gratitude

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the everchanging view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold.

--Carole King

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays--I associate it with family and warmth and food and laughter. Amazingly, I've never had to make my own Thanksgiving dinner. Most years I've eaten at my mother's house (where I wish I could be this year, as well), and there have been a few wonderful and memorable Thanskgivings with Gerald's family in Alabama. (The contrast between the two is fodder for another post at some point...)

This year we're far away from both of those gatherings, but we'll still be celebrating with family. We had planned to go up to Marysville to spend the day with my uncle and aunt in their house on the sound. Plans changed, however, when my 93-year-old grandmother took a bad fall in Rochester and had to be hospitalized for fractures of her pelvis. My uncle headed to Rochester, and my aunt changed her plans to have dinner with her stepsister in Olympia--so we're tagging along for that dinner.

I toyed with just staying here and cooking our own Thanksgiving dinner for the first time, but events conspired against me. On Monday morning we woke up to find that the compressor had gone out on our refrigerator (well, our landlords' fridge), and Sears won't be able to get a repair person out until next week. No fridge makes any kind of serious cooking a whole lot harder, since you can't do any prep in advance.

So no maple pecan pumpkin pie this year. No sweet potato and turnip gratin (the yummiest dish I've ever made for a Thanksgiving dinner). No sweet potato casserole. We'll be toting a couple of store-bought pies instead...

We'll have to make up for this over the winter holidays--we'll have a big latke dinner, of course. But maybe we'll also have a Thanksgiving-style dinner that we make ourselves, complete with all of those favorite recipes, and some friends over to share in the bounty.

In the meantime, we're off to Olympia for the day. May your day be a rich tapestry full of warmth and love and gratitude.