LIGHT

As usual, I'm lingering behind in all my chores and postings and cleaning and getting ready for the cookie-swap on Sunday. Perhaps on Monday, there will be time to post a bit about our Thanksgiving celebration, which covered almost a week, with the comings and goings and the getting together several times, here and far away. I'll post some of that if anyone's interested.

And now, I must away, for the kitchen calls, the two-pans-of-fudge which will go into the cold room to set up before the party, the lists and the getting out of dishes and tables and cloths, the cooking and the preparing, with a meditation and contemplation in every little moment. I enjoy getting ready for things, making little dishes to stash in the fridge, plumping a cushion, moving a footstool just so, getting out the stacks of napkins, cuddles of spoons.

The light's bright Autumn swags of grapes and leaves have been exchanged for the ropes and swirls of richly-colored ribbon, and the corner tree, bright with white and silver, greeted me this morning when I emerged sleepily for coffee---Caro had come down and been Fairy TreeMother in the wee hours when she came home from work, and as we slept. The small table is draped in white layers of Battenburg, and the three-foot tree glistens with lights and tulle swoops and incongruously-enormous crystal ornaments too-big-for-the-tree, but perfect, nonetheless.

But whatever the brightness, whatever the light, know that none is as bright in my life as the people who inhabit all the rooms of my splendid House of Family and Friends---you all drift through, you stop and read, you comment and say hello, and those things BRIGHT me every day.

Tomorrow will be Post #600, in this bare two years of my everyday scribblings, and I hope it will be worthy of this wonderful group of friends who come and visit. I love and appreciate you, each and every one, and I wish all of you the blessings of this wonderful, warm Season of Light.

rachel