Two People's Thanksgiving Day

Our Thanksgiving Day is traditionally quiet - I say that with a wink. KDM's children from previous marriage celebrate the day with their mother every year. We get calls. Even got one as we sat at Mass this morning. KDM had forgotten to turn off the phone: it's not Sunday, you see, and one is not used to turning off the phone on Thursdays.

After the Mass we stopped at Wal-Mart, and bought a young chicken, enough for 3-4 meals for two people. The store was peaceful and quiet, everybody saying "Happy Thanksgiving!" to everybody. We also picked up some framing supplies, and labels and postcard stock etc. for the show. KDM has three more days to get all the pictures framed. He plans on taking the steers to the big livestock market in the big city in our neighbor state for sale this Sunday. There is a brand new, shining, aluminum trailer parked in our pasture, and he has been itching to put it to use.

Quiet day, but no worry. we have stuffing mix and canned cranberry sauce in the pantry. One of our three Le Creuset dutch ovens can turn any ordinary Tyson chicken into a repository of splendid flavors! Seeing my handyman husband so diligently laboring in the workshop, turning out one elegant frame after another, ever refusing to compromise on fine craftsmanship, I resolved to bake him a made-from-scratch apple pie for desert.

For entertainment, I'm going to watch Charlotte's Web on the VHS tape the second grade teacher whose class I visited last week lent me. She was filled with compassion upon learning that I had never read the book on account of my growing up in China. (At second grade I was learning to sing Internationale and reciting Marx and Lenin by chunky paragraphs). For extra charity she threw in the video. I was delighted. I'm almost done with the book and I'm pretty confident that by the time the chicken is ready for the table, and surely before we settle on the couch for the movie, I will have finished reading it. (The story is so deliciously written by E. B. White that one feels obliged to slurp while reading it.)

KDM sometimes would give in to my plea for watching a movie together. Most of the time he would promptly check out at the 35 minute mark, or thereabouts, and I would not notice until his snoring breaks my concentration on the what's going on on the screen. But by that point I would be so engrossed in the movie I would just let him be, sometimes lending my laps for a pillow. It is a pattern we both have grown comfortable with. Is this time going to be different? We shall see.