2025: Ten Reasons I’m Thankful This Thanksgiving

The wild turkeys that wander our landscape have disappeared. It’s a trick of preservation they conjure each year in the weeks before Thanksgiving. The predations of deer in the orchards and elsewhere continue unabated, leaving a fence in our lower field crumpled from the lazy leaps of the fat and indolent. If I could just be bothered to get out of my chair, my deer rifle awaits by the door.

Stepping out onto the porch in the mornings, I’m greeted by the comforting smell of woodsmoke that fills the valley and the low, reassuring rumble of pickup trucks as they’re warmed up in the cool air. On a still, cloudless day, one neighbor’s old diesel can be heard as he winds down our road, until he turns off at Paint Rock five miles away.

This is our farm, our valley, changing yet unchanged, and this is my 26^th list of things for which I am grateful:

· Meemaw, my mother’s mother and once the head librarian in Crowley, Louisiana, for giving me stacks of deaccessioned titles from the Acadian Library as a child.

· All of the 59 books I have read this year, both highbrow and low—yeah, I’m looking at you, John Sandford—and that out of those, most have been around for a hundred years or more. (Another thank-you to my grandmother for instilling in me a love of reading, and a love of older books in particular, borne of her library cast-offs.)

· Friends and family from near and far who visited throughout the year. They delivered the opportunity to pause and stop our farmwork, fix a meal from our bounty, share a bottle of wine, have good conversation, and laugh at old jokes and ourselves.

· The produce from our gardens that graces our table every month of the year. The abundance in full baskets on the front porch feeds us, and the surplus fattens our pigs, who in turn fatten us. A lovely circle.

· Other farmers in the valley. They keep the faith, working hard and feeding themselves and those around them and beyond. They serve up the lessons on being productive that are still there for those who wish to learn.

· Friends who show up at the right time, with willingness, to help troubleshoot and free that stuck thingamajig on an ancient piece of equipment.

· Neighbors who lend a hand in welding a gate, moving livestock, cutting up a fallen tree, suggesting a reliable friend for tractor repair, and always, of course, accepting graciously a sack of zucchini.

· All the various abilities of my beloved, and they are extensive. Let it be said that she is a good worker.

· The alien beauty of Sister Moon. For those many nights when you’ve shared my secrets, shared your secrets, given me new ways to wonder at what I didn’t know, I thank you.

· The trees. Stout old oaks, show-off maples, winged elms stark in winter, straight tulip poplars towering in the heart of the woods, scrubby jack pines on the edge of a field shouting “I am here!”—they are living proof that Kilmer was right.

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Reading: Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling), a classic children’s book full of literary and historical references that would bore a kid today; The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius).