The weekly post that allows for older photographs that haven’t landed anywhere yet. Easy Sunday? You bet.

This is my grandmother. She was pretending to fuss at her granddaughter, so I could send her this picture. She doesn’t know how it all works, but she thought it was neat that I could show her pictures of her granddaughter’s children on my phone. She’s a sweetheart:

My grandmother has always been a big advocate of salve. Got a cut? Let’s put some salve on it. Burn your hand on the stove? Here, let me get the salve. Have a splinter? I have a salve for that. Concussion from a high impact fall? Don’t you want me to get the salve? Got a blister? Salve. Traumatic amputation? Here’s the salve.

So when I saw this at a store over Christmas, and it had her name on it and everything …

I also saw this around Christmastime, I think. Next year I’m picking some up for gifts:

Next week may be a bit slow around here, but there will be something every day. So thanks for coming, thanks in advance for even more patience with what you find here. But please do stop by when you can.

These are a little bit old, from Christmas, but there’s no time like the present.

We did a Christmas event at my great-grandparents’ home. They’re both gone now, but there are still family events and kids and life and presents and running water and things. This is right above the steps on their side porch, where everyone entered, into the kitchen:

I always wondered what kind of wood they used there. It has aged well, considering how long the house and that porch have stood there. I like to thing that worn away spot is a sign of many happy visits to see good people.

Years ago I got my first real camera for Christmas and I shot some of the first rolls of film here. As we left after this particular Christmas event I made sure to notice with much happiness, and relief, that the old dinner bell was still in the yard. That was one of those first pictures. When I was being “artistic” or something. And now, here I am, taking pictures of nails on my phone.

My grandfather pulled out some old pictures he’d found while working his way through his parents things. This is the first one he pulled out. It isn’t exactly crisp. I didn’t have a scanner in my pocket and had to make do with a picture of a picture. He said it was all gone now. He didn’t know who the man was and the only thing that might be left, anywhere, was the plow over to the left margin.

Even still, I couldn’t help but look at every barn from here to there and wonder:

I asked him if he’d thought about taking these photographs to church. It is a community that has stuck together quite nicely over the decades. Maybe someone there would recognize an old family face. He didn’t seem too optimistic:

When you look at the entire series of photographs he’d found, in the nice crisp shots under better light, you could tell that a lot of the same faces kept popping up. So these are people somewhere in his family. In this picture two or three of those faces have similar features to some people he knows:

This is that same family. The original shot is fairly blurry, too. But they’d gotten out, put aside their chores and put on a nice jacket and went and stood outside the homestead for this shot. Now no one knows who these people are anymore, which is somehow both sad and a happy mystery.

Probably they are in Alabama here. Most of my families, I’ve found, settled here before it was a state, which of course pre-dates photography of this kind. If not in Alabama, these ghosts are more-than-likely standing in Tennessee.

Even still, there are family events and kids and life and presents and running water and things. It takes more than nails to hold a place together, to allow for the time to wear down that solid wood.

I feel like this: the spirit of Thanksgiving isn’t brought about in a day, but rather through a season. When, really, it should be a spirit we keep throughout the year it is something that is at least always close at heart throughout this time of the year.

If you’ve ever sat around the table and played the “I’m Thankful For …” game you know there are a lot of things that folks choose. Throughout the season, based on how the holidays fall and where I’ve always lived and all of the travel and the various things that go with it, I’m thankful for one thing more than others. Truth be told, I’m probably not as thankful as much as I should be. I probably let the inner-Grinch run roughshod over my sentimental gratefulness too much, at the expensive of my gratitude.

And the thing I’m most thankful, and most grateful, for are the people who’ve come into my life when they didn’t have to, and let me take up a little piece of theirs. We pick our friends, we inherit our families, but we’re absorbed and adopted and accepted by others and that’s just a remarkable condition of humanity.

My family is full of stories like that, a family tree with swirls that shouldn’t be that, over time, make perfect sense. So is yours. People marry in and you come to see them as your own. People that need an extra sibling or a grandparent or whatever they need, and you find a place for them in your own family puzzle. This is a neat, and powerful thing.

A few years ago, for just one example, some friends of mine lost their newborn grandchild just before the holidays. Circumstances meant these two lovely people would have been alone at Thanksgiving. I invited them to my grandparents’ home and they sat with us and joked with us and cried with us like old relatives we’d known forever. It had this ease and casualness and lack of formality or awkwardness that was a marvel. It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen in a lifetime of memories at my grandparents’ home.

I’m sure my grandmother sent them home with leftovers, which is also what she does.

I was thinking about that sort of thing, how rich I have been in extra-family, on the drive from Connecticut to New Jersey, where I get to be on the “adopted” side of things. This last Christmas gathering is with The Yankee’s godparents. The families are intertwined in unbelievable ways. My father-in-law and The Yankee’s godfather, a retired teacher and coach who tells great stories, have known each other literally almost all of their lives. My mother-in-law and The Yankee’s godmother, a nurse fully intent on exercising her right to spoil her granddaughters, went to nursing school together.

The two families raised their three girls, only about four years apart, between them. Everyone is all grown up now, of course. The younger godsister, if you will, went to college and married the guy she dated there. The older godsister went to the same college and she and her husband have two children — ages two to five or so, who both already speak two or three languages. All of these people are lovely folks.

They’ve all taken us in, the three guys who married into this family — a biotech sales rep, a bike racer/budding film producer and little old me — with the greatest of ease. And I know this happens everywhere and is not unusual in the slightest, but it is, to me, the most amazing thing, about how families operate.

As gifts I received a beautiful ornament and a really nice shirt and sweater. I’m going to take my godmother-in-law clothes shopping with me. She knows her stuff.

Did I really this entire passage just so I could write the phrase godmother-in-law? Yes.

Even the dog gets presents:

That present that the dog opened was from my mother-in-law, who is among the world’s better present givers. (She’s mine and you can’t have her.)

Also, because my godfather-in-law’s father was there tonight, we had scratch-lasagna with four generations of a family tonight. Four generations! (The second time I’ve done that in a week, since there were four generations at one of my family dinners.) How incredible, and it is something we seldom even think about.

The only downside to this day of travel and festivity is riding on some of the bumpier roads on the eastern seaboard. Small price to pay when you have a lot of things for which to be thankful.