Thanks, y’all

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe the climate is changing. Maybe both. Winter seemed to arrive very suddenly this year.

One day it’s a vest and short-sleeved shirt, the next it’s the L.L. Bean parka and the wool hat. Tuesday afternoon I drove through a blizzard. It was only a couple hundred yards, and it was gone by the time it was in my rear view mirror, but it was SNOW.

In November.

In Gettysburg.

In Maine it should be snowing. In Minnesota and Colorado skiers should be rejoicing. In Gettysburg, there are still leaves on some of the trees.

I think I remember this happening last year, as well. And winter turned to summer almost as suddenly, I recall.

Must be the climate is changing, though I’m not certain it is all our fault.

I remember one hunting season wading through waist-deep snow — and that was not including some drifts. That was the winter before the June I graduated high school, so my waist was about as far from the ground as it now resides. (Some might say my waist now actually is closer to the ground than it was then.)

Several decades have passed, and snowfall in that part of the North Country typically is not as deep as it was then.

Climate change? Maybe.

There are some things that do not take a physics degree to notice. Every time we put a dark brown roof on a house, pave a driveway or add a few miles of road, we raise the temperature on that part of the planet.

But in spite of the dire warnings this year, hurricane season seemed not as catastrophic this year as last.

I am thankful for scientists who try to understand that stuff. Clearly, there is much more at work than simply the amount of fossil fuels we convert to “greenhouse gas.”

I have traveled much of the world in person, and I am thankful for the choices I had that enabled me to do that.

I also am thankful for my mother and the numerous school teachers I had along the way who taught me to travel to other worlds in books. Books taught me to put a car into a four-wheel drift and fly an airplane. They have taken me through time, from the earliest suppositions of human experience to far distant worlds of which we are not yet personally aware. Pretty cool, huh.

I am thankful for authors who, in their fiction, have revealed truths we would never have accepted from more professorial presenters. James A. Michener, Michael Crichton and Neil deGrasse Tyson come immediately to mind. (OK, Tyson is non-fiction, but he’s a drn good storyteller.) Anyone who has not read at least one book from each of those authors has missed a real treat.

Movies, too, have their place in the pantheon of travel opportunities, though sometimes I have to admit favoring my imagination over that of the screen director.

I’m thankful for the way the election turned out this year. Reasonable minds may differ on whether the correct candidate was chosen to command our military or set us back on a profitable economic track, but I think no one can argue our image in the world has not been enhanced.

A few years ago, my convoluted track through history brought me to Adams County. A decade later, I think that was a good choice. So I am thankful for the welcome I have received to my no longer quite so new home.

I am thankful for the thousands of young people who have risked life and limb to protect the rest of us. Many of them will not be home Thursday to share the family turkey. All of us should mentally place an empty chair at our table.

That’s the trouble with war. Empty places at the Thanksgiving table are mostly in other people’s homes.

I’m thankful for the crowd I expect to surround my table Thursday. Son and his wife plus three, a daughter with her offspring, a sister with her husband and four more — one of whom officially joined the tribe by marriage last month.

And finally, I’m thankful for the folks who think what I do for a living is worth doing at all, and who sometimes think I do it well enough that I’m worth paying for my efforts.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.