The Wine Commonsewer™

Celebrate Life™

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

That's what Thanksgiving is all about anyway. Isn't it? A celebration of life.


It happened in early autumn of 2017, just a few weeks before I smoked this turkey. That's when a persistent case of pneumonia proved to be a very rare lung disease that I had never even heard of called IPF. At the time, the survival odds were 3-5 years and now seven years have passed. I said this elsewhere recently, but it bears repeating; Not sure if seven years is a record. Or a miracle. Or maybe it's the shelf full of additives in the cupboard along with the Lunger™ cough syrup that have gotten me to this place.

 

Long way around the barn™ to say that I'll bet that all y'all™ know exactly what I am most grateful for this Thanksgiving. But for every ordinary day, I just want to celebrate another day of life.

As is my custom, my vote for Thanksgiving's main dish went to doing a standing rib roast, but I was outvoted something like 20 to 1.

I really don't mind being tapped to prepare another mesquite smoked turkey. The clan is also clamoring for Lisa's incredible edible chipotle sweet potatoes and my sausage stuffing (I think).

 

Note: since we moved, we still haven't found those white serving platters. There were two of them.

Here's to you and yours (lifts a glass of the red). May your families be blessed at Thanksgiving and every other day of the year.

Photo Credit: Lisa

As Ever,

The 19th Day of Thanksgiving

Good Morning Gentle Readers, 

Before he passed, Dad's old place was on ten acres of Ponderosa Pine, Valley Live Oaks, and native Cedar trees located just below the snow line in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada between Sonora and Columbia. That was less helpful than it sounds. Sure, it was warmer and didn't snow much. Instead? It just rained. And rained. California is a funny place, there's an abundance of rain in the colder months, when there isn't much need for it. And there is very little precipitation from April thru October when the dry, dusty, ever-brown hills are left begging for rain and all that is offered up is wildfire. I was my daughter's age when I spent my first Thanksgiving with dad and his wife in Sonora. It drizzled and poured for four days straight as it did for every subsequent Thanksgiving visit that followed. How many visits? I lost count, but more than a dozen over the course of four decades.     

UPS and FedEx could never find it, though UPS had a slightly better track record. I suppose that was mostly because the house was at the end of a twisting, rutted dirt track that most folks figured they'd need a high clearance 4WD to traverse. He had an ancient Shivolay™ truck with an old-school granny gear that made short work of that road, but mostly he paid it no mind and barreled in and out of there in his Lincoln Lawyer Lincoln. Not the new Lincoln Lawyer, the 2011 McConaughey film version. 

Before the infamous drought of the twenty-teens, the first 100 yards of narrow road (the good part) was lined by wild blackberries that formed a twelve-foot high hedge along an embankment. Just past the quarter mile of blackberries, off in the pine trees to the right are a couple of houses. That is where I spotted this wild turkey.

As Ever,