Following the Nose:

It will be a small Thanksgiving this year, just the three of us, and a few friends later for dessert. No long drive, no folding children's table tacked on the end of a fully-extended oak antique. No bevy of aunts acting as sous-chefs to the baster-wielding matriarch. But it is only a short quiet pause, after grandparents and parents have left us only memory and a few bits of good china, and before we ourselves occupy the head of a three-generation table. Terry has all the makings of a pretty fierce matriarch herself. So we give thanks for our lives and for the lives that came before, and the lives that will come after, following their noses to partake in the feast.