My friend Anita is felting up a storm.

Philip is cooking something new and posting a photo of it every day. Megan is reading Shakespeare on video, Jason is doing woodwork projects, Tom and Mary and Katie are sewing thousands of masks, and Peggy is studying Spanish, German and Latin -- all at once. Then there are the folks who are just trying to make it through the week, working jobs that demand more and more of them every day.

There is no right way to do this.

I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo -- which stands for “National Novel Writing Month” and is held every year in November. November is a month when I am usually much too busy traveling and visiting family to commit to writing 50,000 words in 30 days -- which is what NaNoWriMo is all about.

Except this year, I was not going anywhere. So, I thought, “Why not?”

There are a lot of good reasons why not, the biggest one being that, in order to “win,” a person needs to write 1,667 words seven days a week -- if they don’t take a day off on Thanksgiving. While 1,667 words may not be an impossible number of words to write in one day, it is a heck of a lot of words to write every day.

“Why are you making your life more stressful?” my husband, Peter, asked.

I knew he had a point. But I thought it would be fun because I figured, this year more than any other, there would be a lot of interesting people doing it. And I was right.

NaNoWriMo encourages writers to strike up friendships with the more than 300,000 participants. The “National” is not quite accurate; there are people writing from all over the world. Everyone I met online had a story -- how they were working from home, or their business was closed, or they were going to be doing something else that was canceled. There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and encouragement and positive energy.

This year in particular, having this big goal gave a bit of structure to my life that seemed to be lacking. It provided a reason to stretch in a year where just getting by often feels like more than enough. It noted the passing of the days and gave me a badge for showing up and writing -- first one week, then another -- until I made it to the end.

Most importantly, it connected me to others. And right now, that is what I am missing more than anything. Encouraging a writer in England whose B&B is closed to get her words written, providing sympathy to a writer who is struggling with her novel while caring for her elderly mother, having a writer in Hawaii say he found my writing funny -- these were the connections that made this big, ridiculous goal worthwhile. These connections made the goal irrelevant.

Of course, not all the writers finished. Some got called back into work. Some simply became overwhelmed by day-to-day life. There is no right way to do NaNoWriMo either.

We all had an adventure. We did something that made a shrinking world feel a little bigger. We might even have written a few good words in there, somewhere.

In the end, I did write 50,000 words. I don’t know if I’ll ever participate in NaNoWriMo again; I’m writing most of the time anyway. But I’m glad I did it this year. When I hit 50,000 words, I had a reason to celebrate.

Right now, I think we’re all looking for reasons to celebrate.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

I have always loved Thanksgiving. I love that it is a holiday built around a full table and homemade treats. I love the recipes handed down on index cards that only get made once a year and traditions that bring back childhood memories and the chance to use linen napkins and the idea that sitting around a table -- just sitting around a table -- is reason enough to celebrate.

I think it might be my favorite holiday. I like that expectations are reasonably low and yet the holiday provides an opportunity for people who care about one another to get together.

Of course, things are different this year.

I’m told my extended family will have a “Zoom Thanksgiving,” and I’m trying to be more excited about that than I am. Thanksgiving will be, by necessity, a significantly pared-down affair this year. But I am still looking forward to it. My husband, Peter, and I will celebrate with his sister, Lori, and her husband, Robert. Lori has been fighting cancer all this year and last. We’ll be even more careful than usual so we can share this meal at opposite sides of a room with her. And, yes, we will be grateful.

Because we didn’t know if Lori would be alive to celebrate this holiday. But she will be there, eating turkey and breaking her dietary restrictions to have a piece of pie and a glass of wine, and I know there will be laughter and someone (probably Lori) will tell at least one rude joke and all of us, at our little gathering of four, will be more than usually grateful.

Cancer has been held at bay for another year. Yes, there have been deaths and losses, but there has also been a lot of laughter and some learning in this difficult year and (while it sounds cliché) a new appreciation for how important our relationships are.

