odd year, this time twenty seven

The day after Thanksgiving is often a lost one—Black Friday, a cold and cloudy day, not quite winter, not quite Christmas. The morning after.

But this year it was also my birthday, and it was one of the best.

As if Thanksgiving were not party enough (I am continually humbled by the generosity with which the Family Pan opens their doors and hearts and lives to me—year in and year out), I had a birthday to celebrate. One year closer to Spinsterdom and Cat Haggery.

So I rang it in right: went to yoga class, took myself to lunch, and had my first Peppermint Mocha of the season. I bought myself a brand new dress and a big chocolate cake and walked through the Village in the grey gloaming, enjoying the desolate peace of the city on a holiday weekend and how it smelled faintly of woodsmoke.

Then I got showered with love and spoiled rotten by just about everyone in my life. Little gifts and large gifts (all perfect) and then sixteen people at a big wooden table eating ravioli and drinking Chianti by the jug.

Then the milonga, where we ate the aforementioned cake and I was greeted by two dozen red, red roses, sent by Spumoni from five thousand miles away.

I was a little too tipsy to dance, but it was good to end the evening under the twinkle lights in the back basement Ukrainian den of iniquity all the same, surrounded by friends I would never have made were it not for my shameless addiction to Argentine tango.

If this year is any reflection on its inaugural day, I will spend it smiling, behind a veritable Great Wall of Gratitude, tickled pink by the people in my life, with full knowledge of my impossibly good luck in those things that truly matter.

So from the bones of twenty six, I make a stock. It is a scrappy broth, given my circumstances, made from bits and blobs in a rented room. And it is just what I need. So I live out of a suitcase (well, two suitcases now, if we're counting) . . . I could not be more blessed than I feel today.