It wasn’t on my wish list. But there it was, on display in all its vintage glory, set on a table among silver tree toppers and Santa mugs: cups and saucers, dinner plates, dessert cups, even a creamer and sugar bowl.

There is bee balm growing in my garden, its tall stalks topped with tufts of magenta and ruby red- like the crest of a woodpecker.

My mom and I are posing half-naked on a striped towel in a backyard-- there are garbage cans behind us and what must be a clothesline pole.

After a 42 year-absence, I recently had the great fortune to visit Paris, where I had spent my junior year in college.

We linked arms, black and white and brown and sang “We Shall Overcome,” as many stanzas as we could remember.

I was 12 years old when it happened. I was wearing my new two-piece swimsuit with a bronzy-orange floral print; the bottom piece was cut like boys’ boxers.

On a recent trip to New York City to visit my daughter Abby, I visited the book store in the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side.

In my kitchen, above a white hutch that displays my treasures: my kids baby photos, a bone china cup painted with a seaside cottage, and a silvery Eiffel tower ornament, too pretty to pack away, hangs a long, skinny strip of pink.

We marched. We chanted. We sang. We lifted each other’s spirits which had been wavering between despair and disbelief since our world went haywire on November 8.

Given the fear unleashed by our election, I want to share a story of kindness- in its own way, it is a thanksgiving story.

Before I even open my eyes, I wake up and remember that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Our airboat glided over the murky brown water like a 10 year-old on a skim board at the ocean’s edge.

On this Thanksgiving Eve, I am grateful forThe blissful sight of my tanned daughter, Aster, shivering outside at O’Hare after arriving from Miami where she is making a difference as a City Year volunteer.

Paris was my first love. Before boys, before Truffaut films, before cappuccino.

The landscape exudes a beauty as raw and pure as the sharp pain you feel when inhaling a blast of frigid air.I am in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian country next to China and the poorest, yet most democratic, of the former Soviet republics.

A lizard the color of dry mud scampers across a patio wall painted sapphire in the Airbnb studio I am renting for a few days.

It had been 45 years since I last set foot in the Haley Mansion.

I begin to cry; the natural beauty overwhelms me.

This Thanksgiving I was lucky enough to have two of my three children with me- my daughter, Abby, now a consummate Manhattanite studying anthropology, and Aster, a social work student enrolled at St. Louis University.I had to content myself with a Skype call to their brother, Aaron, an intern in a Central Asian country whose name lacks a single vowel, unless you count the “ys” in Kyrgyzstan.

To my mom, on what would have been her 84th birthday! love, Marcy