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Yesterday was beautiful, windy and wild. From the point of waking up till we sat down at the table it was nonstop hustle bustle but it brought about one of the most lovely Thanksgiving I’ve had in a long time. We set up the table on the bayou and everyone brought their plates laden with Greek offerings. Tin who had waited much too long for his meal, wound up hitting nap time and so he was absent from the table (our bad).

I began with Keat’s Ode and we segued into everyone presenting their version of the written embodiment of the day. Our friend’s daughter (above) recited Robert Frost, while his son (below) gave us a two word Portuguese poem that simply translates into “Love, Humor.”

We heard from Langston Hughes, Marianne Williams, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stegner, Elizabeth Bishop, Constantine Cavafy, and many more as one by one we recited lines that resonated across the bayou – “Life ain’t been no crystal stair,” “No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?” “There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.” “Opa! Opa! Opa! [replete with dish throwing]” and more.

Thanks for the food, thanks for the giving, thanks for everything that made the day special to me and all of us who came to the table.

I wonder if I have ever felt more alive, more competent in my mind and more at ease with myself and my world, than I feel for a few minutes on the shoulder of that known hill while I watch the sun climb powerfully and confidently and see below me the unchanged village, the lake like a pool of mercury, the varying greens of hayfields and meadows and sugarbush and black spruce woods, all of it lifting and warming as the stretched shadows shorten.  Wallace Stegner

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.