The rain has started, but it has been light. The forecast is for rain all day into tomorrow. It has been a long while since the last rain. This storm is welcomed.

My week has been busy with more to come. Today and Saturday I have concerts, but tomorrow’s concert has been cancelled, and I’m glad. Four in one week plus practice and a lesson is a bit over the top.

Life is filled with mysteries. Some are never solved. I was a part of one yesterday. I was on the mid-Cape, on my way home from my concert. I was moving along until I hit bumper to bumper traffic. It was slow going, start and stop, start and stop. Finally the traffic broke. I looked around. There was no accident, no hapless speeder stopped by the police and no car disabled on the side of the road. Why it was bumper to bumper is the unsolved mystery.

When I was a kid, the best part of Thanksgiving was the two and a half day school week, and Wednesday was a bust. We got out at 10:30 and spent the morning mostly coloring turkeys and making one out of a Dixie cup for the body and construction paper for tail. That became a Thanksgiving table decoration.

My mother always bought an enormous turkey which I swear we ate for days and days, even weeks. It defrosted in the sink. My sisters and I remember my mother waking up in the wee hours on Thanksgiving to get the turkey ready. She made her stuffing first. I still love her stuffing. The key is the Bell’s seasoning. The Bell’s box which looks old, from an earlier time, has never changed. The turkey on the front looks like it belongs in the oven, plucked of course. It has long been a New England tradition but is now available all over. Before my sister could buy it in Colorado, we had to send her some. I remember the turkey cooked for hours. My mother would baste it, and when the oven opened, the aroma made my mouth water, and I’d beg my mother to give me a bit of the stuffing, hanging out of the turkey and crusted on the end. The windows steamed. The kitchen was hot.

My Thanksgiving memory drawer is overflowing, filled with the sights and smells of all those Thanksgivings of my childhood with my mother always the biggest, the most prominent part of all my memories of Thanksgiving.