Day 22: Thanksgiving Memory

What is a Thanksgiving memory that you're grateful for? I have so many good memories of Thanksgiving in both Reno and Lincoln, and I'm grateful to my mom and my mother in law for working hard year after year to pull off this huge family feast. But, the Thanksgiving memory that popped into my head for this prompt actually comes from Norfolk, Virginia in 2011. Josh had just received his cleft palate surgery and was in the PICU for a couple days. We weren't able to leave him even to attend a gathering, let alone to try to cook and host; we were new in town; and both of our families lived at least 1500 miles away. Our plan for Thanksgiving that year was to run down to the hospital cafeteria and grab whatever they had put together. Lo and behold, not just one, but two new friends were kind enough to bring us Thanksgiving meals in the hospital. Both of these people had hosted their own gathering, so they had been cleaning and shopping and cooking for days, and were probably ready to just sit back and relax a bit, rather than pack up a plate and drive across town to the hospital. But both of them found the time and energy on the holiday to leave their own family gatherings and make sure we weren't alone and we didn't go without the traditional meal. Every time I think about it, I feel this surge of gratitude for these kind friends.