Full of Grace

• Thanksgiving with Martha’s family is always a loud, blustery affair.  Traditionally arguments center around why the Cowboys always get to play on Thanksgiving instead of the Jets, Bills, Bears or Giants depending on who’s doing the arguing.  But the biggest argument is about whether stuffing should have cranberries, or not.  Even though the hosts make both kinds to please everyone, the argument still dominates the table.  But this year the adult kids of the hosts decided to make a drinking game out of it.  Every time someone said craisins or cranberries, everyone had to take a drink.  Needless to say, everyone was pretty mellow (or asleep) by the time dessert rolled around.

• My experiment of growing salad in the basement is going well.  These two flower boxes are providing me with a fresh personal salad everyday.

• Martha asked me to get an old oak desk out of the basement.  It was too big to get up the stairs so after stripping the salvageable wood and drawers, I took a sledgehammer to it and just wailed away.   What a great anxiety/stress reliever!    I highly recommend it.

• Recreating Friday movie night when the girls were little.  I know you can’t go back in time but all of us cuddling on the couch, sharing popcorn and watching Frozen came pretty darned close.
  
  
• Beautiful weather for a Black Friday hike in the woods which reminded me of this poem:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any--lifted from the no

of all nothing--human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e.cummings