| Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you’re enjoying a great day filled with family, food and the making of precious memories. Thanksgiving looks a little different this year in the Campbell house. For the longest time, our tradition has been to spend Thanksgiving with my sister Missy and her family. Either her family would come up to visit us in Oregon, or we would go to their home in Reno. Most often, she came north because the rest of our family is in Oregon. Our Thanksgiving pictures have included my mom, my dad, step-mom, and both my sisters and their families. Missy couldn’t make it this year because her mother-in-law is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor, and may not be around next year. We could’ve gone to Reno, but that would’ve meant leaving my mom, who currently resides in a care center down the road from my house, alone for Thanksgiving. There’s no way my mom could make the trip to Missy’s house. She has had a tough year: a stroke, carotid artery surgery, and a complete hip replacement. To top it off, we are in the process of selling our house. We’re trying to buy a home that has space for my disabled mom so she doesn’t have to stay in a care facility or have the risks of living alone with her health issues. Having a “For Sale” sign in your front yard during the holidays takes a bit of the warm and cozy feeling away. (Not to mention the stress of keeping your very full house picture perfect for showings to perspective buyers.) We are living with uncertainty. My mom has more surgeries scheduled. We aren’t sure our home will sell before the offer we made on the other house has expired. Will we be moving at the beginning of 2020, or does God have a Plan B for us? For my mom? I don’t have the answers. For today I’m going to purposely setting my worries aside. We have a small gathering for Thanksgiving. Our immediate family, my mom, and my daughter’s boyfriend will soon share a wonderful meal. We’ll also had a guest for part of the day. My daughter is a caregiver and worked today, so she brought her client to our home for part of her shift. He’s a delightful, 95-year-old man with Alzheimer’s. He makes us smile every time he re-introduces himself and tells us how pretty we are. Life has changed, and it’s a different Thanksgiving. There is much to be thankful for, though. It won’t be long before my children are spending holidays with their spouse’s families. There will be a day when I no longer have my mom around. For now, I still have all of them with me. I’m missing the rest of my family, especially as Facebook memories fills my news feed with pictures of Thanksgivings past. I’m thankful, too, for all those sweet memories. As Olaf says in the recently released Frozen 2, there is one thing that never changes: Love. For that I am most thankful. What are your Thanksgiving traditions? |
| And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love — 1 Corinthians 13:13 |
