An Idyllwildian Thanksgiving

We had a very quiet and restful Thanksgiving and only gained about 5 lbs. each. Hope you did the same.

We always spend Thanksgiving in a knotty-pine cabin in Idyllwild, a community in the Riverside County Mountains about two hours from here. Southern California is an amazing place to live. Any kind of atmospheric, cultural, economic and entertainment bioclimate is available within two hours of our front door.

With encouragement from the imps at the Weather Bureau, I had hoped for some weather, which in Idyllwild would have meant snow. But no, after some sprinkles on Thanksgiving Day it cleared up, nice blue skies, and temperatures that Idyllwildians would call suntanning weather.

We were in serious hibernation mode. Karen went up on Sunday after the closing ceremonies of the Breast Cancer 3Day and set foot out the cabin door one time, she said. I drove up on Thanksgiving morning, and it was a drive for a lifetime. Overnight rain had broken into patchy showers, enough to keep the interstate wet so it reflected the sky, with clouds letting enough light through to create an encompassing Impressionist smear of gray and rose and ivory. The highway was almost deserted at that hour, and the wet lanes became part of the sky smear, losing all suggestion of concrete, lane markers disappeared, flooding me with the impression of riding on the sky, words rolling over in my mind, looking for the ones that would best describe this suspension between earth and heaven.

I decided that if there was something I could be thankful for on Thanksgiving morning, it was being born into a species equipped with a brain that could seriously process its surroundings, admit they were too beautiful to describe, but possible to enjoy to the point of rapture even as it became convinced it was flying in total contradiction to the vibration of the tires on the interstate.

I also had hot coffee in a traveling mug and Slim Willet on the CD, so if you know who Slim Willet is, you realize my rapture was complete. I was in a moment unique to my life thus far, and I was thankful. And then I got to knock on a cabin door, and there was Karen!

Karen, with nothing more than a pot and a spoon, produced a turkey breast of considerable juiciness and she is hereby an honorary member of the Kettner Blvd. College of Turkey Surgeons and Airport Relocation Committee. We had stuffing, gravy, green bean casserole with real mushrooms, and Karen's special gorgonzola salad with pine nuts. Then pumpkin pie with walnuts and whipped cream. By then it was 4:30 in the afternoon and I was ready for bed. We watched a movie until 7, and then I did in fact crawl into bed and slept until 7 in the morning.

The Idyllwild community, augmented by a throng of flatlanders, has its Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the town circle every Thanksgiving holiday. On Saturday we stood bundled against shirtsleeve temperatures and precisely at 5 p.m., with the sun down and temperature dropping, the lights went on in a hundred-foot pine topped by a star of white lights. Above it, the sky was in evening blue, with Venus and a new moon in the background, and way up, the silver contrail of an airliner headed southeast.

We drove home early Sunday morning to beat the return rush, unlocked the front door, and there was Gully! Life is good.