Thanksgiving is both the nicest and the most cruel weekend of the year.
We are lucky enough to have a cottage (in the family for four generations) where we can gather to celebrate together. We take gourds and Indian corn for the table centrepiece and then, on Sunday, in the warming sun of the late afternoon, we take a slow trek around the village, collecting multi-coloured leaves.
If we're lucky, as we were this year, we gather a few bright orange swinging blooms from a Chinese lantern plant as a finishing touch.
It's normally the last weekend for gardening so we cut back perennials, like the peonies, even if they're not really ready for it, and we mulch the beds, put manure around the rhubarb and plant some of the late-season bargains from the garden centre, then water them in like crazy.
Sunday supper is the epitome of what good times are all about, beginning with a dry martini. We broke with tradition this year and had a gin sour. Turkey and the trimmings follow.
Thanksgiving, of course, is for the tried and true in everything including food, drink and friends.
Then we face the mound of dishes and go for a "stumble around" the block in that semi-comatose satiated state brought on by one too many helpings.
The chill of the night air, which you can actually breathe, is invigorating. You can see smog-free stars everywhere.
On our return, we are greeted by the roar of a blaze in a fireplace that was actually built before the cottage was, so the building could be wrapped around it.
The sweetness of the celebration of Sunday is followed, unfortunately, by the official closing ritual of Monday.
The cottage is not winterized. That makes Monday a blur of packing boxes, filling garbage bags, stripping beds and using all of the data carefully gathered from years of study of various versions of CSI to try to identify ice-encrusted packages at the bottom of the freezer.
Then we wait for almost two hours until the last drip of water flows out of the system. A little anti-freeze, the last Herculean effort to squash everything into the trunk and one last glimpse of the lake.
Then we drive away from summer for another year.
The long line of tail lights that face us as we make our way through the nearby town is an all too telling reminder that all the mundane realities of everyday life lie dead ahead.