A Long Weekend In “Magary Country”

It is Thanksgiving all across these United States, but it wasn't until last weekend that I really felt it. I can read a calendar, and the season's usual logistic and chore requirements were all right there where I could see them, but knowing that a favorite holiday is coming and actually feeling it are different things. For Thanksgiving, which I love dearly, that realization manifests as a sort of exhausted gratitude, or maybe just grateful exhaustion. The way Thanksgiving season plays out, which is generally as a procession of low, short days stacking up across gray weeks dwindling fast into winter, punctuated by some emails from my mother with the subject line "Brussels Sprout," is familiar enough. But the experience of washing ashore on this little island in time in which all that stuff somehow feels good always seems to come out of nowhere, and always arrives as a relief.