WE GATHER TOGETHER

The Holidays are rolling in with all their thunder, aren't they?  I made the mistake of doing a little shopping after my morning classes.  Oh dear, time to stop that.  Went to buy wine to take with us to Amherst, Massachusetts for the Thanksgiving feast.  We will leave tomorrow after my only class of the day (8:30 to 10:20, but it will probably end earlier than it should) to drive north with all the other crazies going over the river and through the woods.  In our case it's not to Grandmother's house (we ARE grandmother) we go, but to G's sister's house.  This is CR, the sister whose husband died in September, and as this is the first major holiday since then, we thought she might be very lost and lonely trying to figure out what to do.  We've been planning to take this trip ever since G came back from Massachusetts in September.  Other members of G's family will be getting together elsewhere in Mass. and will come west on Friday for a visit.  CR isn't ready for a full-scale family bash yet, but was delighted that we two would come.  It's about all she can deal with.

We love a roadtrip together, and really look forward to getting away from pokey little Delaware for a few days.  Amherst is a lovely college town, and closeby Northhampton is known as Lesbian Heaven.  It has a large population of Our Kind of Folks, with women's bookshops, cafés, music, and more.  We know the traffic on the way north will be monstrous, but - even after 23 years - we can talk for hours, and we see each other so little during the regular workweek that this will be a welcome togetherness. 

I want to wish everyone in JournalLand a restful, peaceful holiday.  Don't go shopping on Black Friday - stay home and play with the kids, read a book, bake a cake, watch a movie, take a really long nap.  It is my deepest hope that everyone has more to be thankful for than they can count, that the harvest of love and delight in your lives is bountiful and rich.  All the political despair, the things that are haunting us day and night, can be set aside while we look around and realize how fortunate we really are. As Lily Tomlin's character in Search for Intelligent Life says, we are all of us just specks in the universe.  In glacial time, this age is a blink of the eye.  Let's enjoy our time as specks: love, laugh, eat, drink, rest.  And return to reality next week.  I love the JournalLand community and I am so thankful to have you as my friends.  (And you, Tim, are a special case.  I'm so amazed and grateful for our long friendship, and its new life during this political season.)