Alexandra Stickel

Thanksgiving morning was gray. Brown leaves clung to branches like a man hanging from a cliff, fighting the screaming, tortured wind. No leaf wanted to join its siblings on the ground, waiting to be stepped on by an avalanche of children, swept away into a truck and never to be heard from again. Nature was at tumultuous war, and I watched it happen from the warmth of the couch.

For the past three weeks, I’d established plans to join the population of maniacal Turkey Trotters. The people who wake up at the crack of dawn on Thanksgiving morning so they can run for an hour, while the rest of the population cooks in a warm kitchen, shouting at Uncle John to “Stop eating the turkey!”

I’d imagined it. Wednesday night, I’d shove all the carbs imaginable into my face and drink enough water to replicate the 2020 Midland flood. Go to bed early already dressed in my running gear, because if I didn’t wake up ready I would wimp out. Hop in the car, drive downtown, and run with only the promise of stuffing when I got home. 

I did, in fact, do all those things Wednesday night. Some part of me knew I wouldn’t be well enough to run, but there was a chance, and I would do anything on a chance. Pneumonia wasn’t going to dictate my life. I’d run while sick plenty of times in the past. Part of running is just doing it, despite the ache in your lungs, your legs, the nausea, the congestion, the cough. Running is a chess game with pawns of endurance, inching forward one step at a time to kill the King of Capitulation. 

I discovered it’s different when the King is in your lungs, wheezing his victory as you feel your chest tighten with every step, when there is exasperation in your breath after every staircase ascent. 

There truly are times when endurance isn’t healthy.

And so I decided to be thankful. I couldn’t run in the Turkey Trot, but I was fortunate enough to still have a Thanksgiving dinner. It wasn’t homemade, it was carry-out, but we could afford that, couldn’t we? Lung infections aside, I’m healthy. I can go for runs, I live in a safe enough area when it’s bright outside—and my body can handle the strain. I have a family to share my gratitudes with. 

Maybe with the fraying of time, Thanksgiving lost its meaning slightly to ostentatious parades, Charlie Brown (“We’ve got ANOTHER holiday to worry about”), and Black Friday, but at its core it’s still there. Gratitude is there, to fill the broken cracks of the world, to find the good within the bad.