What I'm Actually Grateful For this Thanksgiving

Not the Instagram Version

This year, I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude—the serious kind, the funny kind, and the sort you don’t usually see filtered through Instagram’s soft glow. This year felt like an overstuffed suitcase: family visits (all good), unexpected crises, small joys, near-miss disasters, and a few victories I’m still a little stunned actually happened.

We began with travel—Los Angeles, the UK, New York. In April, we drove to LA for Easter, where my son and his girlfriend hosted what could only be described as a flawless Italian feast with her lovely family. It looked quirky Instagram-perfect, and it was, but the moment that stuck with me came earlier: a trip to his favorite Italian grocery in Altadena. The store had miraculously survived the January wildfires that tore through the area and up the coast toward the Palisades. Driving past charred communities on our way there was sobering in the extreme. And yet, just three months later, the resilience in the air was palpable. LA people know how to phoenix their way through whatever mother nature throws at them.

Meanwhile, my husband, Timo, had been grappling with health issues no doctor could diagnose—three months of uncertainty and growing weakness. I drove us back from Los Angeles with him dozing beside me, and by the time we returned home, he was fading fast. A week later he was admitted to the hospital with sepsis. We were unbelievably lucky we hadn’t boarded our flight to the UK that week to visit his elderly mother and my father. Thanks to modern medicine, and perhaps the additional medicinal properties of the homemade focaccia I delivered warm to his hospital bed (he’s Italian; the appetite never quits), he recovered quickly and was released five days later.

Summer became a season of visitors and recuperation. By mid-August he was strong enough for me to travel to the UK first to spend quality time with my octogenarian dad. Timo joined later, and we made the rounds to see both parents before he (somewhat miraculously unless you know him) took off for a previously postponed hiking trip in southern Italy, followed by a visit with his mother and extended family in Campania. Flight delays and train strikes aside, we both made it there and back!

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I was determined—perhaps stubbornly—to finish the novel I’d been working on for two and a half years. Anyone who’s written a book knows the masochistic art of hunching over a laptop for hours, wrestling plotlines, silencing self-doubt, and occasionally treating the imaginary characters as more demanding than the real ones. But I’m a deadline-driven creature, and I kept at it whenever I could carve out time. Despite a rejuvenating fall trip to New York—museums, brownstone wandering, much-needed youngest son and friend time—I screeched across the finish line and met my November 1st publishing goal.

Back home, Timo sprang back into his real estate business and into life in general, as if someone had wound him up with a new battery pack. My desk calendar quickly filled up with my own stuff and his social whirl and invitations for me to accompany him. It sounds intense, and sometimes it is, but it’s offset by our Northern California lifestyle — fresh, healthy food, morning dog walks in the Petaluma hills overlooking Sonoma Mountain, and impromptu drives to the coast for beach strolls or hikes through oak-studded parks.

This fall, I surrendered any illusion of order: I’m often reading five—sometimes six—books at once, baking things simply because there’s seasonal fruit in the house, freezing half of it, and calling it good. I’ve stopped planning so aggressively for the future and instead taken satisfaction in the essentials: I finished my novel. I helped keep the people I love alive, well, fed and laughing. I even relaxed my housekeeping standards, which I consider an advanced spiritual practice.

The photos on Instagram do make life in Sonoma County look rosy—and sometimes it is. But this year was also marked by near natural disasters, actual health crises, and the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping going. I’m doing my best to significantly reduce sugar and alcohol (which is, frankly, boring) but has given me the stamina to show up for all of it.

And so: gratitude. For resilience. For people who survive wildfires and sepsis. For focaccia. For messy bookshelves, airport delays and unfinished to-do lists. For family and friends and community, the real stuff that never makes it to Instagram—but shapes a life all the same.

That said . . . Here’s my

Holiday Survival Guide for Creative People

The holidays can be the hardest time to be a creative person. One minute you’re an introspective writer, artist, or musician; the next you’re expected to transform into an extroverted host or dinner-table performer—while your routines go up in flames and someone inevitably asks, “So, how’s that little book release going?” (For the record, my family doesn’t do this. We actually talk about each other’s projects pretty well. But I know not everyone is so lucky.)

Creatives don’t just get tired during the holidays—they get overstimulated. The noise, the emotional dynamics, the 24/7 togetherness: it’s enough to short-circuit the very system that normally produces ideas.

My best advice? Keep one small creative habit alive. Not the whole routine—that’s a recipe for disappointment, and I say that from experience this year. Just a single thread: a daily paragraph, a sketch, a few chords, a voice memo. The creative mind reads this as stability.

In my family, we’re full of creatives, so gatherings always include moments of strategic solitude—walks in the fresh air, a warm bath, quiet corners, micro-breaks to reset the senses. These small, periodic downshifts keep the holidays from feeling like a sensory flood.

Slow down. Enjoy the ordinary moments. And when it’s all over, plan a gentle re-entry ritual for your creative life—something that says, “We’re back.” Your imagination will thank you.

Floating in the Middle in the World

My new novel is officially out there on its journey into the world thanks to international early readers and some awesome and encourging first reviews. Please do post a review if you’ve read and enjoyed this book.

Here’s the latest & greatest by M. Anki (thank you, M, I am so grateful!) :

5.0 out of 5 stars Stays With You After The Last Page.

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2025

Format: Paperback

“Floating in the Middle by Frances Rivetti, is one of those rare books that feels like a gift- you reach the end and immediately wish you could erase it from your memory just to experience the delight of discovering it all over again. Rivetti writes with an ease and a quiet confidence that makes the erudition feel like gentle guidance rather than display. She opens doors to so many fascinating subjects that when you find yourself wanting to dive deeper into each one. The ancient understory of the Sonoma Coast, the forest foods we can forage eat or use as medicine, the history of the Grateful Dead , even the secretive world of Black Widow spiders. The novels seven vivid characters offer someone for every reader to connect with and addition of Raven and his mother brings another spark to the story Rivetti’s writing is wonderfully realistic, her characters fully believable her language often breathtaking. At one point she describes a tiny butterfly tattoo “surfacing beneath a stack of silver bracelets” a small example of the imagery that makes the book feel both intimate and cinematic. There is also a sweet grounding invitation through out the novel to slow down and really analyze climate change and what we can do to help. You can maybe even try a few of the recipes her characters share along the way. I highly recommend ‘Floating in The Middle’ Rivetti has created a story rich with curiosity, warmth, wonder and suspense one that stays with you long after the last page.”

I read at Petaluma Historic Library and Museum this week for the inaugural meeting of the museum’s new quarterly reader’s group. It was a wonderful gathering and in-depth conversation into the common threads between my two non-fiction books and my three novels, all of which are set in Northern California.

The museum has a great little gift store and lots of books by local authors and of local interest. It’s a great place to buy all of my books and to boost the museum coffers as well as supporting local authors. The museum, on Fourth Street, in downtown Petaluma is open Thurs, Friday, Saturday and Sunday 10 to 4pm.

Floating in the Middle is popping up in bookstores also. Look for it on the local bookshelf in Copperfield’s Petaluma and if you don’t see it please ask booksellers to order more copies so it stays in stock.

You can order Floating in the Middle in print and as an ebook wherever you buy your books around the world and especially helpful to me as an indie author/publisher, directly from my printer/distributer.

Here are links to purchase directly in the USA and UK:

Click here to buy print copy/copies of Floating in the Middle in the USA

Click here to buy print copy/copies of Floating the in Middle in the UK

I’m grateful you’re here—reading, living out loud alongside me, and making this space feel alive in a world that often moves too fast.

With appreciation, and a wish for gentleness in the days ahead.

Frances xo