Thanks Giving Eve

Minestrone scent curls to living room—family dinner for the day before Thanksgiving. 

Thus I greet my travelers whose accumulated miles this day are more than Pilgrims could travel in a life-time to eat more foods than grown locally and to enjoy more diversity beneath one roof than Pilgrims allowed on their shores.

We are bigger in our gathering: We reject Pilgrim occupation of land not their own.  We condemn betrayal of native generosity.  Tomorrow we join them only in eating free-range turkey, happy food, so we need not chew and swallow anger from our brutality.

We eat our history in the new world: Italian today and American tomorrow, friends before and enemies after, inviting in now and killing later. 

We plan our future is better than guns and germs and steel because we have dug in and we have seen the promised land and we forgive it and them as we wish to be forgiven by it and them still.

It is time: Cars pull into the driveway and line the street. Sugar-free apple pies and ice cream, banana bread, fruit salad, cucumbers, creamed onions and cranberry sauce climb the stairs to fill the table and contribute to the nosegay of this holiday.

In Plymouth, some Americans gather to mourn the past and in the Middle and Near East some United Nations' forces have a minute to share stories this evening here and in other places they have been.  I give them thanks.

In my family, those not in Pennsylvania are attending a birth in Ohio, the first baby girl to join our family in 61 years.  I know because I was the last one.  I smell the minestrone soup, grateful, indeed, to have home and family, cat and tablet—this big old desktop of a writing pad—my soup pot calling me into attendance and sunshine down the way.

Posted at Poets United where Ella asks us to write about gifts in "Wonder Wednesday #10 Gifts ."  This was already written, but it will do til I have the gift of time to give.


Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast