The last of the cornbread dressing

OK. It's officially over now. The last of the homemade cornbread dressing has been consumed. There's a little bit of turkey left that'll end up in a nice stew, but turkey without the dressing marks the official end of Thanksgiving.

It was a bittersweet holiday - Wednesday and Thursday were wonderful and frantic and everything Thanksgiving should be.

Friday - slug-like behavior, manicure and pedicure notwithstanding - was kinda interesting. It was a lazy day, just reading and drinking tea in front of the fire. But then I got a call from my sister Cindy. We talked for a while about how great Thanksgiving Day was, etc., and then she told me she had some news. Hmm. And the news was something I would've never expected in a million years. Seems she and my brother-in-law Buck will be moving to California sometime next year. He's been made national sales manager for his company (let's face it - quite a coup for someone 53 years old; don't they usually give that stuff to 30-year-olds now?) and since the company consolidated and moved the home office to Anaheim, they want him there.

Now, Cindy and Buck have lived in Atlanta since they graduated from college - of all the people in the world I'd've bet would pull up stakes, it would've never been them. And maybe I wouldn't have been so surprised if they'd've said they were moving to Knoxville or Raleigh. But California? Big, big move for them. It's exciting and quite an opportunity - the children are grown (youngest Lizzie will graduate from University of Georgia in December) and Buck's and our parents are dead, so nothing to hold them here really. Except for years and years of friends and memories. But as I told her, the (metaphorical) gate around Atlanta doesn't slam when they move to California. They can always come back. Or not.

I'm happy for them - and was happy when Cindy told me. But now it's starting to sink in that I won't have my sister around. We're close, but not let's-call-each-other-everyday close. We know we're around when we're needed, especially to vent about something. And family functions - I do Thanksgiving and Easter, she does Christmas and whatever else we want to celebrate, like Mother's Day or Labor Day. It's just going to be weird for a while. And different.

So this might've been the last of the cornbread dressing for real. Not literally, of course, since I make the dressing. But unless they fly back home for the holidays, well, big annual occasions will change drastically. Including Thanksgiving. It'll take some getting used to, that's for sure.

Anyway - back to work tomorrow. Always frantic between Thanksgiving and Christmas, wrapping up year-end stuff - but it's a fun time, too. All sorts of goodies (and I mean the reeeeeeaaaaalllllly fattening kind) land on the office doorstep for the next 3-4 weeks. And we all give in to it - why not? Life's too short!