden thing, but when frozen, it’s as hard as a hockey puck. I counted myself fortunate after the near miss, but our freezer looked poised for an even bigger landslide. Sighing, I decided to cull the shelves, a chore that seemed about as pleasant as sorting my sock drawer.

Even so, a task I’d dreaded soon made me feel deeply grateful, a sentiment I’m trying to keep alive as another Thanksgiving rolls around. Digging through packages white with frost, I couldn’t believe how many treasures I found. 

I’d forgotten about those two bricks of diced ham, perfect for a pot of split pea soup. In the far reaches of a corner, deep in Arctic sleep, sat two sacks of summer corn. Along with the sausage I’d fished out, I now had the basic ingredients of maque choux, a simple but satisfying corn dish inspired by Creole and Native American cultures, guaranteed to brighten a gray autumn day. 

Other delicacies rolled forward and announced themselves as I ferried the contents of each frigid shelf to the kitchen counter. There was a bright red bag of spaghetti sauce, no doubt just as good as when I’d stirred it to perfection a year ago. In a great stroke of serendipity, I came across a loaf of garlic bread as a complement. Fish fillets from my brother, peaches for a future cobbler, and biscuits ideal for Sunday brunch added to the sumptuous tableau. Orange juice and chicken, peas and bell peppers, ice cream, sherbet, and casseroles spilled into view, too.

All in all, I felt as rich as Midas, and suddenly sated. The way I figured it, we wouldn’t need to stock up at the grocery store for a week or two. 

I also felt a little bit chastened. Why had I groused just moments earlier about managing our surplus of food, which was really a singular blessing?  

My morning dive into our freezer underlined a few basics about gratitude I want to embrace, especially in this season that celebrates thankfulness.

Be alert to abundance rather than absence. A simple fact of life is that we tend to see what we look for. I’d greeted my overflowing freezer as an obstacle, when it was really an opportunity to savor my good fortune. It reminded me of other times when I’ve been oblivious to the wealth of my days. 

Like many others buffeted by inflation, my wife and I have cut back on travel and restaurant outings, a change I first felt as a loss. But the shift has freed more time at home, and we’re connecting more deeply with the nature in our backyard and with loved ones who visit our patio. When we consciously look for what’s good, it reveals itself more often. 

Savor details. In the autumns of my childhood, our holiday coloring books often pictured horns of plenty – those cone-shaped baskets of fruits and vegetables that symbolized Thanksgiving bounty. At first glance, the scene just looked like spilled produce. But in working our crayons over each item – the orange pumpkin, the scarlet grapes, the yellow squash – we came to understand that plenitude lives in particulars, that it’s not one thing but many. 

I reconnected with this truth as I scanned our freezer, called once again to the kind of gratitude that reads life as a story with many layers. Seen this way, gratitude can be an adventure, an exercise not only in piety but also in imagination.

Simplify. Mary Stein, my librarian friend, once told me that after her shelves are culled, patrons check out more books than before. Simplifying the collection allows visitors to better grasp the real gems. That basic principle seems to work at home, too. Cleaning out our freezer inspired me to weed our living room bookcase and winnow my closet. That meant reconnecting with novels I hadn’t read, poetry I wanted to revisit, neckties I’d overlooked, and pants and shirts that now, in being reclaimed, have given me a new wardrobe. In thinning my household, I have, paradoxically, gained more.

Share. The wonder of abundance is that when it’s shared, gratitude grows, which is why holidays like Thanksgiving feature communal feasts. 

I’ve tried to cultivate that practice in other parts of my life. When our freezer rendered ingredients for maque choux, a popular dish in my home state of Louisiana, I thought about how good it would look at the center of a table graced by friends.

As maque choux simmered in our kitchen, I remembered that bag of frozen persimmons that had slid from our freezer, taking me on an unplanned odyssey of gratitude. Hopefully, future blessings won’t have to fall at my feet before I notice them.