As I write this, the sun is softly setting over Columbia County. Predictions of rain earlier this week were pushed back, day by day so that today, Thanksgiving Day, turned out not to be gray and overcast but bright, sunny and almost unseasonably warm.

It was a great day for Thanksgiving, which has become one of my favorite days of the year. Our friend Lionel has arrived to spend Thanksgiving with us, as he has for each of the years he has lived in America, having emigrated from Australia. Later, our friends Larry and Alicia will be arriving and we will be surrounded by the lights of two dozen candles while the house will be full of the smell of roasting turkey and baking bread.

Waking this morning, there were a hundred things for which I was grateful, not the least that I woke up, which is a good place to start, any day. Once upon a time, I didn’t like Thanksgiving. It was a holiday fraught with difficulties. Football games never ended to coincide with my mother’s turkey coming out of the oven; it seemed to fall to me to attempt to convince my male relatives to pry themselves away from the television before my mother began to cry.

I was rarely successful. And my mother would go to her bedroom, weep and then return to bravely face a dinner she felt was ruined. It never was but this was the Thanksgiving game in our house, not, I suspect, completely different from other dramas in other homes. Tripp’s favorite movie is HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS, a comic yet tragic but real look at going home for the holidays.

My father had a major heart attack carving the turkey one year. I can still remember the green shirt he was wearing that day and the chair into which slumped after being helped out of the turkey, into which I recall he fell.

James Babl, a very good therapist, who I helped send to Greece more than once, asked me why I was surprised I disliked Thanksgiving. So, I decided to make Thanksgiving my day – and it is now my day. I love to cook and love to gather people around me. Some years it is big; some years it’s small but I gather around me people I love.

Down in New York, Macy’s Parade went off without a hitch, it seemed from what I saw on NBC this morning. I found that a relief as there was noise earlier this week about terrorist activity on Thanksgiving. It is now a constant in our lives, this thought another strike will come but, despite the “chatter” among Al Qaeda, we are all gathering together to celebrate those things for which we are grateful.

And those things are many. There is a relationship that centers me and makes me laugh. There is work that I enjoy. There are friends around me. I feel somehow that I am living more at the center of myself than I ever have. I love sitting here, writing, watching Claverack Creek flow by while Canadian geese paddle in the water and, far off, are the sounds of rifles as people hunt. Larry and Alicia are coming for dinner. We are sure to laugh.

I find myself closing my eyes and wishing good thoughts toward all the men and women who are on military duty all over the world, attempting to create a peace that will survive. I am not comfortable with this place we are in but I acknowledge those soldiers doing their duty bravely, for reasons they feel are right.

Our impulses are good; our means seem suspect to me. But I am grateful that we seem to be able to continue to have a healthy dialogue about our means and motives. And I am delighted that we are coming up on an election that promises a more than interesting debate on the future directions of this country. I am looking forward to it.

I wish all of you who may read this my thanks for taking the time to peruse my words.

May your holidays be happy. Stay safe and well.