Day Seventy-Four, Happy Thanksgiving on Thursday Night

While thinking about what to write on Thanksgiving, I imagined I would write about something I was thankful for, or maybe a list, like 100 things I am thankful for, or share some heartwarming story about a wonderful part of my life. And maybe it will turn out that way, but I think I will just let it be what it will be.

Is it an accident that the birthdays of three people I love best in the world fall around Thanksgiving? This is such a time of celebration for us, and a great reminder of what I am truly thankful for in my life. Not just those whose birthdays fall in November but it reminds me of all the dear ones in my life and how much better my life is because of them. I am nestled in a cozy cocoon of family and friends that I am better for knowing. They ease the hard times and brighten the good times. They inspire and support and help me to grow and be the best person I can. Without them I would be a desert, desolate and dry. So there is something I am thankful for.

Thanksgiving is such a funny Holiday, I can remember as a child learning all about the Pilgrims and how they scraped by that first winter, almost not making it at all. How the Indians (as they were called back then) graciously and nobly helped the wretched pilgrims out, teaching them how to plant food so it would grow, sharing their knowledge with the outlanders to ensure their survival in that new world. We made handprint turkeys and sang "Over the River and Through the Woods", the only Thanksgiving song I ever learned. We gathered for the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, on some years being made to share a thankful moment from our lives (somehow I always choked on that one, even though it was obvious it was coming). Somehow at those dinners I always felt like an outsider, not really part of the family (that is a long, complicated story better told another time) but tolerated and allowed to tag along with those that were included. Things have changed so much, now we are told that that first Thanksgiving was not at all the way it was portrayed back then. I think I have read somewhere that it wasn't celebrated the way we celebrate now until well into the 1800s. We spend our celebration with the same friends we have spent it with for the last 10 years, a gathering of friends that meet a few times a year to share the love and friendship that has grown over the years.

Now, two hours later it is midnight and I am ready to turn in, my mind is still full of mighty ponderings and I am sure I will toss and turn while trying to work out the deeper functions of the universe. I am thankful for my family, my husband, my daughter, my son, my sisters and mother, my father and aunties and uncles, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, all the way back to the beginnings of life that changed and evolved eventually bringing me here, where I am now. I am thankful for my community, the friends that enrich my life, I am thankful and grateful to be alive on this planet, this wondrous, beautiful planet with mysteries untold. I am thankful for funny things like our dishwasher, washing machine and dryer. I am thankful for cozy warm covers on a marshmallow bed that keep me snug all night long. I am thankful to be me, living my life here and now with all the joys and sorrows it brings, thankful for life, thankful to be. Goodnight.

Dún Dúcathair, Inis Mór, Ireland