Supply Chain Issues in the Land of Plenty

The Thanksgiving season is upon us.

I heard on the radio the other day that we were supposed to go grocery shopping early to avoid the holiday being “ruined.”

The shelves are empty, we are told. But in reality, you just have to be a little flexible.

But if I have to eat brussels sprouts instead of green beans on Thanksgiving, I think we’ll be alright. Whatever it is, it’ll taste better than last Thanksgiving, when half our household was suffering through COVID – no taste buds and all. So we consider ourselves lucky this holiday – thankful even.

I’m pretty sure that at the first Thanksgiving the Pilgrims and the Indians celebrated with the food they had, not the food they wanted. Happiness, after all, is wanting what you get, not getting what you want.

And there will be more than the taste of food to be thankful for this year. By the time you read this our eldest will no longer be a child. Our daughter, Ella, turned 18 on Wednesday.

We managed to get her to adulthood with minimal damage – we think.

On her last night as a 17-yearold she sat in on the bedtime story for her younger brothers.

We read out of a book, we discovered after opening the inside cover, that had been given to Ella by her grandmother for her own second birthday. Sixteen years ago.

It was a accidently fitting final bedtime story of her childhood. She woke up Wednesday and we marked her height on a wall in the house next to an “18.”

It appears’s she has grown all of a quarter inch since she was 17. But in reality she’s grown so much more than that. In the last year alone she’s gotten a job, a driver’s license, a car she’s paying for, and she even thinks she knows where she’s going to college and what she’s going to study.

I can only hope as an adult she doesn’t get what she wants, but wants what she gets.

That’s my hope for you – and I – this Thanksgiving too.