A Different Type of Thanksgiving, part 2 by Sara Wright

{Part 1 was posted yesterday. You can see it here}

 Soon after I began to create little traditions that I follow to this day. November is the month I begin to celebrate my love for every evergreen tree on the earth. The leaves of broadleaf trees have become nature’s mulch, yet forest green stays with us until spring, thanks to the conifers. Thanksgiving week is the time I choose to go into the forest to tip balsam boughs  thanking the trees for being, always choosing a mild day when I can enjoy being outdoors. Then I weave fragrant wreaths sitting on my living room floor listening to choral music sung in Latin, a language I don’t understand, thankfully (!) This year my indoor Norfolk Island pines are already lit with rice lights for a few hours each evening lending a festive glow to the soothing cloak of darkness.

 Recently I decided to include a dinner for this week of Wintergreen Tree Celebration and it turned out that the foods I wanted to cook were some of the favorite foods I prepared during those exhausting and meaningless thanksgivings, cooking that I did for others, including my children at my own expense. At first this idea of cooking a feast for myself, (after all the trees couldn’t join me) seemed silly until I recalled how much I loved my own food! I am an excellent cook and I can conjure up just about anything without a recipe.

And this is how I came to create the space for a celebration of all evergreen trees that includes food I love from old thanksgiving dinners. I have transformed thanksgiving! Every year I wait for one of my favorite birds, the partridge, to join me outdoors as s/he feasts on old crabapple berries. This year I have added “Star Baby” to my celebration!

I am no longer without human relatives! I will be talking to my cousin on thanksgiving, sharing memories and stories as well as whatever pictures/videos of the baby that may come my way…Capri Rose, my beloved little cousin was born just a few months ago on my dad’s side of the family, family that my mother made sure we never got to know.

My Star Baby is the youngest of the Pottetti line and I am the oldest. Together we close a circle, just as Billy and I have done.  (I think our two Dads would be very happy about this outcome). My first cousin and I have what is known as Sympatico – he tells me all the time “it’s natural that we should share and do things together because we are family.” He will never know what it’s like to be without loved ones, because his Italian roots privilege family over others – the exact opposite of what my mother did, and my own children continue to do today.

 It’s easy to see in retrospect that my refusal to abandon my father when he died gave my mother another opportunity for revenge that she couldn’t resist. I set it up by challenging her decision not to have any kind of memorial service for her husband. The worst part was that she made sure her grandchildren wouldn’t attend their grandfather’s service.  This either or attitude of hers – choose her/her money, or me and a memorial service, helped split me away from my children/grandchildren on a permanent basis.  

Thirty years later my father’s nephew folded me back into  family. I have no idea when I shall visit my little cousin but she lives in my heart as a beacon of hope for the future, and oh, I love her so. She’s a girl and she’s family too! Billy doesn’t let a day go by without sending me pictures of her laughing, crowing, working hard to roll over, eating her first food, all the things I missed…

This year when I weave my wreaths into the circle we call life I will be thinking of Billy and his family, my Star Baby, and the Pottetti Family Tree – the one with Love and Blessings for all Beings, (human and non human) at its center.

BIO

Sara is a naturalist, ethologist (a person who studies animals in their natural habitats) (former) Jungian Pattern Analyst, and a writer. She publishes her work regularly in a number of different venues and is presently living in Maine.