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Thankfulness is one of the themes of November, and I’m blessed that my cornucopia is overflowing with things for which I’m grateful

As every year, they are, in order, God, family and friends.

This year, I am especially grateful for the time I got to spend with a former Grand Forks Herald coworker and longtime friend, Lori, a North Dakota native who lives on the East Coast, and for my family who gave me the opportunity to visit her and to cross leaf peeping off of my bucket list.

Part of the trip included spending time with Lori in New York City, where she lives and works during the week, and part of it was spent with her in upstate New York, where she owns a farmstead that is her weekend respite.

Ann Bailey / Agweek

During the trip upstate, besides visiting farmers markets, walking through woods vibrant with reds and yellows, we visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Norman Rockwell, more than any other artist, was someone whose paintings the farm family in which I grew up could relate to because they depicted everyday Americans’ lives like ours.

Each month we looked forward to the arrival of the Saturday Evening Post magazine, which featured a Rockwell painting on the cover.

Ann Bailey / Agweek

Many of the museum paintings were familiar to me because I remembered them from the magazines and one of my mom’s books of his paintings. Others that were painted before my time were new to me and I enjoyed reading the narratives about them.

The paintings that most moved me when I was a child and still do so were his paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. The 1943 paintings Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom From Fear were based on Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address.

Ann Bailey / Agweek

The paintings were reproduced for four consecutive weeks in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943 with narration beside them by Booth Tarkington, Will Durant, Carlos Bulosan and Stephen Vincent Benet, who were well-known thinkers of the day.

I don’t know specifically when or where I had seen the Four Freedom paintings before, because Roosevelt made his speech 17 years before I was born and Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms 15 years before I was born. I’m guessing that they were in my mom’s book or I had seen reproductions in my elementary social studies book or both.

Ann Bailey / Agweek

Viewing the paintings at the Norman Rockwell Museum about a month before Thanksgiving was a physical reminder for me of how deeply I am blessed to be a recipient of them and to work to make them available to others who haven’t had the opportunities that I have had.

Lori’s qualities of generosity, thoughtfulness and the way she treated everyone she met — from Uber drivers to coffee shop baristas to fellow subway passengers — during my New York trip demonstrated to me how much simple acts can make a positive difference in mine and other’s lives.

I can strive to do the same at my home in rural North Dakota, by my owns acts of kindness like taking a casserole to the home of a neighbor whose family member has died, attending a fundraiser for a community member who is ill and attending Mass at my church on Sunday and living out the Gospel message during the week. I can respect the views of other believers and non-believers and their right to have and to voice those views. I can comfort a child, console someone who is facing a serious illness and give monetary and emotional support to people with an uncertain financial future.

Wishes for a blessed Thanksgiving enriched by the Four Freedoms and the resolve to share those with others throughout the year.

Ann Bailey lives on a farmstead near Larimore, North Dakota, that has been in her family since 1911. You can reach her at anntbailey58@gmail.com.