to be thankful

The problem with Canadian Thanksgiving being so early in the year is that the trees have not had a chance to fully turn colour. Although — as Pd pointed out, as we were driving along the Niagara Escarpment — that might be an illusion because a lot of the trees we were looking at turned out, upon closer inspection, to be conifers. Nonetheless, here is a picture of my in-laws' deck, replete with squash; that is the closest to a Thanksgiving image I could come up with today.

And actually, yesterday the temperature was somewhere in the mid-twenties, and today it's in the high teens, so it doesn't feel much like late fall anyway.


This year has been a bit of a medical annus horribulus for our family. Just over a year ago, my mother-in-law went into the hospital with severe abdominal pains and came out with a diagnosis of cancer (thankfully she is in remission now); my father was hit by a drunk driver (not yet fully recovered, but healing) my father in law was in an ATV accident and lost the tip of two fingers (thereby gifting the rest of us a verbal punchline that will never get old). And, of course, there is the Kidlet: by the time she left the hospital in mid-September, she had spent a cumulative seven of her nine months in a hospital. March and April, essentially.

Every family has weeks, months like this. We are not unique. We are, however, incredibly lucky — that we have all survived, more or less; that everyone is still alive, relatively intact (give or take a finger or two ... you see?), reasonably healthy and hale. So I think that this year, as we gave thanks, it was pretty obvious what we were thankful for.



Health, kids, hope. And turkey duck. What more could anyone want?