On the edge of Baldwin, Wisconsin, just down the road from a dairy farm and a stone’s throw from Main Street—lived June Everly in the same yellow farmhouse where she’d spent nearly every year of her 82. The place had seen it all: births, funerals, holidays, power outages, and her husband Harold’s famous Sunday pancakes.
June had always kept a little notebook tucked in her kitchen drawer. Not for recipes or shopping lists, but for something she called her “thank-you pages.” Every night before bed, she’d jot down three things she was thankful for. Some nights it was big. “Katie made it through surgery just fine.” Other times it was smaller. “The bluebirds came back to the feeder.” But she never missed a night. Not even after Harold passed, and not even on the loneliest days that followed.
That fall, Baldwin had one of those weeks where the skies stay gray for days and the cold sets into your bones. June’s roof sprang a leak, her car wouldn’t start, and her arthritis flared up so bad she couldn’t open a jar of applesauce. “What on earth is there to be thankful for today?” she muttered to herself, rubbing her wrist at the kitchen table.
But then she glanced at the window.
Outside, her neighbor’s boy, Luke, was scraping frost from her walkway with a plastic shovel. He wasn’t asked. He just came. June smiled. That night in her notebook, she wrote, “1. Luke. 2. A warm house. 3. Still here.”
Gratitude, she realized, wasn’t just about counting blessings when life was rosy. It was what gave her the strength to keep going when it wasn’t. And somehow, even on her hardest days, there was always something, however small, to hold onto.
These days, folks in Baldwin still talk about the old lady in the yellow farmhouse who kept her kitchen light on every night, rain or shine. It became a quiet symbol of hope, of habit, of faithfulness in things unseen.
And tucked in a drawer, worn and weathered, June’s notebooks rest. A lifetime of thankfulness, written one day at a time.