Season's greetings to you and blessings upon you!

It's Thanksgiving week. Around here we are starting the week with well above average temperatures and look like we're going to have snow cover for Thanksgiving. The thirty-day forecast suggests that snow cover may last until January thaw or what passes for spring in our North Country. That's why we're behind schedule posting this. Yesterday was committed to changing the oil and checking out the snow blower (and cleaning up most of the mess I made in the garage) as well as cleaning up more fallen leaves plus the dead plants from the front porch planters that will soon (before the soil freezes) hold Christmas angels and greenery. By Thanksgiving, the "back yard" may look like this:

November usually brings a "dusting" of snow

Photo by J. Harrington

We've already started shopping for Christmas presents and received our first "holiday greetings" card. The weekend after Thanksgiving is traditionally when we put up lights. A pair of poinsettias is perched on the piano already. My long-standing dedication to deferring all Christmas activities until after Thanksgiving is being eroded by retail temptation, especially since the family is going to do our best to honor the Black Friday / Cyber Monday boycott from Thanksgiving until December 2, shopping only local and with cash (if stores still accept that😉).

We Ain't Buying It

Today we're planning on changing the oil in the tractor without increasing the mess in the garage, we hope. Then we get to mostly sit and watch what Mother Nature delivers late Tuesday and early Wednesday. We promise not to complain at all if the storm misses us entirely. That would give us something else to be grateful for come Thursday.

Many decades ago we lived a little north of the former Plimouth Plantation. It looks as though they've been increasing recognition of Wampanoag contributions to the first celebration since I moved to Minnesota. I'm please to see that during this Native American Heritage month. Check out Plimoth Patuxet this week but first, enjoy Joy Harjo's Thanksgiving poem:

Perhaps the World Ends Here

By Joy Harjo 

 

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

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