316/365 Thanks

Thirty people in the house. No green bean casserole, but the best gravy. I could just drink it out of a glass. Dry stuffing and gravy on my plate and the sweet potato puree with the nuts on top. My favorite. I sit with Mike and his brothers and their wives. We're all shadows of each other. I see a lot of myself in them, different pieces of the mirror thirteen years behind me. Leo sits between me and Mike and his dad comes over with his plate, well, I can't even describe his plate, it's so obscenely full of Thanksgiving.

I think about his ridiculous luck, about when Pete and Steve were 11 and he broke his neck. I think about the layers of experience that happen and how they make a family out of individuals. If I knew what was coming tomorrow, I'd be thinking more about Maeve and what we'll lose and what we'll gain and what will happen. But I don't have a spyglass into the future and all I can see is the moment, the good red wine and John made an apple pie and I have nothing I have to do.

And I think about my brother and his wife and what their Thanksgiving must be like. My siblings and I have entangled emotional lives, Mike always likes to say. And there I do think about the future. Worried and useless, I think about things I'm thankful for. For our cats and our car that makes me feel smart. For getting into the next size down in jeans last month. For my kids and for oak trees and snowflakes and temporal lobe anomalies and tums and my wedding ring and girl scouts and our school and the BBC and how folks change over time and blogging and stained glass windows and neosporin and Pixar movies and the Ozarks and all the things that happen that make fabulous stories later on. And gravy.