Aftermath to a Holiday

I failed to report on my actual Thanksgiving Day. Maybe it's not too late to do that now.I'll confess I didn't have a thing to do with the meal. Most of the credit for the day goes to my girl Annie, She can do anything, it seems.This is Annie just last week. (Sometime your kids don't let you take endless pictures. You have to kind of sneak up on 'em.)Anyway, she left her apartment with the 20-pound bird  in his 20-pound pail of brining fluid and came over here to the house of her aging parents who were just sliding their feet into their slippers.She cooked for the rest of the morning, gleefully accepted the dishes made by three other great  family members and had us all seated at 2:00 for the feast.  All I did was make the gravy and get the porch furniture out of the dining room in time. (See here for that story.)  Old Dave even got in a little yard work in the morning, pruning some branches off of the hawthorn so the coming snow won't do that for us.That’s when he noticed the ball stuck high in the branches of the crimson maple which he knew would drive him crazy all winter long.  But that got solved when the guest who is also a firefighter/medic arrived. He shinnied 60 feet into the air, loosened the ball from the tight grasp of the branches and shinnied down again.And when a tiny fire occurred in the oven threatening to wreck half a dozen "sides"  he fixed that too, without harming a hair on their heads so to speak. (He's a firefighter/medic.)It almost goes without saying that that guest is Annie’s intended who she fell in love with while still in high school.So here’s one more handful of gratitude tossed up in the air.  Getting older isn’t bad at all if the ones coming up behind you are this kind of competent and helpful.And know how to smile and have fun too.