Commentary: Thanksgiving is a time to appreciate the humor, serenity of our bounty

I look at Thanksgiving in two parts.

First, Thursday will be the day on which we begin to make weighty decisions.

A day on which we begin face the fats of life: the turkey, the mashed potatoes, the candied yams, the chicken-and-noodles, the ham and the green beans topped with toasted onions and infused with condensed cream of mushroom soup.

Then, after the Cowboys game, we will face them all again - along with the second helpings of key lime pie; the puddings and mousses; or the cakes, cheesecakes, custards and cranberry dishes that dance before us like Unhealthy Thing 1 and Unhealthy Thing 2 from the Fat Cat in the Hat.

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Even the word “helping” seems wrong on a day when what I most want to do is avoid hurting myself by developing stretch marks in my digestive tract.

Which leads to another decision we all face on Thanksgiving: whether the word stuffing will be a noun or a verb for us this year - whether it will be a bread-based food or it describes our eating habits from the beginning of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to the moment the largest defensive lineman has finished his post-game meal at the High Fructose Corn Syrup My 600-Pound Life Bowl in Fatty Tissue, Ariz. (Aerial shots provided by the Gastric Balloon Blimp.)

We might be better to call this whole period of overeating not just the bowl season but the bowl, plate, cup, saucer, plastic container, Red Solo Cup, freezer-bag, the dog-can-no-longer-stand-up season.

One thing is certain: Thursday kicks off a five-week season in which it’s easier to be gluten-free than glutton-free.

In the second part, Thanksgiving turns to a drive taken now that the leaves are gone.

And I miss them, two sets in particular: the yellow leaves on the twin maples in our front yard whose reflections set our bedroom aglow; and certain small ornamentals at the moment half of their ruby red leaves are secured to their slender branches and the other half have formed a bright red pool on the still green grass below.

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At that stage, they sometimes look to me like a living sculpture and at other times like a poem in the works whose leaves, like words, will fall into place only in their own good time.

Even with the leaves largely gone, a Thanksgiving season drive from Springfield to Plain City, first north along Ohio 4, then east on to Ohio 161 at Irwin, is not to be missed.

My version of the drive begins at Route 4 and Villa Road where the Buck Creek Carry Out’s sign for guns, ammo and bait reminds me I’m headed for the countryside. Then comes the curving drive past the Ole Brick Tavern and look up at the wooded beauty of perfectly named Pleasant Hill Cemetery.

At the sign for Moorefield Road, I anticipate arriving at Twitchell Road, where my eyes take in the open landscape like a deep fresh breath.

Just before the large, arching curve skirts at Mechanicsburg Sand and Gravel, Route 4 intersects Ohio 54, which climbs quickly on the left toward Urbana while rising more gradually and up around a curve in the other direction to Catawba and the rolling ground known to locals as the Knobs.

I still remember the late Ron Duncan, a one-time Northeastern School Board member, telling me I ought to contact Delmar Unangst for a fuller appreciation of the area.

Back on Route 4, harvested corn fields stretch out from Route 4 like welcoming and massive natural fiber door mats. The dun fields shaven clean of soybeans offer less resistance to the eye, which races quickly to the tree lines. Some of them sport the untamed haircuts of stubborn old evergreens; others are populated by slender silhouettes of leafless trees that stretch out along a creek like a string of paper dolls.

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Past a set of railroad tracks on the approach to Mechanicsburg, the road rises over a knoll at Allison Road, and the view expands over farmland resting from a season of work. A second set of tracks cuts a swath that draws the eyes through a wooded area, and soon the village appears.

The metal structures at the top of the grain elevator in Mechanicsburg stare down like a mechanical spider that might at any moment pull its legs free and begin marauding over the countryside.

North and east of the village, it might lose its breath climbing hills where the engines of combines and the semis filled with grain whine at this time of year, then catch their breath as the land levels out in time for the right on Ohio 161 at Irwin.

Every now and again, one of the trees hugging the Little Darby Creek to the north sticks its head above the others to be notice. But they are more often seen on the return trip.

Because once out of tiny Irwin, the driver’s eye is drawn to the vast vistas to the south, where cleared land stretches out to clean to the horizon. The word panorama comes to mind over the miles in which every object, whether natural or of human origin, appears to have been transplanted from an HO railroad layout. Farther on just north side of 161, a semi-circular Quonset hut covered with a yellowish fabric looks like an oversize roller bale.

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Just before reaching Plain City - a name sprung from the landscape — 161 makes a final arching climb revealing an expanse of harvested farmland to the left and a small still greenish valley to the right.

Both the absence of crops to the left and the fullness of green to the right testify to what the small star in the center of our solar system has done yet again.

For another year our sun has, without charge, provided the energy needed for everything around us to grow - not just the harvested crops but we humans, as well, who live off the organic solar cells of the plants that convert and store solar energy.

In the one month and three days before the winter solstice - that moment at which our hemisphere is farthest from the sun — we are right to both feel and give the warmest thanks, in proportion to the vast vistas of land on which food is grown and that can be seen any day on a drive from Springfield to Plain City.

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