A Thanksgiving epistle

Dear Family,

I wish I were with you today, bustling around between the kitchen and dining room, fulfilling my unofficially-official role as mistress of etiquette. That was my job -- my pride as the young woman, firstborn: yes, setting our family's Thanksgiving table thrilled me anew each year. How proud and glad I was to make our gathering place beautiful.

It's been seven years since I have set that table. When I say it -- when I write "seven years," it seems an impossibly long time ago. Where was I, again? Oh, college and the Peace Corps. Seven Thanksgivings spent with surrogate families, patchwork crazy quilts of adoptive cousins. Sans china, sans silver, sans crystal or candles, sans oblong teak tables with gray-battened chairs, I lost my role as place setter. Instead, I claimed other mantles: pie-maker, wine-procurer, cabbage-cutter, photo-snapper. I reinvented Thanksgiving in those new homes.

I'm back in the U.S. now after four Thanksgivings abroad, and there's a big piece of me that wishes I could have spent JUST THIS ONE with you. It's our last chance for a holiday together for a while. That's a sharp sting. But, I'll be back in Anchorage in one month's time.
We'll be complete strangers to the reality of our new family dynamic, but out of that strangeness, we'll forge something strong and new together. I'll reclaim my my place as Christmas dinner table-mistress -- and pie-maker, brother-encourager, dish-washer, mother-listener, cocoa-cooker. Day by day, did someone say? Day by day. From this flux, we're moving towards stability. We'll figure out what it means to be The Gardners, Reconfigured.

Until then, this is an open letter to my family, and to all people giving thanks on this day. I give thanks for the ones I love, for starting over, for transformation, for carrying on. I give thanks for the music and poetry that I hear ringing in the halls, the streets, the fields, oceans and skies. I give thanks for traditions, and for breaking them, and for gluing the pieces together with other broken bits to make a transcendent and luminous whole. I give thanks for Americans voting their hearts, and for a man with a vision who unites us as a people. I give thanks for hot tea and for small dogs and for healthy food that nourishes my body. I give thanks for the support from my boyfriend, friends, colleagues and mentors that pours over me when I stand anxious and full of questions. I pray for all people everywhere to have enough to sustain their hearts, bodies, and minds. I pray for victims of violence -- physical, mental, social, economic. I pray for healing and I pray for love-as-justice.

And finally (for now), I give thanks for Rilke and this wisdom: "Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

Love to you on this Thanksgiving Day.

Amanda