Thankful even for cafeteria food

During Thanksgiving time, I think a lot about food. And giving thanks.

This year when I think of food, several aspects of my life come to mind, and they make me so thankful for a number of other blessings:

* Thanksgiving break means a reprieve from cafeteria food. Truman's food doesn't taste bad -- it's just not my mom's. This makes me thankful for getting to come home to be with people who love me.

* A group of people who live on my floor in the dorm invited me to the cafeteria to eat our Thanksgiving dinner together before break. Twelve of us crammed around the table as we vowed to eat like civilized people. Looking around at each of the individual personalities, I was thankful for the opportunity to go to a place where I knew no one and be myself. I was thankful to be learning how to do that, thankful for the hard month or two of loneliness, thankful for friends.

* I work for the compost project at school. For this job, I have to scrape the leftover food off people's plates. I am so thankful for this chance to be humbled and to get to appreciate the accepting people who work nine-hour shifts in the kitchen to support themselves and their families for almost no thanks.

* For my writing class, I wrote a paper on hunger in Africa. These people's stories make me so thankful for my life and for food in general -- cafeteria or my mom's. They make me thankful that I am human and that we can help and teach each other so much.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because of the warm, relaxed feeling of thankfulness that surrounds everything. I love the specific day set aside to publicly declare all the blessings God has given me. I love that there is no commercialistic hype pressuring Thanksgiving to be perfect. I love my family's traditions of going to the movies and looking at the Christmas lights in the park after we eat the meal we all helped cook.

This Thanksgiving as I ponder food and thankfulness I've found myself looking most forward to the moment before we eat when we say what we are thankful for. I'm looking forward to thanking God for everything that comes to mind -- good times and struggles -- as my 16-year-old brother sighs impatiently sitting next to me. I'm looking forward to thanking God officially for cafeteria food and workers, friends, a job, being included in things, family, having more than enough, the people of Africa, coming home, and how he's been here with me during every single happy and painful second of college. I'm looking forward to thanking him for Thanksgiving -- a day to set aside my wants and live in gratitude for all that life was, is, and will be, even when I can't see it all completely now. I'm looking forward to thanking him for giving me a life to live poured out in gratitude.

I hope instead of wishing a blessed Thanksgiving that this year we all give thanks in amazement that, even through the struggles, we already are so blessed.

Mia Pohlman recently graduated from Perryville High School, where she wrote a monthly column about being a high school senior. She will continue her column through her first year at Truman State University.