Thanksgiving is always a fairly hectic holiday (unlike most holidays, right?).  With Christmas, we’re able to pace ourselves a bit and negotiate a bit of a divided schedule amongst the families.  Christmas Eve is practically Christmas, and as far as the extended family goes, it is treated as such.  Then, some folks prefer the evening celebrations to the morning ones, so between Christmas Eve evening, Christmas Eve night, Christmas morning, and Christmas Afternoon, there are several chances to visit the different branches of family scattered about.  It’s busy, no doubt, but it doesn’t sneak up on me like the craziness of Thanksgiving, where — at least for us — there’s really just one extended nebulous of time to eat lunch, a late lunch, and/or an early dinner; and often times, it seems like we end up driving across town to do all three.  This Thanksgiving, my family traveled out of town, and all of Naomi’s gathered to meet in one place.  With so few stops and such a short trip (less than an hour from our house), Thanksgiving almost felt like a vacation. 

One of my grandmothers is living in a nursing home, and her birthday is today.  She’s kind of on the way to this year’s great gathering place (if one takes the slightly-scenic route), so we planned to stop by to see her for a little while on our way up to Gadsden in the afternoon.  Since we still had most of the morning free, Naomi signed up to volunteer with the Jimmie Hale missions downtown.  The plan was to spend about an hour delivering warm meals to shut-ins.

The kids are young, and we want to expose them to community service, so they went along.  I am not young, but I still need to be exposed to community service, so I went, too.  We loaded up the car and headed downtown (opposite direction from Gadsden, but not too far away).  They gave us five meals to deliver to four houses, a detailed set of directions, and a good map with the route highlighted and the stops numbered; we were all set.

Things were fairly uneventful, though we ended up delivering in Bessemer (opposite direction from Gadsden, and starting to get pretty far away).  The first two stops went off without a hitch.  The third was a bit trickier, though, and by this time, Nathaniel was getting hungry, and was letting us know by screaming his head off in the back  (I was shocked to learn that McDonald’s is closed on Thanksgiving).  

To get from the second house to the third, we were told to get back on the road we were on, and continue 0.6 miles, at this point, the road changed names, and we were to stay on it another 0.3 miles (these were some detailed directions), then we were to turn onto Cedar Hills Drive.  Easy, enough, I guess, except that, instead of changing names, the road dead ended into a patch of dead grass after about a half mile.   I took a few random turns and ended up on one of the major highways in the area.  We got our bearings (eventually), and finally traversed the two mile separation between stops 2 and 3 after about 20 minutes.  

Looking at the map, the 4th stop looked like it would be easy to find.  Turn left from neighborhood #3, take the next left, drive around to the apartment complex across the street from the cemetery.  We took a left, followed by a left, and then circled the cemetery three times looking for this alleged apartment complex.  The map was nearly perfect, and the streets matched up wonderfully (even streets that weren’t much more than dirt driveways showed up on our map).  We drove down all three of the roads that met at the highlighted intersection, and from each point of view, the only building to be found in that location was the seemingly-abandoned tombstone store/house.  If there happened to be an apartment above the garage (we were grasping at straws here), it was unlikely that it was numbered Apt. 192N (there definitely weren’t 191 other apartments — much less for letters A-N — above the garage). 

We thoroughly explored the area surrounding the cemetery, and the thought even crossed our minds that the abandoned shopping center down the street may have been converted into apartments.  Finally, after reading the printed directions (instead of tracing the green path marked on the map), we saw that we were supposed to turn right from neighborhood #3, instead of left.  We finally traversed the one mile separation between stops 3 and 4 after about 35 minutes.

Naomi had been the designated delivery person who hopped out of the van to take the meals to their recipients.  She has a warmer smile, and she’s just friendlier than me (plus the van was awfully warm and cozy), so she was obviously the better candidate.  For the final stop, though, she wanted me to experience the first-hand joy of the interaction, so she talked me into taking the job. 

I’m nervous when it comes to meeting new people, so I asked if there was anything special I needed to do or say.  She assured me that the people were nice and grateful for the meals.  She hadn’t said much, just wished them a “Happy Thanksgiving!”  That sounded easy enough, so I gathered up the meal and walked to the door. 

