时间过得真快！这是我在这儿的第二个感恩节！

Picture yourself cozily snuggled under the covers Thanksgiving morning.  You stayed up well past midnight baking pumpkin bread, and are infinitely proud that it didn't burn in the toaster oven.  It's 7 am.  Even the rooster who is about to become someone's dinner hasn't stirred yet.  He's saving his voice for the first glimpse of our mutual friend, the sun.  As you rest deep in the folds of your pillow the sound of a cell phone begins to disturb the silence.  One eyelid cracks open but you decide the phone is too far away to bother turning off.  You'll just go back to sleep and pretend that the day started peacefully.  Dreams begin once more to flit across the screen in your head.  That's when the sound repeats itself.  It rises from a mere nuisance to a genuine annoyance.  Mentally you calculate the amount of effort required to shut the darn thing off.  Deciding once again that the effort is not worth the reward, you put another pillow over your head.

Another hour passes with you caught between blissful sleep and vexed awareness.  Every couple of minutes a new text message has sounded bringing you to the brink of despair, but then the cell phone reaches capacity and overloads its ability to receive new messages.  You breathe a prayer of thanksgiving and snuggle deeper under the warm layers.  Then the phone comes to life again.  This time someone is calling you.  Wondering why people must rise so early when sleep is a perfectly attractive alternative, you subject your toes to the cold floor in search of the source of all your frustration.  A bright and entirely too cheerful voice greets you from the other end, inquiring as to whether you will be teaching class that morning.  Trying to put every ounce of sleepiness into your voice you croak out that, as you pointed out in class numerous times last week, there will be no class because it is a holiday.  Just like you wrote all the way across the board in an effort to avoid this very situation.  Hoping the student will feel bad for waking you up, you yawn in the middle of the sentence and trail off at the end.  She seems to get the idea that there will not in fact be class that morning and you hang up and jump back under the blankets, only to discover that all the warmth has fled during your brief absence.

Purposefully ignoring the ten or more text messages wishing you a happy Thanksgiving day, you make your way outside to greet the rooster who has finally realized his calling in life and is cheerfully crooning his own death march.  You wander down the row of farmers, perusing the array of vegetables spread out on the ground.  A pumpkin catches your eye, along with some eggs that are destined to fulfill their higher purpose of making enjoyable food.  Too tired to bargain earnestly, you give the farmers a bit more than average for their wares in a gesture of generosity on such a special day.  You spot sweet potatoes farther on, and eye them expectantly.  Just knowing that these things are going to complete all of your culinary longings in a few hours makes your stomach leap with joy.  You bargain for the sweet potatoes, all the while wondering just how to say 'sweet potato' in Chinese.  Little did you know that you were going to have the chance to learn the word for good later that day.

You return to your kitchen and begin packing up every possible ingredient or tool that could be needed to prepare a tremendous feast, and cart it over to your friends, Zagg and Shmelizabeth's house so that you can cook together like a real family.  You correctly assume that this will stave off some of the longing for your own family and make the holiday seem festive.  When you walk in the door at Zagg and Shmelizabeth's the fragrance of holidays washes over you, brightening your mood as much as the table full of snacks that await the hungry cooks.  Tears well up in your eyes when you spot cinnamon rolls, the one thing you had mistakenly assumed you'd have to live without this year.  Sighing with deep satisfaction you add your meager snacks to the collection already laid out.  Zagg and Shmelizabeth are already elbow-deep in flour as they work to prepare a feast that will probably go down in the history books as one of the greatest.  You roll up your sleeves and join the fray eagerly.

It's only a few hours before the first morsel is scheduled to be eaten.  You've been busily mixing and boiling and measuring and singing.  It's time for the sweet potatoes to achieve greatness.  You start to peel one and disaster strikes.  Your eyes must have gone bad.  The sweet potato is strangely white under the layer of mud.  Frantically you peel some more.  The potato somehow managed to morph from a sweet potato into Mystery-Vegetable-39.  You've never seen such a deceitful root.  Lamenting loudly that there will not be sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving dinner, you guilt Zagg into buying some of the non-mutant variety while he is downtown purchasing 'Turkey' (which oddly resembles six tiny chickens).  He graciously agrees and sets off in pursuit of these very necessary food items after you look up the proper term for sweet potato so that no more mistakes will be made.

With two burners, one toaster oven, and three cooks the food takes longer than expected to come to completeness, but eventually everything is spread out in a glorious display before your eyes.  Zagg came to the rescue, and the sweet potato casserole was finished in the nick of time, along with a variety of other things, the likes of which you may never see again in this life.

Everyone sits down to give thanks for the happiness that awaits them.  It is decided that each person will tell what they are thankful for, but you find that when your turn comes you are so overwhelmed with thankfulness, not a single word squeaks out.  You try repeatedly to tell the other people in the circle how much they mean to you, how they are the most wonderful people you've ever been blessed enough to know.  Every time you try to say these words nothing is able to come out of your mouth, but abundant moisture escapes your eyes.  After causing all the females in the room to produce waterworks too, and making the only male as uncomfortable as possible people begin to realize that you are not going to be able to formulate a complete sentence for a long time, and they commence eating promptly.  You shrug and try to show your gratitude through your appetite.  You never manage to tell your friends that they are what you are grateful for this year.  That without them so much sunshine would be missing from your life.  That they have blessed you beyond measure.  You want them to know, but can't express yourself without crying.  They are not just friends, they are family.  You have so much to be thankful for.

"Oh to grace, how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be.
Let thy goodness, like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to thee."