Ocean Pines Thanksgiving

We are spending a quiet Thanksgiving at the beach. Fall has been filled with travel, rehearsals, and sadly, a funeral for a beloved family member.  My husband and I celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary at a dinner shared with wonderful friends. There have been meetings and interviews, a new church choir director, drum corps trips, a good report on a mammogram, a run to the emergency vet for one of our dogs, and, Lord have mercy, the election of a convicted felon who plans to govern this country with a rogue’s gallery of spectacularly unqualified appointees. This fall has been a lot.

I’ve done my share of Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings. Growing up, when my mother’s family descended on our house with their various children and grandchildren, chaos ensued. Card tables extended across two rooms, cocktails and crockpots covered every available surface, youngsters ran around high on Hawaiian Punch and much shouting and laughter filled the house. Over the years, I’ve hosted Thanksgiving for a more sedate crowd of adults, coming home from school and spending hours prepping the night before.

This year is different and that’s ok. It doesn’t always have to be a Hallmark movie. I have a scaled down meal ready to cook when we feel like eating. We raked 20 bags of pine needles yesterday and then went out to one of our favorite restaurants. At the end of our meal, the waitress came over and said someone at another table wanted to know if I was an orchestra director from York. It was a student I taught probably 30 years ago who still remembered me. How wonderful.

While we were working in the yard, the gentleman who lives across the street walked by with Wendy, his emotional support dog,  Steven is a good soul who deals with some mental health challenges. He stopped to chat, oversharing a bit about his recent surgery but also said he missed seeing us this fall and was so glad we were here for Thanksgiving. That was wonderful, too.

I received some good writing news in the last week which I will probably shamelessly share at some point. Getting those emails were just the lift I needed to get me back to working on stories again.

Out the window, a blue heron wanders around on the little island across from the house that we call “duck beach.” Named so because in the summer, a mother duck and her family arrive there every morning like clockwork for refreshment and preening. The heron pokes around in the shallow water, prospecting for a snack. It raises its head at some sound and then lifts those majestic wings to  soar into the sky, heading east toward the ocean, blissfully unaware of its incredible beauty.

So much to be grateful for if we look for it.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends.