Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Technically it's not Thanksgiving day any more, at least not in my time zone.

So that means that it's really Friday and that also means that it was two weeks ago that I landed in Phoenix for a week of meetings and a couple of hours of snatched time to spend with two of my three kiddies.

It was not a problem to leave the gray rain of Michigan for the palm trees of Phoenix and Scottsdale. And since the summer is a distant memory I even though for a moment that I just might want to live in Arizona after all. But I shoved the thought aside, especially since Mrs starts working in Albuquerque next week.

The week flew by and the only family time that I was able to fit in was a lunch with the boy and then another dinner with the boy, the girl and my son in law.

And I didn't take one photograph.

I thought about it however, and I even looked closely (camera in hand) at the shrub in my daughter's back yard that had these flowers on it, but they were faded and I had already taken a shot of the bougainvillea earlier in the season.

For today the image from August will do quite nicely, since we are basically going to talk now about contrasts, between the warm hues of the Arizona sun and the cold reality of an early Michigan winter.

Earlier today my mother suggested that she thought I would have been outside taking pictures, and she was right.

But they were not photos of the warm, they are photos of the cold.

Now granted, I was quite happy to drive to the airport last night and pick up my son, I was just not wild about the blizzard that I drove through, or the parking lots of slush that greeted me as I made a quick stop to pick up some extra luggage for the impending move to a warmer climate.

And don't get me wrong, the day did dawn with a crisp beauty that was truly stellar, but there it all was, that stuff that paints the world in white and for a moment, is pure and crisp and clear.

Color however, is hard to find in this world.

I confess that it was fun to look for, since the wind was calm and the temperature hovered just about freezing. I would have not have been wandering around for long had the wind been howling with the temps bouncing around the zero mark, or below.

So today I'm thankful, for lots of things, even though it seems that just about all I can sense of life is the freight train of change that is running through my living room.

At least I can say that the almost all of the doors that I was assigned to paint are done.

No biggie, only 34 coats of paint on this door, or that.

I even had some time on the airplane to put together a gallery of the aurora, should you be interested in more images of the dancing lights.

I'm thankful that although we learned about my mother's cancer 2 years ago this holiday weekend, she is doing pretty darn well, even though the doctors want to run some more "preventative" chemo through her system.

It's interesting that the older we get, some of us seem to understand that the things we are most thankful for are just about always the things that money just can't buy.

And one of those things is the expression of life that can be found in the journals and blogs of those who document their lives on the web. From that community I find great entertainment, encouragement, debate, sorrow and inspiration.

Thank you all for writing, especially those of you who just keep on hanging in there, no matter what the storms of life throw your way.