Thanksgiving
Thanks for a big brown bird, soft and crunchy stuffing, sweet yams, a tart cranberry relish and ample bottles of wine. Thanks for a fresh green salad and don’t mind if I skip the smashed potatoes, rolls and that baked broccoli-cheese traditional. Who would notice?
Thanks for bringing this group together year upon year, through marriages, visiting parents, babies, toddlers, widowed mothers, t’weens, divorces, rearrangements, and— for some time now— only one Grandma left. Maybe sometime we’ll be the grandmas. Will that add to or take away? Yes, well, don’t anyone hold their breath.Thanks for all the spills, the misses, and fine nights of charades.
This is what my Thanksgivings have looked like for most of thirty years. A tight and cozy table at a friend’s house with once-a-year linen and platters upon platters. It must have been a whole year between each one of these food-a-thons, but I’m surprised they add up so high.
Thanks for good fortune in our own lives. We’re fortunate that our sadnesses have been transitory: real but not chronic. Long suffering has stayed distant from this table. Death has come only for the older ones. We’ve come to know that’s not always the case and so we’ve grown so very grateful.
Our children…they already grew up so fast. Now that we see the rate of spin, we know their lives will fly right by at an increasing rate. We know that the next ten years might have some harsh surprises for them—for us. No rush, no rush—but no slowing it down.
Take a few moments before dessert. Take a basket, choose teams and try to recollect the movies ofthe year, the book titles nobody read and the songs that separate the generations. Let me hold onto this enormous good and gather in all the smells and tastes, the warmth and the story, the hopes, the disappointments and the familiar smiles. Let me taste them like another course, no matter how full I am. Four and twenty lifetimes baked in a pie. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.



