Since this will likely be my last time online before Thanksgiving, I'm posting early.
A little over a year ago, after personal circumstances had pushed us to the brink of homelessness, we arrived via Greyhound in the Texas Panhandle. With about $1200 to our name and my weekly unemployment check to tide us over, we purchased a car, paid our deposits and set up house in the first home we could truly call our own.
Our first Thanksgiving here really wasn't OURS. We spent it with new friends, as we didn't have a lot of the creature comforts of home set up yet, and, although we appreciated the hospitality, it wasn't quite the same. We were new to town, facing an uncertain future with the resolve and fortitude that had brough us thus far. Even though we lived in modern times, with modern conveniences, I couldn't help but feel a certain kinship with the Pilgrims who had celebrated the first Thanksgiving, also with neighbors, also in a new land, and also facing an uncertain future. They, too, had been uprooted from a world that was familiar to them to face a world with unknown hardships and untapped opportunity.
As we prepare to celebrate THIS Thanksgiving, the first one we can truly call OURS, the first in our own home (OK, so we have several years to pay for it yet, but...you get the picture), we do so with a true sense of gratitude, a sense of thankfulness that even we would have been hard pressed to muster a couple of years prior to this.
This past year has reminded me what a truly great land we live in. Although our nation is far from perfect, it is far better than most of the many other nations covering this planet's surface. Although we are torn apart by political ideology, it is a land where we are free to express that ideology without fear of being dragged off in chains and interrogated in secret. And we owe much to those who are fighting as emissaries of our great nation overseas at this time. As well as to those who are preparing to go overseas, who have returned from overseas, and the families that wait for them back home during their deployments.
So I want to wish each and every one of you to have a truly blessed Thanksgiving. I know we will.