The "Grateful" Camp Giving Thanks this Thanksgiving

Excerpts takes from "Just Thoughts of a Plain Country Woman" by Lucile Ellingwood Morrow, published in The Collinsville News, November 22, 1951.  

Mrs. Morrow's son was in combat in Korea at the time of this writing. He had returned from WWII only to be called back in for military action in Korea.  

". . . .Thanksgiving time is here again and I think this year more than since the last war, folks in the United States are divided into . . .  camps:  the Thankful and the Worried.  

In the Thankful Camp are those whose hearts are full to bursting with gratitude and thanksgiving since we are blessed above all people on earth. Our cities are not being bombed, our crops have not been destroyed . . . 

In the Worried Camp are we whose dear ones are away at war again and we might well ask the question, "How can we have Thanksgiving this year when our country and the whole world is plunged so deep in another war . . . . 

". . . The Boy saw the last of  the Heartbreak Ridge and Bayonet Ridge actions and in a recent letter 
says, "We have our fox holes fixed up pretty well; we get two hot meals a day; we are as safe here behind these barbed wire entanglements as we are at home-well almost, anyway." . . .

So, as Thanksgiving comes on I am, at first thought, not very happy.  Then I console myself that he survived the active combat, that I have the health to go to that work every day. I live daily amid the beauty and blessings of our fruitful countryside now resting and peaceful. I have seen the trees arrayed in their frocks of rust, gold, red and brown. How lovely the harvest moon so clear and cold and the radiance of the stars that seem to hang lower than at any other time of the year! . . . 

As Thanksgiving Day comes on, it should make us all so humble and grateful! . . .There is nothing which sustains one more powerfully than the ability to recognize in one's every day life, the beauty of the commonplace."