Tricked out in my white canvas Tilly hat like Jessica Fletcher off to solve a mystery on my annual pre-dinner Thanksgiving perambulation out past the salt marsh and the marina. The colours are a little late this year, after a warmer autumn than usual, but the cold salt breeze coming in off the water is absolutely autumnal and bracing. The sky is dazzling blue, almost painfully so.
This annual walk of mine is almost a religious pilgrimage—I took it in countryside out by the lake back in the days when we spent family Thanksgiving in Ontario. I always take it alone. It's me, communing with the beauty and silence of that natural world. It feels almost more meaningful here in Nova Scotia because the ocean makes it sacred somehow., as it has ever since I was a very small child on the Mediterranean coast, in Beirut.
I'm still high from last night at the dance at the Shore Club in Hubbards (an experience probably worth its own essay at some point, and one which engendered more joy than even I fully expected) and watching my beautiful goddaughter, Kate, as an adult among adults for perhaps the first real time; she's clearly inherited her mother's ability to own a dance floor—Kath, on a dance floor, is a vision. Of course I miss my godson Michael, who is not with us this year, but I carry the kids with me everywhere I go, in my heart. They're never far from me.
Quite apart from the utterly perfect Maritime authenticity of the spectacle in which I was fully participating, the delight of this mixed-age, mixed-skill crowd of celebrants dancing to the band was like oxygen I hadn't known I needed. Nova Scotia is good for the soul.
So much to give thanks for this year—good health, good marriage, good family, good friends, and an utterly beautiful day in the most beautiful part of a beautiful country. Even the absence of far-away loved ones is a joy of sorts, because one is reminded of how lucky one is to have them to miss.
May you all be similarly blessed.
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