She thought about it. “Getting there,” she said.
Getting there. That is most of what any of us can honestly say.
## The Thanksgiving That Happened
I said I would tell you about it, so here it is.
Paige and Andrew came to Hartfield for Thanksgiving. Ruth and David came as well. Donna and her husband Marv declined to transfer their standing Thanksgiving invitation from their own house, which I understood — they had their own family coming — but Donna stopped by in the late afternoon with a pie she had made, and she stood in my kitchen for twenty minutes and met the Lawsons and told Andrew something about my community meals program that made him look at me in a way I was not prepared for. Donna has a gift for making people feel proud of each other.
The dinner was strange and warm and slightly effortful in the way that first occasions always are, the way you can feel everyone calibrating and adjusting, not uncomfortably but with the awareness that nothing is automatic yet.
I made Carl’s stuffing recipe, which is the only part of Thanksgiving that I insist on doing exactly a certain way. The stuffing goes in the bird, which is a position I hold firmly against the prevailing modern preference for dressing-in-a-pan. This became a topic of conversation, briefly, because David Lawson also makes stuffing in the bird and was delighted to find an ally, and we had a brief and genuinely enjoyable argument with Andrew about the merits of each approach, during which Andrew held the losing position with good humor.