The Best Thing That Happened This Week: Going Home for Thanksgiving
Turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie … and those people you can’t live with, can’t live without
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Prognosticators warned the traffic would be dreadful this Thanksgiving holiday, and they were right. On the roads, along the tracks and in the skies, we headed back en masse to the warm embrace of mothers and fathers, grandparents, siblings and aunts and uncles, gathering around heavy-laden tables, our hearts brimming with gratitude, only to realize within the stretch of just a few minutes that these people drive us out of our freaking minds. How had we forgotten that Cousin Don is a Cowboys fan? How did we banish from our brains for an entire year Aunt Sally’s nasty oyster stuffing? Why does Grandpa have to keep quoting Sean Hannity? Oh, God, why were we born?!?!? It’s occasions like this that remind us of both haves in the oft-quoted lines from Robert Frost’s poem “The Death of the Hired Hand”:
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
Hard to believe, we know, but chances are everybody there is thinking just the same sorts of thoughts about you.
