Thanksgiving

Well, today is Thanksgiving, which means I've spent a solid amount of time putting together felt turkey kits from Target. I haven't been any help, dinner-wise, though. This is probably a good thing, as evidenced by the following conversation:

Me: How do you tell the difference between a sweet potato and a potato? You know, with the skin still on?
My mother (holding a sweet potato): Well, these are red and potatoes are brown…
Me (looking at the decisively red potato-object): That would be a fairly easy way to tell.

I did, however, manage to find a reasonably sized turkey at the grocery store and helped taste-test a few appetizers. So some accomplishments, albeit not dealing with actual skills involving food. Apparently at some point before I head off to college in the fall I will be learning how to cook some basic meals. My current food repertoire more or less starts at cereal + milk = breakfast and ends at bread + stuff + more bread = sandwich.

Other activities from today include playing chess with a brother (he made me play to show off his fancy opening-of-the-game strategy which turns out to be an open-the-game-and-end-it-too strategy), playing with the piano, pretending that I'll get some reading done at some point, scrubbing a pot (singular), taking some of the dogs for a walk.

It was a rather interesting walk. We have a tight little loop through the neighborhood and the nearby rose garden we like to take. About halfway through said walk, I decided to let one of the dogs, Charlotte, take the lead. Charlotte completed the loop. Unfortunately, it was a mostly-completion. Charlotte completely missed the turn into the alley our house is on. She then proceeded to wander through the neighborhood and we wound up multiple blocks away from our end destination. She was still going strong when a mutual consensus was made between us humans (us humans here being me and my brother) to head on home. Unlike Charlotte the Shetland Sheepdog, we chose a straight, direct route home. My leg was giving up. I could feel some shards of crookedness.

Now that I'm home and have had some Thanksgiving dinner, with my traditional minimalistic amount of turkey meat and solid heapings of some of the cornerstones of Southern cooking, such as butter, sugar and pecans, I feel much better.

But, of course, the point of this post is not really to comment on the relatively small number of things I have managed to do today. Really, I thought it would be nice to write a little list of things I'm thankful for.

I'm thankful for family and for friends for for everybody who has been supportive. I'm thankful for dogs, those with a sense of direction and those without. I'm thankful for medical technology and a body which is in better shape now because of surgery than it would be without. I'm thankful for the ability to get up in the morning and walk. I'm thankful for contact lenses, which are wonderful things once you get them in your eyes. I'm thankful for snow, which makes the whole world sparkle. I'm thankful for music, for stories, for enjoyment, for laughter.

And despite my fear, I'm thankful for the Taylor Spatial Frame. I don't have it on yet and I suspect it will not be my best friend, but what I'm really thankful for is the knowledge that I'll be able to have an active future. A future where I can walk and move and be me.

That's what's been running through my head, more or less, this Thanksgiving.