The trash truck outside just shifted into another gear and woke me from this silly musing on the Rockwell painting I remember. No, not in my lifetime as a baby boomer; I mean the Rockwell illustration that we look to as the apex of American Thanksgiving. Do you know anyone who celebrates like that?

As the political minority at the table and the single mother of a teen who has recently left reason, I dreaded this year’s gathering. I worried, and yes, complained to anyone within earshot, that I felt compelled to keep a balance of so many competing obligations and good manners that there would be no room for feeling thankful myself.

Maybe, like me, you sat around a table full of people you do not see on other days of the year. In my case half were relatives far too old to be boomers, and the rest were their friends or neighbors. Yes, they allowed ‘others’ at this allegedly family-centric holiday. We talked, some yelled, about politics and yes, honest, someone retrieved a blood pressure cuff. Some ignored each other. I drank in the funny stories about those who used to join us but are now deceased.

Some of you may have spent the day alone. Some may have loved the freedom of sweat pants and football. Some may have spent the day quietly, perhaps enjoying a crisp walk in the woods when the deer seem annoyed at the imposition on their holiday. I hope those quiet celebrations were everything you expected.

I don’t think it matters what you did as long as you did it well and with some bit of contentment. I thought I envied those of you who stayed home. But now, home from the highway, I am glad I followed compulsion and ditched the sweats. I am happy to have received hugs from those who would have removed my yard signs before the election. I am thankful that I kept some connection to the world that does not agree with me but values, as much as I do, this gathering each year.

And now, here comes ‘the holidays’ (she says ominously). Can we spend another day thinking about connections and forgetting our 401(k)s? Can we stop circulating emails about bankrupt stores, or inept politicians, doing nothing about it but spreading the gloom like some grease mark on our glasses?

We are literate; someone taught us the value of the written word as expression. We have our computers. We have our memories of music and, if we look, delights anew. We have enough things that I think we can sleep past five a.m., even on Black Friday. We are fine.

For my part, if we disagree, I’ll still take your heartfelt hugs. The greatest poverty I fear is the one of lost connections, which may be the one over which I have the most control.

When I met Marty I was nearly convinced that life after fifty would be better alone than with partner who could not see me, could not recognize something familiar in my eyes, and had no lexicon for the artifacts that clutter my kitchen windowsill.

In the corner of the windowsill, there’s a very deep oyster shell yanked from a narrow gut on the eastern shore of Virginia. Two plastic gibbons with their arms raised commemorate the day at the Philadelphia Zoo when the gibbons were most in touch with their carnal side and friend Babs and I laughed to tears with admiration. An owl made of shell and bark is a reminder of days spent in graduate school far from the beach or the forest but on the hardscape of Temple University’s North Philly campus. A tiny clay bear sits solemnly assured of his importance as a Mother’s Day gift. There are corks, just a few when there could be an acre, one from The Great Wall Chardonnay, another from the serene and frumpy valley that bears my middle name Edna.

Next to the corks, the black and yellow Jitterbug— a jointed cigar-shaped fishing lure with a wide metal “wobbleplate” at its mouth to make it stagger and bubble on the water’s surface. I found the Jitterbug while drifting in my kayak. Tangled on some rocks, it had been left by the first owner who didn’t have boots or the eyesight to retrieve it. The Jitterbug is just one of the countless objects from moments spent before I met Marty.

When I met Marty he was concerned that whatever filament of attraction he had managed to attach to me would break if we did not share our thoughts every few hours, at least by email if not by phone. He was concerned that, with silence, I would be repelled by his nearly bald head, freckled crow’s feet and perhaps the belly that filled in between us when we kissed.

Yet when distracted from his inner voice, he appears comfortable in his stocky male body. A bit taller than me, he is thick and grounded like his Russian heritage; he looks like a man who should enjoy his beets several ways. He dressed in a black t-shirt that has a dark grey Fender guitar logo fading into the front, jeans, and slip-on black canvas sneakers with tiny white skulls decorating them, as if some Talbot’s designer had visited the catacombs. I looked at the shoes a lot on that date. I know the contentment from quietly wearing shoes designed for your children; we walk happier than our peers wearing acceptable loafers. We didn’t have to convince Mother to buy them either.

But as I looked at the shoes more and more I wanted to see Marty’s feet. I imagined that there would be hair on the top of both feet and on each blunt and full-sausage toe. I wanted to see them looking unabashedly male, built like heavy machinery for sturdiness and utility. I wanted to see them as if I had been his wife of thirty years and awoke like Snow White, to marvel, to be familiar, to know them, to suddenly realize those feet had carried him through a full and different shelf of artifacts to this night, to be warm on the cool summer park bench, next to me.

Jane Mohler Pigott lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.