Last March, at the beginning of our romance with this virus, I never thought that on Thanksgiving of this year I'd be planning a big gathering for two at a restaurant of our choice.
My whole life I've never been at a Thanksgiving dinner with fewer than 18 people—at home with too many cooks in the happy bustling kitchen. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Since we're planning on going to a restaurant, I feel lucky we're in Indiana. I hear California now requires masks to be worn between bites and sips in restaurants there. My son is concerned about us catching the dreaded bug. Pretty thoughtful, I'd say, but the situation is still strange and rather sad.
I remember a Thanksgiving when I was a kid. Cranberries had been determined to be the cause of cancer, so no one had cranberries that year. Of course the experts were totally wrong, but it is something I remember every Thanksgiving. Now of course, I'll always remember the COVID incarceration. That tops cancer-causing cranberries by a mile.
Some of my friends who are able to completely quarantine have basically been locked in their closets for months. Our ministry partners haven't physically attended a meeting in forever. Others have stayed away from large gatherings, but kept up with close friends and family members. Everyone is doing what they feel is necessary.
Me, I feel like I'm leaning over the edge of a well, calling to the water below. "Happy Thanksgiving...skgiving..iving". There is a hollowness and a loneliness to the feel of this season. An emotional vacuum between those who are worried and those who aren't. But I have decided I will enjoy the options I have, because I know in spite of everything, God is good. God is good all the time. (Sometimes you just have to look around for the good, that's all.)
And next year, when I'm up to my earrings in dish water cleaning up after 20 or so fully inoculated family members who have just enjoyed a ridiculously caloric turkey dinner, I expect I'll look back wistfully to that lovely 2020 Thanksgiving at a restaurant, where I didn't have to cook and all the dirty dishes just magically disappeared.
Nancy :)
