It is about 6:30 in the morning, and I’m sitting in a vacation house in North Truro on Cape Cod. It is a beautiful house owned by and artist and full of her work. With the exception of an occasional crow outside, the house is quite. The weather is cool, damp, and misty.

Soon enough, the house will erupt into activity. Fiona will get up, along with her three cousins, and the two dogs. They will talk and run and it will be a grand time. Kim will get up, along with her brother, sister-in-law and her parents and the preparations for the Thanksgiving feast will begin.

But now, I have the house to myself, to sit quietly and reflect. Without the impending chaos, this is a wonderful house for reflection.

I’ve gotten so far behind on my novel that I’m setting it aside for the month; another year with an unsuccessful National Novel Writing Month. Yet I do have the beginning of a good novel, my writing, I hope, has improved, and new ideas have come flooding in.

One of the characters in my novel is a narcissistic trustafarian. He seems incapable of empathizing with the people around him. They are all just objects for his continued amusement. As I explored the character, I thought of the contrast, the empath. I remember years ago when I was exploring my well developed emotional defenses and a therapist observed that sometimes our defenses can be a good thing. We need them to keep the whole world from crashing in. If you think about all the people suffering from diseases, hunger, war; the list seems endless, it could be dehabilitating.

An idea emerged for a story, The Empath’s Touch, taking the idea of a person wanting to be more empathetic and wishing that they could feel everyone’s feelings. Like Midas’ Touch, it would end up being a curse instead.

This idea has been in my mind as I prepared for Thanksgiving Day. I’ve thought of those I know that are in the hospital; some fighting lung cancer or Alzheimer’s disease, others simply getting far enough along in age that the flu that has been going around has left them too weak and in the need of special care.

I remember ten years ago when Kim and I celebrated Thanksgiving Day at a historic Vermont Country Inn. It was a few months after Kim’s mother had died, and she just didn’t think she could deal with a large family affair. We were both horribly wounded at the time by so many of the things going on in our lives, but still we took time out to be thankful for the few bright spots, including our new found love for one another.

At a meeting on Monday evening, the chair of a board I serve on commented about how two important people had died in her family on Thanksgiving in years past and so for them Thanksgiving was a more quiet affair.

These thoughts stayed with me throughout the week. On Tuesday, Fiona and I drove over to Gozzi’s Turkey Farm in Guildford. It is a wonderful local turkey farm, and we always get our Thanksgiving turkeys there. The traffic was heavy on the Interstate, so we took the back roads. I thought about those stuck in traffic on the Interstate, simply trying to get home on the second day of a short week. I looked at the people as they drove along the back roads; how many times so many of them must have driven these roads, how routine the frustrations of the traffic must have become. I remember years ago when I was young, single and working in New Jersey what some of my commutes were like then.

As the sun set behind us, the barren trees in front of us were lit up with a beautiful darkening crimson. Yes, in the frustrating long commutes home for the people around us, and the exciting trip to get the turkeys, there were special moments of beauty, if only we could look and see them.

The folks at Gozzi’s Turkey Farm dye a bunch of their turkeys bright colors and put them in a pen in front of their store before Thanksgiving. It was getting dark as we arrived, and the turkeys were lit up by the headlights of cars in the parking lot. Fiona and admired them and were taking a few pictures as some of the workers came out to escort the turkeys back to their night time quarters. It was a stunning parade of brightly colored turkeys and one other person commented about how it beat the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Yup, a few brightly colored turkeys at the end of the day could be a spectacular event. We picked up our turkey and headed home.

My thoughts continued in a similar vein as we drove out to Cape Cod. I was focused on my driving, so I didn’t spend as much time pondering the lives of the people around me. We stopped to get a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on the way up. The store was quiet and empty and I wondered how the store owners had been weathering the recession. We had no traffic and were on the Cape for a late lunch. Most of our favorite clam shacks were closed for the season, but we found a good place to stop in Wellfleet.

It was after whatever they might have had for a lunch time rush, with only a few couples sitting around. A tall red headed proprietress took our orders and made sure we received what we needed. How had business been for her this past year?

As we drove the last few miles of our trip, I looked at the scrub pine trees alongside the road. The mist intensified the colors of the lichens on the trees and beyond the road, Cape Cod felt like a barren strange land. I thought about what it must have felt like to the pilgrims and early settlers as well as the Native Americans that had inhabited these lands.

After settling in at the house, Kim and I went to the lighting of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown. The museum at the monument was packed. A nice young man was playing the piano in one room with many of his friends gathered round. Some women were dressed in traditional pilgrim garb, and many people drank cider and ate cookies as they looked at various exhibits of what life was like on the Cape in the early 1600s.

Outside, around the monument, speakers blared. Techno music segued into Christmas carols as Kim and I found a quiet place off to the side to sit and watch the event. The mist billowed past the monument, only to clear shortly before the lighting ceremony. Various people spoke about the monument, out country, our traditions, and the Mayflower compact.

With the monument lit, Kim and I headed down into town and stopped at Twisted Sister to pick up some pizza to bring back to the house. We chatted with the owner and the manager as we waited for our pizzas to cook. We talked about the Sagamore Bridge and how the construction had affected businesses already suffering because of the slow economy. Then, with our pizzas in hand we returned to the house.

Now, I sit and finish writing my blog post. It is almost long enough to be a full days worth of writing for NaNoWriMo. I’ll post it, briefly check my email and some other blogs, perhaps write a little bit more about my ideas for what I could do with a cellphone that is a fully powered Linux box, and prepare for the activities of the day.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.