October 15, 2025
Now that we’ve entered the third week of October, it’s
safe to say we are fully entrenched in autumn. The sights and sounds and scents
of the season have changed little over my lifetime.
There’s the panorama of the changing leaves, and the
scent of outdoor fires. On weekends, as folks work to prepare their property
for the onslaught of winter, the sounds of lawnmowers, leaf blowers and woodchippers
combine into a symphony of household industry.
It’s a lovely symphony, best enjoyed after enough time
spent outside to pinken the cheeks from the autumn chill, and with one’s hands firmly
wrapped around a mug of something warmly soothing.
I never quite cottoned to the pumpkin-spice-everything
craze that has been prevalent over the last few years. I’m a bit of a purist
when it comes to pumpkins. I believe that pumpkin spice belongs only in pumpkin
pie.
The traditions related to early October have shifted only
superficially over the years. Here in Canada our Thanksgiving Day is the second
Monday in October. We celebrated the feast this past Monday at our second
daughter’s home, which we have been doing for the past few years. My, but she
has an excellent and patient hand with her turkey! She does such an excellent
job of it that I cannot recall the last time I roasted one in my own oven. The
rest of the meal is a group effort, so that the load is not only on one person.
What an amazing feast we had!
I grew up in a rural community about a half hour’s
drive from where we live now. In fact, my home as a child which became David’s
and my first house as a young married couple, was basically next-door to the
quarry where my husband ended up working for thirty-nine years.
In that community, each Thanksgiving weekend saw the
arrival of a local fall fair. And until we moved to the town where we live now,
our family’s—both ours as children and then as parents—Thanksgiving tradition always
included a visit to that fair. And on Thanksgiving Monday itself, no less. Yes,
indeed, the race to stuff the bird and set it to roasting, before heading out
for a few hours…. Thanksgiving Day was a very busy time indeed!
Then we moved to the community where we currently reside
in the early 1990s. The annual county fair here is held in this very town and on
the Labour Day weekend. After our first couple of years here, our younger two children
were old enough to go to the fair on their own, which they did on “bracelet day”.
That was a wonderful innovation where the kids could purchase a bracelet and
enjoy the midway for several hours for one low price. David and I did enjoy
those quiet times back then, right at the end of the busy, back-to-school
rigamarole.
Despite the odd variations, the heart of all of our Thanksgiving
traditions over the years has never changed, and that’s the gathering of family
and friends. This year, as we formed our own little community around the dinner
table, we each took a few moments to pronounce what we were thankful for. There
were nine adults, two tweens and two children gathered for that wonderful meal.
And while the gratitude lists differed in some details the one item that was
constant was family and friends. We were grateful, each one of us, for the
gathering of loved ones and the bounty before us.
In these challenging times in which we live, we’re all
experiencing the sense that things are not stable around us. Things are
changing and we humans don’t like that. But if we can be grateful for the
basics—our loved ones, and our homes however humble they may be—then I think we’re
well equipped to handle whatever comes our way.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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