Weeks around Thanksgiving

Since I would be at Nanny and Skip’s house for over a week before the rest of the family came I decided volunteering would be a good idea. Nanny set me up to volunteer at New Hampshire Peace Action through her yoga teacher who also volunteers for them. Peace Action is a non-profit group with sections all over America that’s aim is to promote the end of the wars and stopping of new ones. I only worked here for 5 days and could go in and out as I pleased, a satisfying feeling when in a real job you are bound to strict hours. The guy who nanny had set up the volunteering with had forgotten I was coming on my first day, so arrived fairly late. It was difficult for the staff to find things for me to do because organising volunteers is like a different job completely, so in the end I mostly created my own stuff to do and had a lot of interesting conversations with some of the radical people working there. I decided to create a few interesting pages for their seasonal Newsletter, including a big article about a War photographer. I also stood out in the weekly anti-war vigil for a short while holding huge protest signs with another older lady and the intern – we got some abuse from rednecks in trucks but also got some positives. Volunteering was a very nice experience, like having a job but with no real ties and no forced work. I also went to Nanny’s Unitarian Universalist church quite a lot while I stayed, pretty different from your regular English Christian church service. Over the two weeks in New England I went on a pretty crazy cooking run now that I had so much freedom to make good food, compared to Yellowstone where crap was just served to me on a plate. I did tonnes of vegan baking so a lot of scrumptious sweet desserts were had all round. I thought that it would be snowing while I stayed so had got my hopes up for skiing trips, something I have only done a few times but thoroughly enjoyed, however it only snowed a little towards the end and not enough to go skiing, sledding or ice skating.

I met up with the English family (mum, dad and Emma) at Boston airport in week two, a strange feeling because I have always been the one greeted here so now it was like greeting them to my new home for a year – it was great to see them after 4 or so months. The first night we stayed at Ned and Andrea’s in Boston, near the Bunker Hill monument, a short visit with just a few shared meals but enjoyable and nice to see more family. The next day we went to Rhode Island to get to the Cicchetti’s for Thanksgiving, picking up Gian Carlo from the hospital on our way, after a cancer treatment. We stayed in a motel in walk able distance from their house since Gian Carlo was very susceptible to catching viruses from others and if he did it would halt his treatment. So our stay mostly consisted of hanging out, talking, preparing lots of food (including a 40 pound organic turkey!) and then evidently eating tonnes of food with all the American family on Thanksgiving Day. I enjoyed this holiday, which I had never celebrated properly before, because it was more about having fun with others and eating good food, there are no worries about presents involved.

After Thanksgiving we went up to New Hampshire to stay with Nanny and Skip for four days, the second time for me. We went on nice walks with the dogs, I baked more of course and we mostly just hung out together. On Tuesday morning mum, dad and Emma were to return, travelling over to Boston for their flight. They took me with them and got me safely to the train for my next move of the year, hugs and kisses as goodbye for the next section of the year and then I boarded the train for the 3 day journey all the way to the West coast in Olympia, Washington.