Ten Reasons I’m Thankful This Thanksgiving

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A few cisterns in happier times

I’m thankful this Thanksgiving that …

  • The severe drought has made us grateful for the water we have stored in our cisterns and has made us more thoughtful about our usage and plans for conservation.
  • Several years of culling to improve our flock of sheep has paid off. The market wethers are fat and healthy. The ewes are pregnant and lambing season is still a couple of months away.
  • Our hoop house is complete, loaded with greens, and warm on a cold day.
  • Cindy, as my partner, continues to inspire me with her energy, skills, and willingness to share this life.
  • My father, after suffering a stroke this year, is still with us at 89. He continues to find the time to volunteer each week at a local church helping feed the needy.
  • My mother’s eldest sister is still alive and well at 96, the last surviving stalk of that line. She reminds me through her continuing penchant for reading that one’s intellect is a gift to keep and nourish.
  • The Republic still stands even as those on the right and the left trumpet its demise.
  • My blogging friend Clem, with his insufferable positive outlook, reminds me to not herald the end of the world, just yet.
  • My friend Rayna harvested enough pawpaw fruit this year for Cindy to make pawpaw crème brûlée for Thanksgiving dinner.
  • My brothers and I (and a brother-in-law) managed to find the time for a recent get-together. A weekend in the north Louisiana woods eating good food and sitting by a fire is a wonderful tonic for the soul.

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Reading this week: Southern Hunting in Black and White: nature, history and ritual in a Carolina community. By Stuart A. Marks.

Thanksgiving

It always seemed cold out on the Louisiana marsh as a boy. On Thanksgiving eve my father and I would head out to the hunting camp, a ramshackle building under centuries-old live oaks. At dinner we’d sit down at a long communal table and enjoy hearty bowls of duck gumbo. The dozen or more men would talk, and we the sons would keep quiet, seen but not heard. The morning smell of bacon and eggs served as an early alarm. And by 4:30 we were climbing into mud-boats and heading off across the marsh. At regular intervals a father and son would disembark into a wooden pirogue and push off into the darkness, usually arriving at a duck blind an hour before sunrise. Our hunt would begin with my father calling the ducks, enticing them to circle and land.

At the end of the hunt in late morning, we’d head home, pulling into the drive around noon. Thanksgiving preparations inside were well underway, pies lined up on the counter. I’d cast an anxious gaze to determine that a favored sweet potato pie was among them, then off for a shower and a change to clean clothes. The table was set and dinner typically eaten in mid-afternoon; afterward, the calls would begin from distant relatives.

Today, as a grown man, my rituals have changed. I’m now the relative calling across the distance of a time zone and seven hundred miles. Instead of a duck hunt early Thanksgiving, my morning is filled with chores: feeding pigs, sheep, cattle and chickens, stacking wood for the woodstove. Busy, but still time will be made later for a woodland walk on our farm. We eat late, so no need to rush dinner preparations. Some years we are graced by the company of friends, and other years we dine alone. This year, Cindy travels and I will dine by myself or with a couple of friends.April Scrapbook 028

I’ll prepare a roast duck in memory of those boyhood hunts with my father. And I’ll regret the absence from the table of a sweet potato pie. But since it is Thanksgiving, I’ll be grateful for reasonable health, a loving partner, a satisfying life, a full library; that my father is still with us, as is a large abundance of siblings and other kin. I’ll also be thankful for what is absent in my life, namely, the darkness of war and the dislocation from hearth and home of the refugee.

As I step out on the porch before sunrise Thanksgiving morning, the air will smell of smoke from a dozen farmhouses in our valley. It will be cold on our farm here in the hills of East Tennessee. The cattle will begin to bawl. But over their din, if I listen well, I will hear the sound of my father calling the wild ducks out on the marsh.