THANKSGIVING DINNER--

At the Clay Haus, Somerset, OH

I offered a silent prayer of thankfulness as I celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday Thursday with an assortment of friends and relatives of my lady Sue's family--and was grateful for that privilege. 

I lost my bride over 10 years ago.  Gone too, then, were the stable traditions that are born and grow with a loving marriage and the arrival and maturing of children.

In just a few years, it seems, those children have children and my expanded family now lives from Mansfield, to Columbus, to northern Indiana, to southern Ohio to Jacksonville, FL.

That does not change the meaning of Thanksgiving.  It just makes its celebration different.

There were many years when the male members of the family went hunting while the ladies toiled over the feast yet to come, whether the hunters were productive or not.  Then there were years where about three days worth of televised football rounded out the day of pleasurable digestion.

On this day it came down to my "adopted" grand daughter Mackenna and I roaming around the Junction City, OH area in search of some geocaches before it became time for a rendezvous of our 7-member tribe at the Clay Haus.

That morphed into a second gathering at Sue's family homestead, where sister Patsy still resides, for a prolonged period of grazing on some terrific desserts while the ladies mostly discussed the launch, early Friday morning, of their annual shopping blitz ranging somewhere between Zanesville, Newark, Columbus and Lancaster.

The whole thing winds down when Sue, Patsy, Mackenna and I reconvene over lunch Monday and load the vehicle for the trip back to Mansfield.

Or was that Sunday when I was supposed to retrieve the shopping gals?

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Click here for an earlier blog story on the Clay House, Civil War General Phil Sheridan and a ghost or two.  (Our group's seating was out of the picture area in the near foreground of the above photo.)