The Unexpected Harvest: Healing, Home & the Heart of Thanksgiving

This year’s harvest — grown with care, tended with presence, and shared with gratitude. A reminder that healing happens in cycles, both in the soil and in the heart.

Thanksgiving has always held a tender place in my heart. Not because of the holiday itself, but because of the feeling that lingers beneath it — the warmth, the laughter, and the sense of connection that once filled my mother’s family home. As a child, I can still remember the sound of laughter echoing through the rooms, the smell of a slow-roasted turkey drifting from the kitchen, and bowls of pickles and nuts that seemed to appear on every table. Those simple, sensory details have stayed with me far more vividly than any tradition ever could.

Even after my mother passed, I continued to spend Thanksgiving with my grandmother or aunt. There was always something about that day — maybe the gathering, maybe the gratitude — that made me feel closest to her. Looking back, I think it was the spirit of togetherness that I cherished most. The love. The laughter. The reminder that even after loss, the heart remembers.

A Harvest of the Heart

These days, I’m not much of a holiday person. My celebrations are quieter — less about the calendar and more about the season itself. Thanksgiving has become a time of reflection, a gentle pause before winter’s inward turn.

The garden taught me that beauty often arrives quietly and unexpectedly — just like healing.

This year, as I look back on the garden that brought me so much joy, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. Each day spent tending those little plant babies filled me with wonder — from the first sprouts of spring to the abundance of summer’s harvest. Even the challenges, like potato beetles and rotting garlic, became teachers in patience and surrender. The garden mirrored life itself — the cycles of growth, loss, and renewal — reminding me that gratitude doesn’t come only from abundance, but from awareness.

And so, as I prepare to sit at the Thanksgiving table this year — bringing a jar of fresh pickles from my garden — I smile at the full-circle moment. The same pickles that once sat on my grandmother’s table now come from my own hands and soil. It feels like the laughter and love of those earlier years live on through these simple offerings.

The Unexpected Harvest — A Sister Returned

My earliest Thanksgiving memories live with my mother’s family — that was where I felt most loved. But this year, something shifted. Healing came from another branch of the family tree — the side that once held distance. I never expected Thanksgiving to include reconciliation, but gratitude has a way of reaching places we thought were closed.

Some things become sweeter when held again. This year, reconciliation became one of the greatest gifts I didn’t know I was growing.

Last spring, I wrote a blog for Mother’s Day titled “Mother’s Day Reflections: A Journey Through Grief, Growth, and Grace.” I wrote it from a tender place — somewhere between memory and ache — sharing the truth of grief, growth, and grace that shaped my life after losing her. I thought I was simply honoring her life. But I didn’t realize I was planting a seed of healing — one that would quietly open a door of its own.

That reflection on grief and growth reached someone unexpected — my “half‑sister”… the one I had been estranged from for 20 years. She told me it helped her see another perspective — a window into my heart that she hadn’t fully seen before.

She read it. She saw another side. She felt something shift. And with courage in her heart — she reached out.

Six months later… we talk weekly. We have kayaked together. She spends time with my grandchildren — who absolutely adore her. We even do yoga together — moving our bodies into a new kind of sisterhood.

This is how love grows: piece by piece, hand in hand, across generations.

I am grateful beyond words for her bravery — for the moment she chose reconnection over silence — and for the chance to grow a relationship that once seemed lost.

This year, I finally understand that healing, like gardening, happens in cycles. Sometimes it is not what we plant in soil that grows — but what we plant in truth. What we plant in courage. What we plant in love.

And perhaps that is the truest meaning of Thanksgiving: A season where hearts harvest what hands alone cannot grow.

Finding My Way Back Home

If I were to summarize what I am most grateful for this year, it would be home.

Home was once elusive for me — something I longed for but never truly felt. Now, home is everything I once dreamed it could be. It’s the place where I have found stability after a lifetime of searching, a space where love surrounds me through my partner, my family, and the little feet of my grandchildren running through the yard.

Home is where I grow the fruits and vegetables that nourish us. Home is where I work, teach, and create space for others to heal. Home is where my heart rests — and where it has finally come home to itself.

For that, I am endlessly grateful. For my partner, who opened his home and heart to me. For the land that feeds me. For the laughter that still echoes through the walls. For the peace I once thought I might never find.

Ayurvedic Reflection: A Simple Practice of Gratitude and Grounding

At the close of the day — or before your next meal — take a few quiet moments to pause.

1. Place your hand over your heart and take three slow, steady breaths, feeling your chest rise and fall.

2. Offer gratitude to the five elements — earth for nourishment, water for flow, fire for transformation, air for movement, and space for holding it all.

3. Reflect on what you’ve received, both seen and unseen — the food, the love, the lessons, the growth. Whisper softly: "I give thanks for all that sustains me, seen and unseen.”

4. Move into eating or resting with awareness, honoring the sacred act of receiving and digesting life — body, mind, and spirit.

Gratitude, in its truest sense, is a practice of remembering — a way of coming home again and again to the heart.

As this season shifts toward winter’s quiet, I feel myself softening into gratitude not as an idea, but as a way of living. The garden has gone to sleep, yet what it taught me continues to grow. The door with my sister has opened, and the love that once felt distant now stretches into a new generation. Home—once elusive—is now where my feet, my heart, and my purpose rest.

Thanksgiving is not just a holiday. It is a daily invitation:

• to remember where we came from,

• to honor what grows even in silence,

• and to give thanks for the chance to begin again.

  
  

May this season remind you that healing has its own timing, that home can be found in unexpected places, and that love—seen or unseen—always leaves a light on for us.

With Gratitude and Love this Thanksgiving and every day,

Jennifer