My first knock was met with extended silence, so I knocked again.  “Who is it?!” a voice demanded.  I explained that I was delivering a Thanksgiving meal.  “No!!” A bit taken aback, I asked if the person was sure that she didn’t want it.  “No!!!” This time, there was even less uncertainty, so I slinked back to the car with the unwanted meal. I hopped back into the cozy (and noisy) van, and we were back on our way to Naomi’s family with a brief stop planned to visit my grandmother.  Her birthday was coming up (and we had starving kids), so we stopped in at the local Wal-Mart to get the kids a snack and a couple of little presents to give to Grandmother Alice.  I think she enjoyed the company of our short stay, and the girls got as much of a kick out of the box of chocolates and Snoopy socks as she did, and — I hope this isn’t awful — I think she really enjoyed the unplanned (for all of us) Thanksgiving dinner we brought her.  I’m glad someone did.

This morning was much like yesterday morning.  Yesterday, it was cold, and the rain was pouring, and today it’s colder, but the rain is more of a drizzle.  It’s fairly standard fare for mid-November in Alabama.

Naomi kids that these cold, grey, wet days make her feel like Christmas is approaching (rumor has it, some people substitute “White” in the holiday classic “I’m Dreaming of a Wet Christmas”, but that doesn’t seem to make much sense to me).  Up north, the holidays’ approach is announced with heavy, fluffy clouds laden with snow.   Down here, the clouds are grey, and the precipitation is much wetter.

As I was heading back to my cubicle yesterday afternoon, I overheard the casual sarcastic jeer: It’s another lovely day, I see.  This morning, as I dragged the trash cans to the curb, my thoughts were very similar.  But then it hit me:  I sure have a lot of gall to declare the aesthetic value of the day based on my fickle whims of convenience.

Some of the prettiest scenes I have seen have been glimpsed in moments where I have been caught in storms. From a lightening-filled display shared with my wife-to-be atop Sumatanga, to the leaky shelter of an abandoned mansion in the back woods of Selma, some very fond memories have involved stormy weather.

One of the best photographs I have taken was set against a storm on Bear Island off the coast of North Carolina. 

Bear Island is a small island secluded from the rest of the world.  One must take a half-hour or so ferry trip accross the marshy sound to get there — a process which keeps the foot traffic on the beach relatively low.  Naomi and I rode the ferry one afternoon and enjoyed the nearly deserted beaches.  It was quite lovely. 

We began noticing some dreadfully dark clouds looming off in the distant horizon and snapped a couple of qick pics before the downpour hit.  We rushed to the crowded shelter near the ferry docks. 

Suddenly, the ferry, which typically transported 20 or so folks ever hour or so was bogged down by a 100 person line.  A system which runs so smoothly most of the time was disrupted by the sudden urge of everyone to leave at that very moment.

An extra ferry arrived on the scene, and the process went more smoothly and quickly than I had expected, but there was still ample time for me to sit down on the cold cement and sulk at the rain.  The beauty that would later be immortalized in a white frame on my bedroom dresser was now just dark and lousy weather.

This morning I left through the back door, only to remeber I had parked out front instead. Getting drenched on my climb up the driveway to my car, I remembered it was trash day, so I cranked the car and despondantly trudged forth into the drizzle to drag the two garbage cans up the driveway (one per trip).  Soaked, I climbed back into my car, and noticed that I was running later than I hoped.  Traffic would probably be building up by now, which would make my drive through the fuzzy rain that much longer.  Another lovely day, I see.

But today is another lovely day.  The grey clouds look cold but benign, and they make the indoor warmth and safety all the more comforting.  The autumn leaves are fading and gathering on the glistening grass, and the veiny silhouettes of trees paint a stark picture against the misty ghosts hanging on the horizon.  Sun beams pierce through the scattered breaks in cloud cover providing just enough of a spotlight to bathe the world in a soft glow of much needed warmth.  When I leave work today, I will probably be greeted with another stunning display as I leave the parking lot just as the sun melts away with a bang rather than a whimper–as it it prone to do on these November days.  In spite of the inconveniences and delays that I may have encountered this morning (ancient history by now, really), it is another lovely day, and I hope that I can see that.