Our Thanksgiving Day Parade

Two turkeys -- one smoked, one deep fried, two stuffings -- one vegetarian, one not, two potatoes -- one sweet and one regular old. The Emeril's macaroni and cheese, the roasted vegetables, the salad, the cranberry mousse, the corn pudding. Butternut squash -- that was new this year. Thank goodness for the appetizers that tided us over, and the desserts to punctuate our annual gluttony.

It's been years since my cousin, Bruce, and I (and Lily, the beautiful golden retriever) met up for our Friday-morning-after-Thanksgiving run. At 71, he still looks as young, to me, as he did when he was the bearded, long-locked hippie on a motorcycle. My relatives, the men in particular,  are blessed with some odd youthful gene. Though I miss the crunch of the leaves on the hilly path, the icy cold November New England air, the weakening sun fully visible through the naked branches, my aching feet and rebellious stomach are thankful for the respite. I am happy to sit by the fire in the hotel eating a bagel and drinking coffee.

It's been years since I spent much of the day entertaining my own babies, hoping they would nap, worried they would interfere with everybody's feast or rub chocolate turkey remnants on my cousins' white couches. The crowd size has remained relatively constant, though with marriages and trips abroad and pregnancies and the occasional illness, attendance has fluctuated. I, for one, have never missed a Thanksgiving meal.

My cousins' home is filled with their grandchildren now, small humans with runny noses and leaky diapers and short attention spans and unfiltered emotions who somehow manage to steal my heart the moment we lock eyes. Each year, it seems, we add a new side dish, and a new person. There's always enough room on our plates for more.

It seems crazy, sometimes, the hoops we jump through to continue to convene somewhere in Connecticut every Thanksgiving, when most of us don't live anywhere near there. For eight hours (give or take, depending on unexpected cooking snafus), we flow from room to room reacquainting, catching up, looking for delicacies that may never have made it to the big table in the living room, cousins we may have ignored. From one year to the next, everyone looks pretty much the same. When I pause, though, and think back on the 24 year tradition, I can't quite reconcile the baby cousins I remember so vaguely with the doting parents they have become. Then there are my babies who are, quite suddenly, adults. My once chubby cheeked son who joins us these days via Facetime from Japan, his hair still matted with sleep and his eyes still bleary. If I close my eyes, I can still hear my father's voice, my aunt's, my uncle's. My mother is still young, still beautiful, can still hear.

We come for the turkeys and the potatoes and the apps and the pies.  Okay, no we don't. But it's nice to know the feast will always be there, to join us.