The Lens of Gratitude

My sister and I have an inside joke, about someone who "ruins Thanksgiving," or "ruins Christmas." I started it by assuming a mock outraged falsetto, and accusing her of this transgression. The joke is that I am mimicking our mother, when in fact it was usually our mother who did the ruining.

This year's Thanksgiving day wasn't ruined, but it was certainly weird.

The temperature climbed into the high eighties, the sky cerulean. Late in the morning, dueling chainsaws drowned out the birdsong. Our next door neighbor's house has been vacant for months. The owner occasionally visits to water the little orange tree in the otherwise barren back yard. The front yard has some nice landscaping, with pepper trees providing shade and privacy, and a contemplative bench next to a bird of paradise.

We share a one hundred and eighty-foot long chain link fence with this neighbor. Running inside their fence line is a row of trees, which provide privacy to them. Or was a row, anyway. Now they are stumps, and our neighbor's faded yellow house sits naked and exposed. The drought had stressed some of the trees and killed others, but the view before now was preferable.

My wife has always had the ability to help me see the bright side of things. Her perspective is that now, we can plant vegetation or fencing of our choosing. "When one door closes, another door opens," she said. I wondered if the converse was true, that when one door opens, another closes. She assured me that A is a subset of B, but B is not a subset of A.

We worked together to bring a traditional Thanksgiving dinner to the table. When I got back from walking the dogs, I started to prepare the stuffing and then rinsed the bird. When she arose, we seasoned the stuffing, stuffed the bird, and got it in the oven.

The meal would have been perfect, if it weren't for the pumpkin pie that I made. It tasted like an ashtray. I tried to substitute whole milk for sweetened condensed. She noticed, as I added the milk to the can the pumpkin puree came in, and questioned why I was adding fourteen ounces of milk. It seemed like a random amount to her. I believe she may have begun adjusting her expectations around this time.

Our turkey came out magnificent, same with the stuffing and the potatoes. The drippings went into a skillet, and I started making the gravy. I added teaspoon after teaspoon of cornstarch to the drippings, and it refused to thicken. My wife noticed the white powder I was adding was not cornstarch, it was baking soda. Luckily, she had bought chicken stock, which made a quick gravy.

As we said grace over our meal, I was reminded of the 23rd Psalm, the passage which says, "my cup runneth over." It's true. We have so much, that it is needless to become cross over a little scorched pie or lethally salty gravy. It's true that we have been provided for by our Creator, sometimes embarrassingly so.