Finally, My Family

I Like Everything To Be Perfect for Company, But This Thanksgiving It Won’t Be

I’m just thrilled that everyone will be together

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“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” William Faulkner

For the first time since COVID struck, we are having a large gathering in my home. My son and his family, and my daughter and her family are coming for Thanksgiving. A couple of single long-term friends are headed to share. My son’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law are tagging along.

The Shawshank Redemption is one of my favorite movies. I love the line, “Get busy living or get busy dying.” I decided I would not let perfect stand in the way of anything I intended to do.

Typically, when expecting company, I go through and fix every little thing and clean the house like crazy. I am lucky my spouse is an engineer who cleans up after himself (mostly), so our house is never truly messed up. Because we are both engineers, large issues get repaired immediately, but small ones linger.

So, I have a light fixture that does not work here or a faucet that won’t entirely turn off there, etc. Things we see and live with until one of us fixes it. Since we are getting older, we leave the heavy physical work to others.

Scheduling contractors to do the physical work is frustrating. Sometimes they do not show up having gotten better jobs than our small, inexpensive ones. We ended up with the Boy Scouts putting down mulch in our flower beds after we hired a strapping young man and his friend to prep our yard.

The electrician came in and completed the repairs on the items requiring a ladder or wall saw; we did the rest ourselves. I hired someone to deep clean, but I don’t know if they will show up or not. If not, I will do it myself.

Everyone is bringing something, but we will provide turkey, ham, and asparagus. I am borrowing a table and chairs from a friend to seat everyone.

After a search, I found some small decorations to hang to make the place look festive. There were few left anywhere when I looked a week ago: thank goodness for Amazon. The days when the decorating…