A brief, distracted note on Thanksgiving

Yesterday Thanksgiving, & then & now, yawning out for a week ahead, we are in a hotel room two miles from our friend’s home, where we were not welcome. Turkey dinner was replaced with a trip to Safeway for greens & some deli chicken salad. We toasted, Stef her cabernet in a Styrofoam cup, me my winter ale, & we ate our dinner in our king bed here at La Quinta. I jawed the ears off my family prior, & took the weight of the situation, & balanced its circumstances with its calendar day. In the end, gratitude stands out in stark relief against the unfortunate backdrop we’ve been given here. But we’ve this roof & this bed & each other, & we neither enduringly suffer the abuses of the other, we neither acquiesce, we neither will resign ourselves to the venom we’ve seen here, or the sheer thoughtlessness, or the disregard for the fragile carriage of a friendship. Our values, these days, are shaken to their core, & we continue to mine & furrow into depths of ourselves & one another that we’ve never been called upon to exhaust. In spite of it, though, we grow, together. The trivial slips away from us, the excess loses its grasp. When left to ourselves under the most pressing & stark of circumstance, we continue to love one another, & I know no fonder gratitude than that. What one envisions on Thanksgiving—that communion with family & friends, that auratic joy that hangs light & buoyant about the place, the light & warmth, the low hum of conversation & laughter, the sound of glass clinking & (metal) forks scraping (actual) plates—are expressions in their own ways of something fundamental that we find, with some imaginative contortion, right here in this hotel room. Perspective is its own lesson.

& Orcas, Orcas seems a home to us from this distance. We want to return. We don’t have certain of those securities in place that make such a trip burgeon with a sense of abundant comfort, but we carry with us that which we carried here, that which attended to our long journey to the island in the first place, & we are borne along by it replete & whole. & banalities they may be, but we carry, too, such rich gratitude for the ongoing love & support of our family & friends, without whom we would not be here to place in bright context these unfurling & fugitive days.

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