Hi all! Here in Louisiana dinner is served in the middle of the day. Supper is served at night and we don't do lunch. So - dinner is over and the deer hunters have gone back to the woods for the afternoon hunt. They spent last night at the cabin and came back into town in time to eat. Our hunters, my sons and nephews, are all college-age and have traditionally spent this week in the woods. When they were younger, we all stayed at the cabin with them. The cabin is one room, no electricity. It sits in a clearing 1/2 mile off a country road. This part of Louisiana is not flat and swampy, though we do have the occaisional swamp along with the resident alligators. The terrain here is hilly, gently rolling hills covered with loblolly pines. The bottoms have little creeks running through them and that is where the hardwoods grow. Behind the cabin is a 2 acre pond and in front of it is the campfire that burns all the time we are there, winter or summer. When the weather is warm, the boys drag their cots outside and sleep under the trees. When it is cold everybody burrows deep into sleeping bags inside the cabin. At night, we listen to the coyotes yap-yap the night away. And we can sit on the steps with the owl call and get into a conversation with the owls talking about who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-all. Some nights we will sit around the campfire until very late, watching the sparks fly upward into the black sky. This morning one of my nephews had company in his deerstand. A litter of flying squirrels was nesting in the plastic bucket he sits on. My oldest son saw a doe on the way to his stand but saw nothing else. And the bobcat marked the gatepost with his scent sometime during the night. I could still smell it when I unlocked the gate. My son calls this place the Happy Hunting Ground. He doesn't mean that the hunting here is good, which it is, but instead, his reference to this place is sacred. This is a good place. I've watched these boys grow up in this place and become comfortable in the quiet solitude they enjoy deep in the woods and I know that I am so thankful they had the opportunity to grow up here where they could learn so much about their natural world. Soon, they'll be back for supper. Tonight we do the gumbo - seafood not turkey. The turkey gumbo will be later. And the talk will be of what they saw, the redtail hawk near the bridge over the creek, the rabbit that jumped off the trail. They'll laugh and joke about who missed their shot and why. They may even bring in some game, in which case we'll be very busy after supper. But that is not the point - it never has been. The laughter, the buzz of conversation, the sounds of a thankful people celebrating in hundreds of different ways life lived gloriously. It just doesn't get any better than this. Thanks for sharing your holiday with us and allowing us to share ours with you. Happy day! Sue