Thankful

A long day, traveling two hours to Monmouth ME to have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with brothers, sister-in-law, niece and nephew.  I am thankful that all my family are progressive, environmentally-sensitive, sustainability-minded, smart and very caring about others.  I don't have to end up in arguments on holidays, and that is a thing to be very grateful for.
My youngest brother was a very premature baby back in 1951, and the only way they had discovered by then to keep such infants alive was to put them in incubators with high oxygen concentrations.  There are a whole cohort of adults born then who survived their premature birth, but ended up blind and with other developmental deficits.  My brother was at home with us in MA for some years, the youngest of 4 children, until it became too much for my mother to handle and was interfering with her health a great deal, so he was placed in the Fernald School outside of Boston.  He lived there, with regular visits home (my mother never stopped caring for him until she reached old age), for many years, until he transitioned, about 20 years ago, to a group home run by the MA Assoc. for the Blind, where he has received excellent care.
My other brother and I are his guardians now, and I visit him every couple of months, and bring him here and to Maine for our annual family celebration of Thanksgiving.  I look forward to being able to see him more often when I retire.  We will not move him from MA, because so far we have been able to count on his being in a state where the care for the most vulnerable is not always the first place to cut when some rich person's taxes are too high.  He lives with 2 other men he has known for 50 years, from when they were all children whose parents did not have the knowledge or support to care for them at home.
So that was our day today, a drive to Maine with Nick and two dogs, a delicious, mostly locally produced meal, a walk around the farm and the drive home.  Ben and Nick went in the hot tub and we are all relaxing now.  A day to be thankful for.