Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you had a wonderful holiday. (Or happy Thursday if you don’t celebrate!)

Beauty and gratitude don’t always go hand in hand, but today they do. Here are three beautiful things from my past week:

1. I spent last Thanksgiving alone, Facetiming with my folks to watch the parade and chatting with Rudi, who was out with his mom, on the phone. I don’t think I’ll ever take spending the holiday with them in person for granted again.

2. My brother called to wish us all a happy holiday. He recently made a major life decision, and he sounded so much more relaxed this time than the last few times I’ve talked with him.

3. The table may not have literally groaned under the weight of so many delicious dishes, but I think I heard it sigh contentedly. Mum has spent the past month preparing a couple dishes a week and freezing them, and the only thing that needed to cook from scratch today was the turkey and Rudi’s carrots and peppers dish. I appreciate how much work went into making the holiday meal (it was after 11 last year when I sat down with just three dishes) and the energy required to do it all.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your past week?

Our drive north today started later than we’d planned, as it nearly always does. To be fair, 4:30 in the morning isn’t the natural departure time for either Rudi or me, so the fact that we were on the road at 9 a.m. is really impressive.

But it also meant there were more people, some of them doing crazy things with their cars. Luckily, we were really only caught in standstill traffic a couple of times, but we’ve made this drive enough times over the years that we have a solid understanding of alternative roads. It’s just that those alternatives put you onto state roads that are just slower and less direct.

We detoured through Princeton and opted to stop at a used music shop for an hour. Their Christmas cd collection was a lot lighter when we left!

In the end we pulled into my parents’ driveway nearly a dozen hours after we left the Burrow. While it was a slow trip, it wasn’t a horrible one.

But I am glad we don’t have to drive back until Monday.

A Thanksgiving tradition for you.

The next time it comes around on the guitar, I invite you to sing along with the chorus, loudly. We’re starting a movement, after all, and they need to hear us.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share fictional characters we’d like to check in on. Here are some of mine:

1. Isola Pribby from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows
2. Felicity from A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd
3. The teen protagonists of The Illuminae Files series by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristof
4. Will from Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
5. Starr from The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
6. Ruth from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
7. Claudia from The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
8. Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
9. Mary from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgsen Burnett
10. Miranda from When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

How about you? Are there characters whose lives you’d like to peek into even after the happily ever after takes place?

I’m feeling a little blue tonight, so I’m giving us a rare non-Thursday edition of three beautiful things:

1. I passed a woman wearing a hat with a gigantic plume of a feather sticking out of it.

2. An upstairs neighbor removed their laundry from the dryer with twenty minutes to go. I grabbed the thickest items off the drying rack and finished them off with a little heat.

3. There was a shred of pink along the horizon behind the Washington Monument as I was biking home past the Capitol on an otherwise overcast day.

What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

The apartment still looks like a tornado came through, but now you can add a couple bags of groceries, several bags of Christmas presents, and a full bag of produce from the garden. (Tomatoes, peppers, all the remaining basil (two types), Swiss chard, and a handful of tomatillos are in the bag (and then I added at least half a dozen ripe figs from the tree in the park)).

Admittedly, Mount Laundry is now looking more like Laundry Foothill, with three loads done since Rudi left. I’ve got at least three more to do before we head north for the holiday, but I should probably switch over to removing items from the Burrow, rather than just cleaning and rearranging them. (This would have been made easier had the recycling been picked up this week.) We have a new cat sitter coming by Monday evening, so I now definitely have a narrowing timetable for putting the worst of the situation to rights.

Tomorrow holds more than cleaning, though. Sarah and I are getting together in the afternoon for lunch†, and I’ll probably bike across town to get in a little more exercise and daylight and to count it as a Coffeeneuring ride.

But once the sun goes down, I’ll get to work righting the ship.