thanksgiving is not a good holiday. you know what i mean. i’m a vegetarian and am generally anti-imperialist, so it’s not my favorite. but i missed my family, so I decided to visit.

originally the plan was for me to head down alone and spend a few days of much-needed alone time house sitting for a friend. my partner would stay home with our cat and work on friday morning.

it’s surprising how learning the maximum amount of meth reside the state considers habitable – and having 72 times that amount in your house – makes you not want to be alone for any holiday.

six hours in the car actually really helped us talk through plans and wrap our heads around things – about the house and also about in-group humor, about ferguson and the pervasiveness of victim-blaming. but mostly about the house.

on the way there, i decided to not tell my dad’s family until the end of the visit.

that lasted for about ten minutes of hi-hello-so what’s been up. i couldn’t do it any more beyond that. things were not good. I had so many feeling and none of them were fine. i couldn’t talk about my freelance knitting gigs and craft fair plans because i really shouldn’t be selling things that have been hanging around in my house (oh right, i should email that craft fair about that).

so we spent a lot of the day with a collective “what the heck?” in between football and knitting and oh-so-much food. the family watched the seahawks while i called my mother, who was in central america… i updated her on what was going on with the house, and then the football game – i heard a roar of excitement from downstairs, and said “something happened in the game. i think it was good.” she responded “interception,” and i learned that she had also been watching it, on mute.

…

i think that this time of gratitude is the right time for us to find this out about our house, though, because we are still such a lucky little family. it’s been an amazing reminder of how supported we are by our community. who knows where things are headed, but for now this challenging path has at least had some good cheerleaders.

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