My friend Marisa recently had a dream so powerful she felt compelled to share it on Facebook. She dreamed she had died and come back to life and was trying to tell everyone how special and amazing this was, how amazing life was, and no one would listen.

“Maybe you'll listen,” she wrote.

“Times are really rough, I know,” she continued, “and more so for some of us than for others. But this life is a gift full of little gifts. I hope you find some of them in your day today.”

Another friend told me he was suspicious of people like Marisa who were always looking for something to be happy about. If you had to “work to be happy,” it wasn’t “natural,” he said. He may be right.

But just as we’re able to extend Lori’s life or replace a broken hip or clean our teeth -- working at gratitude makes life a lot more pleasant, a lot more bearable, a lot more fun. If that’s unnatural, I’m in favor.

This Thanksgiving, Peter will make the stuffing his grandmother always made. I will make at least two kinds of pie, rolling pastry the way my mother taught me. Lori will get out her family china and silver -- although we won’t be using many place settings this year. Robert will set the table because he’s gotten good at that in these months of Lori’s illness, and Lori will probably ask us, as she has at Thanksgiving gatherings in the past, to share something we are thankful for.

And, in spite of everything, I don’t think any of us will have to work too hard to come up with something to say.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

“I’m going to bake bread!” my husband, Peter, announced.

Inwardly, I said, “Oh, no.”

Baking bread is not easy -- until it is. Every person I know who bakes bread will agree. If there’s someone out there who tried baking bread for the first time and it was a great success, I would like to hear about it because, in my experience, you have to bake a lot of bad bread before you bake anything close to edible. I was afraid Peter was about to find this out.

But what I said was, “Great, honey!”

A lot of people are trying to bake bread these days. Our store is still low on yeast and was out of flour for weeks. I wonder how many bags of flour and bottles of yeast are sitting around unused after a first, disastrous attempt. I remember when I first decided to bake bread.

“I’m going to bake bread!” I announced. There was no one around to discourage me.

I don’t know how many loaves of terrible bread I baked. I lost count. I tried all sorts of recipes. I blamed the altitude and the flour and the yeast. Nothing worked. I kept producing these heavy, unappetizing loaves and the only thing that prevented me from giving them to the birds was my landlord, a portly man, who came by to chat almost every day. He would eat absolutely anything with enough butter and honey on it.

So, my landlord ate loaf after loaf of terrible bread until one day I tried the “No-Knead Bread,” which my brother-in-law recommended and, quite unexpectedly, I made edible bread for the first time.

This was more than 10 years ago and, since that time, I have not experimented with another kind of bread. I will put nuts and raisins and cranberries and wheat bran in my bread on occasion, but the basic recipe remains the same because I figure I am lucky to have found one kind of bread I can manage.

Peter was inspired to bake bread because he remembered the bread his mother made when he was a child. The recipe was on a 3-by-5 index card she’d labeled, “My Good Bread.”

“Did she have bad bread?” I asked Peter.

“No. This is the only bread she made.”

I never met Peter’s mother. She died before Peter and I met. But other than giving birth to Peter, I’ve no reason to believe she had any superhuman abilities. I’m guessing she learned to bake bread like everyone else -- she failed until she found something that worked for her. That’s why she called it “My Good Bread,” to differentiate it from the countless loaves of terrible bread that proceeded it.

And it was obvious she wrote the recipe for herself. There was no oven temperature given, no baking time, and the ingredients were arcane. I’ve never seen “cake yeast” in the store and I’d have to guess that “potato water” was water she had boiled potatoes in. She used a type of graham flour that, as far as Peter can determine, is no longer made. Still, Peter was optimistic.

A few hours later, the results were in.

“My bread is a failure!” Peter announced.

The bread was tasty enough, but it crumbled as soon as it was cut.

“Well,” I said, “you’ll just have to try again!” And I suspect Peter will.

Because there is a reason we bake bread.

It is frustrating and time-consuming and failure-prone. But, really, there is nothing in the world like a loaf of freshly baked bread.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon’s memoir is called, “Blue Yarn.” Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION