I’m at home right now, though it’s a new home. My parents just moved for the third time in ten years. My childhood home is housing someone else’s dreams now. I went back to look at it once. I wished I had the courage to knock on the door and look at the changes they’ve made. I wonder if they’ve replaced the linoleum in the kitchen and found my name scrawled in large wobbly letters on the bare floor.
I’ve not yet seen the new house, they bought it while I was in the UK and I’ve been too busy lately for any more prolonged trips. Apparently there’s a wood fired sauna so I’ll have to bring my bathing suit. Normally you do a sauna nude but I’m definitely not going to do that around my parents. That would be weird.
I’ve scheduled this post to publish after dinner, when we’re all sitting around the TV feeling like the turkey, picking a show to watch and wearing pants with elastic waistbands. We’ll probably wake up late tomorrow and have pancakes for breakfast. Leftovers for dinner. More TV watching. I’ll go for a walk with my mom and we’ll try to avoid talking politics with my raging right wing uncle. Three days sounds like a very long time to avoid talking politics with my raging right wing uncle. Sigh.
It’ll be good, though, to see and show love to my family. My parents are very close to my heart, though I think they might not feel that way. I think because I don’t call home often that they think I don’t think of them often.
And yet It will be good to return to my little studio apartment, write more, read more, meet my beloved clients, live in the reassuringly homogenous pocket of ladies I adore. Soon is coming the season of quiet indoor socializing, hot tea and hot toddy’s, exquisite hours of warm comfort wrapped in fuzzy robes and relaxing.
But today I’d like to give thanks. Not to some entity in the sky but to the real, present gentlemen who have supported and encouraged me these last few years and the ladies who have built me up and shown me strength. Thanks for a community of sisters instead of a sea of rivals. Thanks for financial and social security instead of fear and apprehension. Thanks for the pride I can take in my work, my space, and myself.
Thank you, and happy Thanksgiving. I hope you are well and well loved.