Three days without Internet and it was really quite good.
I played with my niece and nephew and teased my brother and hung out with his wife and slept deeply and read and even took a few wobbly knit stitches. I walked down a frozen road and felt my muscles working gumbly under my skin and then remembered to look up at the mountains, at the trees and the ice. At the world. And the grumbles ceased to matter.
I had exceptional quantities of turkey and Serbian booze (I recommend the quince or sour cherry) and eggnog - not at the same time. Eggnog is much more delicious than I remembered, though I need look no further for a reason than the fact that I was about 10 then, and opposed to both booze and custard-like anything. Rakija is ferociously good. So is the pumpkin/banana mousse.
When you are just the right amount of drunk, snow fall at midnight is especially lovely.
The merits of solar panels and pellet fed furnaces were discussed and Trivial Pursuit played. And Jenga. And Cranium, though less successfully (humming is hard). Pecan pie made with maple instead of corn syrup is 10000 times more delicious. Debates over small town school politics are the same everywhere. Listening to my brother be a pillar of the community makes me giggle. I like his friends.
I thought deep literary thoughts about the extremely beautiful ginger molasses cookie and how it was just a barely-cooked excuse to eat gingerbread dough, and how unctuously rich the cream in coffee really is on your tongue and how perhaps cappuccino would offer a better balance of bitter roast to slick fat dairy.
I put gas in the car without a jacket on and positively enjoyed shivering under the cold sun of a pale blue winter sky. I did not find a safe place to stop to take photos of the waterfalls of ice lining the road. I never have, so the pictures stay in my head.
700 miles.
Since I was on the highway, I also spent some time thinking about the next opportunity to recycle some of that coffee and then wishing to and being wished good day by people in line, behind counters, holding doors, walking across parking lots There was a lot of congeniality on the highway this year, much more so than I have felt before. Is it me? Or us all?
I thought of people far away and close, people loved, people who trouble me, of family, of absence and presence, of old friendships long left behind, the charm of meeting like-minded souls and all the degrees of affection between. All of these thoughts, even the sad ones, or the wistful, were good ones too, joyful. It’s hard to regret the adventures of the road when all, overall, is grace and luck and fortune.
My thanksgiving toast was to extraordinary people (who cook), second chances and the opportunity to learn something always. It was that kind of year. The only thing that stops me from wishing for that to be true every year is that the unexpectedness of it all is better than any guarantee.
Thank you all for reading, for commenting, for a chance to write sometimes, a chance to be read, a chance to think out loud about the adventure I’m on. I hope your holiday - or your weekend, if no holiday was involved - was even a tiny bit as rich and good.
