Food and other drives

I was having the most pleasant dream. I was with my parents, my mother had fallen in love with a house somewhere in New Jersey, and bought it. It was nothing fancy, but she made it nice. She had that knack. I was there spending days with them as they arranged the place, and my daughter was with me. I slept in a room downstairs, which morphed somehow into a dorm room, and men came in to hang my pictures on the wall, but by the time they came I no longer wanted the pictures hung, as I'd drawn my own pictures on the walls. I was in this lovely reverie with my mom and dad and then the phone rang, startling me awake. It was to confirm a delivery for later today. I pressed the button for yes as the recording instructed and hung up, falling back onto the pillow. It was still dark. My heart was hammering. And then I remembered, my parents had already died. The call in the night that I had feared and dreaded had already come, twice. I settled my breathing down, and tried to catch back the dream. But it was gone. I comforted myself that they'd seemed happy puttering around together in that house.

And now we welcome the hordes for Thanksgiving. Today I'm going to move the furniture around in the living room for easier flow. And clean the house. My cousin Nicky gets here tonight. Tomorrow morning she and I and my daughter and my niece will go out for breakfast at our favorite Greek diner—Nicky craves diner pancakes on her first morning in New York. Then we'll come home and begin cooking as we wait for the rest of the party to arrive. My whole goal over these next few days is to take things as they come, to not get overly attached to an idea of how things should go, to let events simply unfold. Pray I manage it. As my friends here know well, it's not my natural state.

That's my girl working a Thanksgiving food drive outside her daddy's museum. People could either buy a bag of fresh produce to donate to soup kitchens and shelters or they could give money and my girl and her fellow volunteers would get the produce from the farmer's market themselves. This being New York, everyone gave money, because who has time. Our girl came home exhilarated from how much they raised to feed the city's hungry. Doing good makes her happy. I love how that works.

Okay, back to work until my niece wakes up and can help me move the furniture around. I'm grabbing every minute I can. I have to get the manuscript to my subject this coming Monday, and there's a house full of humans and a gauntlet of festivities between now and then. I find it so interesting that my husband and I did not grow up with this Thanksgiving tradition and now it is our family's favorite holiday. I wonder if that's because we got to invent our own way of doing it. Hmm.