It is 7:15 in the morning and the house is quiet. Every bed is full with people that I love, and the beds at Anna's house are full with more people that I love and there is even overflow parking in beds at the house next door to Anna's house. Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday, with no close competition. Without any manipulation or planning on our part, all of our children have made it a tradition to come home for this holiday. At first it surprised me that they would make this a priority (when we were growing up, our family often hit the road and went north to Boston and New Haven to join others for Thanksgiving. Our house was never the hub.) but Anna reinforced this homeward migration by starting a decade-long tradition of being the center of family gravity. We no longer even think to make plans to go away. This is the place to be. There will be 37 people at dinner today.
Of course, not everyone comes every time. Benjamin and his family are far away. They have made plans to travel back here for the other time of gravitational pull that is becoming a tradition -- Anna and Gordon now rent a big house for a five day retreat every December and they try to pull in as many of our mother's descendants as they can.
Anyway, before everyone wakes up and starts back in on the pie-making and turkey rubbing, I can sit here and baste myself in gratitude and wonder.
Of course, the first blessing to note is that every single one of us is healthy. Someone usually has covid but at this moment each member of our extended family is in good condition, mentally and physically. This is no small feat. Mom is 87 and all of her systems are in excellent working order. She will make sure the plants in the greenhouse are not forgotten today (no one else will think of that). Her husband is 82 and last Sunday he worked the whole day at Takoma Park, from loading up to unloading eight hours later on a day that never got above about 33 degrees. Jon is in his 14th year with a low-flame and incurable cancer and he is the one who will be wrangling this 30 pound turkey into the oven and making sure it is ready by dinner. The youngest people, ages 9 months through 5 years, are all in good shape, if you don't care about runny noses. We are all blessed, at this moment, and I note our resilience and am glad.
From a seasonal perspective, this is such a great week. Every year our last markets and our last CSA days happen on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We push hard right up to that last day, filling the coolers to the ceilings and wall to wall with everything that we can gather for the last hurrah. It was a brutally cold week, with wind and rain, but we got it done. There were more than enough carrots for everyone (which is not always true, and so it must be noted). On the Monday morning after that Sunday, we did not go into the field at all. Everything was frozen, and it didn't matter a bit. We had done our job and finished 25 weeks of CSA, without missing a beat.
Yesterday we resumed our farming activities in a low-key way because we still need to be ready for our weekly Winter CSA. Compared to the main season, this is child's play. We have 140 customers, which is about 1/4 of the number of CSA folks we fed last week.
As I thought about the plan for this week's harvest, I realized there was an opportunity to combine all the blessings of this week -- the convergence of family, the lack of pressure, the return to beautiful weather, more gorgeous carrots still in the ground. Instead of going out to Loudoun to pick with the one part time employee who was working, I decided to figure out how to get us some company and make it a party. I sent out an email invitation, with one day's warning. At 1:00 in the afternoon yesterday, 16 of us went out to dig the last Loudoun carrots of the season. The crew included two beloved retired farmers from farms next door, my mom the great-grandmother and her always-ready-to-work husband, two of her children plus one spouse, four of her grandchildren, three of her great-grandchildren, and the one worker who we all know and love. What a team. We did real work, but since there were so many of us, it was not real work. We collected up the last 800 pounds of carrots plus about 400 pounds of rutabaga just because it was right there.
The house is waking up. Thanksgiving Day is underway. Happy Thanksgiving to all. May you also have many blessings to count.
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