Welcome to Adulthood

Guest Blog: Hungry for Thanksgiving

“Forget all the other bready options on that buffet table and give me the weird-looking celery-studded stuff. So GOOD to get a bite of stuffing, a bite of turkey and gravy, and a bite of cranberry sauce all mixed up together in your mouth!” – Excerpt from Hungry for Thanksgiving

‘Tis the season for guest bloggers!

This holiday season, I am thankful for my amazing group of blog collaborators who continue to inspire and amaze me with their incredible writing abilities, and wonderful stories.

Here’s a guest blogger, the sassy Mim, who gave us a personal perspective on death that was a quiet little blog entry but was packed with meaning and was incredibly moving. I always learn from her (especially lately — on a personal level, Mim is about as wise as they get) and I am so excited and honored to feature her again on Welcome to Adulthood. Did I mention that Mim is about to jump into the world of blogging? Her blog will be launched next week. Stay tuned right here for all the juicy URL details.

I am also excited to feature a guest blog from two of my favorite ladies at 2GirlsonaBench, Tricia and Siana. Stay tuned, because after the holidays we will kick off our first blog in our Inhabit series from two little ladies that you will not be able to get enough of. (Luckily, you can amuse yourself for hours on their blog.)

But for now, enjoy this little diddy courtesy of Mim that is so good you can almost taste it. Happy Thanksgiving!

Hungry for Thanksgiving

by Mim

When I was a kid, my family celebrated Thanksgiving at our church by helping serve a community meal. I don’t know if we ever had a conversation about the great effort to feed the hungry on the holiday that’s all about gluttony and counting blessings. We just showed up, cooked, served, smiled. Seems maybe there should be some great life lessons in there somewhere. But really, for me, Thanksgiving has mostly always been about the food.

Mom would get up early and, following Grampy’s recipe, she’d sauté celery, onions and poultry seasoning in Crisco until the whole house smelled festive and edible. Before we kids had finished our Frosted Flakes, she had stuffed the huge bird and heaved it into the oven. And by the time we arrived to deliver the finished, golden-crisped turkey to the fellowship hall kitchen, we were bouncing off the walls from the anticipation of eating the magnificent thing. (…)

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Lessons on Adulthood: November 22

Life is about learning lessons–that is how we keep growing and evolving. Lessons I learned this week involve friendship, relationships, and…shopping!

1) Friends come and go — even friends that you think are kindred spirits. But you see their faults, and you think, “But I am special. They would never do that to me.” And then it happens. A betrayal can be as small and unspoken as a silent phone, an unanswered call, or a secret. But the loss is heavy, the rift is wide. So you try to accept the change, set aside the bitterness, appreciate them for their moment in time, and move on. Call it a lesson learned.

2) Recently, I ventured to Sonoma for a weekend of wine and hibernating for a dear friend’s bachelorette party. One of the days we were there, we drove down Sonoma’s coast to an epic iPod soundtrack and then stopped at a little restaurant for dinner. We had to wait a few minutes for a table, so we stood outside on the patio deck looking at the ocean.

A couple, who appeared to be in their early 50s, was also waiting for a table. We chatted with them a bit about where we were from and why we were in Sonoma. They were vacationing for their 25^th wedding anniversary.

“Do you have any advice for the bride-to-be?” I asked them, expecting some cheeky response.

The couple thought for a moment and the woman said: “When you get married, you have fights sometimes, you might disagree, you might even be attracted to another person, but on our wedding day, we made a vow to always choose each other. So, no matter how angry we may be when we go to bed, no matter how stressful life may get, we wake up every day and think ‘I choose you’ and we are happy.” (Note: it is not “I chose you”, it is “I choose you.”)

Then the husband spoke. He had a slight accent which he indicated was because he was born in Israel. He said, “Never hit below the belt. Because hitting below the belt leaves a hole of hurt so big that no amount of apologies can ever fill it. And you can never take the words back.”

Duly noted.

3) And on a lighter note….From Kaitlan, a reader in Arizona, “Adulthood is seeing a pair of boots you want, being able to buy them without devastating your budget, and walking away because it is the season to give.”

(Photo via AlyssaFilmmaker on Flickr.)

Wordless Wednesday: Adulthood is Innovative

(photo of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain via Hisgett on Flickr.)