Because I have kept decades of diaries

sometimes I like to open the bookcase next to my desk and randomly thumb through my old diaries/journals to see what I wrote on the exact same day in a different year.

After my walk this morning, after thumbing through five or six at random, I found this entry I wrote in the diary I kept for my daughter Perri.

In 1995, November 23 was Thanksgiving day. Perri was three. She's twenty-four now.

My mother and father were alive and well. We drove five miles to their house on Brush Hill Road for Thanksgiving dinner my mother cooked.

We had just moved back to New England after eight years of living in Florida.

We were renting a house in the town next door to where we now live, but we had bought a house on Brush Hill Road we would move into in a few weeks.

My son Landon was eight. My youngest daughter, Franci, wasn't yet born. I had no dogs to walk me in the woods.

This is my first Thanksgiving without my father being alive. My mother died eight years ago.

In 1995, it seems I was grateful for the same thing I'm grateful for twenty-one years later:

I started my day with a walk in the woods at 6:30 a.m.

I loved the trees against the sky in the morning light.

All photos and text copyright Kelly DuMar 2016