Thanksgiving comes after the sun goes. The sun disappears as the earth tips and hides the sun in the south for more than two months. We do not see the sun for seventy-seven days. For seventy-seven days we have no direct sunlight. We see its light on the moon and the snow sparkles from reflected sunlight from the moon and stars.
Stars are suns.
Up there the aurora flows along magnetic lines like expanding colors of oil on water. I think about charmed quarks and black holes as I snowshoe across the frozen lake. I listen to my snowshoes crunch the ice crystals and am delighted that sub-atomic particles have charm. I accepted their charm before Bjorken and Glashow gave the quantum number its name. Somewhere up there between the glittering stars is a black hole which Kip Thorne of Cal Tech called a marvelously simply object because the matter that collapsed in the making of the black hole simply disappeared.