The night table and the house surrounding it seem too quiet in my post-holiday, post-vacation, post-friend's-visit depression. I drove my friend to the airport this morning and she is back home by now. I will strip the sheets from the bed in the guest room. Back to work tomorrow. And it doesn't help that the sky is doing its traditional November steel gray shroud thing today.

We burned five bundles of wood on Thanksgiving Day, and stayed outside talking and eating and drinking Bob's 47 beer until the coals looked liquid in the bottom of the fireplace, then dimmed and ashed over. It was a wonderful time.

The downstairs cat, at first appalled and upset that I had a house guest, got more relaxed about it during the five days of my friend's visit, and by yesterday was acting almost friendly. Will she notice the quiet?

It's usually on the toilet tank, but I cleared that off to make space for additional toiletries because my dear friend from high school is coming to visit for Thanksgiving. She'll arrive Monday night and stay until Sunday. I'm on vacation, too, so I'm pretty happy. On Thanksgiving Day we will cook for four other friends and after we eat we'll build a fire in my portable outdoor fireplace and sit around and talk laugh sing tell jokes and watch the flames.

I wish everyone who reads this a happy Thanksgiving and much to be grateful for.

Yours truly,

Zoomer

I never knew before that he had small feet, or that he kept a pet hen during the Civil War. Or that he didn't like to tell people to do things they didn't want to do. I also don't like to do that, which is why I bailed out of the management career track at work. But R.E.Lee had that trait and still was revered as a great general. Diffident people everywhere can take solace from his example! But I'm not sure they should follow the example of leading a crusade despite deep-seated doubts about its virtue.

The pet hen was eventually eaten, by the way.

I took off my socks and put them on the night table and there was a bit of dirt on them from my garden. I have been cleaning up the yard and putting things to bed for the winter. I like doing that almost as much as getting things going in the spring. My mother used to say that she liked to make a big mess and then clean it up. She said that Annie Dillard said that too but I don't know where. Gardening is sort of like that. Nature lets us feel that we're imposing some order on it. When of course chaos is always lurking just behind the perennial border.

One thing I did today was to cut back the mint which is near the wisteria vines. They are both vigorous and enthusiastic. And this summer I neglected both of them so they wove their vines through and around each other to make a sort of punk topiary. Mint, of course, can never be discouraged. Anything you do along that line is seen by it as a stimulating challenge and a motivation to redouble its efforts to take over the world.

All the catalogs are gone. Simplify simplify simplify. (Thanks, H.D.!)

Also gone is the REM fan club newsletter which folded out into a poster of the group in their early days looking scruffy and self-conscious.

Also the West Missouri Spirit which I never did get around to reading. Try as I might, I can't make myself get interested in diocesan affairs.

Gone too is The Phantom Tollbooth, which I could not like. And Cherry, which I did like and finished.

The only things on the top of the table now are the lamp, the clock, the prayer book, and the biography of Robert E. Lee. So the downstairs cat has more room to turn around and sit. She likes to sit on the table and look prim and disapproving at me. Or sometimes she looks sweet and narrows her eyes at me, as cats do when they want to seem friendly.