a ~ I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Two days after Thanksgiving. I have decided to never eat again. For at least a whole morning.

Last night I lay awake on the couch watching TV after everyone else went to bed. I watched two repeats and a show that was new to me. It was painful, and, somehow, necessary. Sometimes I need to do this: keep my eyes open in an empty room.

Then the dog and I curled up together on a mattress on the floor and slept fitfully until my father started slurping tea at an ungodly hour. Maybe it was seven? Then B clumped downstairs and squeezed in between me and the dog. And then there was coffee.

Thanksgiving is such a deceptively complicated holiday. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that without presents or an overload of traditions it would be an easy day to accomplish. But, I suppose, whenever family gathers there are considerations to be taken into account. My family seems to be a fairly simple one. No one, that I know of, is hiding a drunk uncle in the basement or keeping mum about a whoopsy daisy pregnancy back in 1954. Maybe I’m just blinded by love? Maybe I just don’t want to be the one to make any crucial reveals? Whatever the reason, our day was marked by gluttony rather than acrimony.

I think part of my heaviness – the part not resulting from pie, quiche, turkey, pizza, soup, butter cake and the proverbial kitchen sink – is that I am out of my routine, I am devoid of schedule, I am adrift on a sea of time. There are no horses to feed or cats to tease, there are no chickens to check and guinea pigs to ignore. There are only dogs and children, and they have four other adults to ask things of, and that leaves me in the weird pickle of not having enough to do but not being exactly unplugged from obligation.

Later we will return to the frozen north and everything will be normal and rambunctious, waves of duty and glee and crankiness and boredom settling us into our comfortable nest. And after a few hours, maybe days, I will long for a change. And one will come, and I will long for usual. And again and again and again.

It’s enough to make one eat another piece of pie.