This year makes the 35th Thanksgiving of my life.  I’ve enjoyed every one of them, and I’ve spent all but one here at home in Connecticut. 

The faces around the table have changed quite a bit since Thanksgiving 1975.  Several relatives have passed away, others are now distant, and some are brand new.  My little niece, Gianna, is just old enough to chew her turkey.

Other things are still the same.  My mother does all the cooking, my father does the carving, my grandfather tells the same old stories, and the men still watch football in our sleep. 

The menu isn’t much different either.  We still start with antipasto and homemade chicken soup, and most years we get our 20-pounder from the Brown family in North Stonington.  We still finish with cherry cheesecake, pumpkin pie, banana cream pie, chocolate cream pie, and about thirty-six other varieties of pie. 

One part of the meal that has changed is the vegetables.  My grandfather used to grow them himself, but he’s 91 now.  And for the last six years, my mother has served mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows.  These are my favorite vegetables on the table—for sentimental reasons—and I take credit for them.  See, the idea came from the one Thanksgiving I spent away from home.

I spent Thanksgiving 2003 in Erwin, Tennessee—me and about two dozen other people hiking the Appalachian Trail.  Most of us had walked 1,800 miles from Maine on our way to Georgia, so we were fairly hungry. 

There were two places where dirty, smelly hikers could stay for cheap in Erwin—Uncle Johnny’s hostel, just 68 feet from the trail on the Nolichucky River, or Miss Janet’s House, a few miles away in the middle of town.  Miss Janet and Uncle Johnny disliked each other—to put it mildly—and hikers talked about the feud up and down the trail.

Some of us had taken sides hundreds of miles before even setting foot in Erwin and without ever meeting either person.  I picked Miss Janet, so when I reached the Nolichucky I stood defiantly across the street from Uncle Johnny’s and chose to wait there in the rain until I could find a ride to Miss Janet’s.

I’ve never regretted my decision.  For the next four days, Miss Janet fed us, counseled us, chauffeured us all around town, and let us stay up late watching movies and making way too much noise in an arrangement that—judging by the looks on their faces—very obviously annoyed the hell out of her teenage daughters.  She charged us something like $8 a day, a sum so paltry that about half of the hikers forgot to pay it.

Miss Janet never complained.  She obviously wasn’t in it for the money.  Heavyset with red hair and a slight Southern drawl, she seemed to enjoy just being there to help us.  People referred to her as a "trail angel," and she was.

On Thanksgiving morning other hikers bummed rides from 100 or more miles around to eat at Miss Janet’s House.  She cooked a feast.  I think my mother’s cooking had hers beat, but I couldn’t stop eating the candied yams with marshmallows.  When I called home that day, I raved about them, and my mother has had her own version on the menu ever since.

The day after Thanksgiving, a bunch of us worried we had stayed long enough.  Miss Janet warned us that a serious snowstorm was on the way, but we started hiking south anyway, bound for the Great Smoky Mountains.  The next morning we woke up to at least a foot and temperatures so frigid that some hikers’ boots had frozen solid overnight and they had to hike in Zip-Locs and sandals.  I pulled out my cell phone, managed to get the scratchiest of signals while standing tippy-toed on a tree stump, and called Miss Janet’s House to plead for a rescue.  A hiker who had stayed behind told me others had already called, and if we could get our sorry butts to the next gap several miles a way by noon, Miss Janet would be there in her old, beat up van.

We made it and waited.  And waited, and waited.  We started to wonder if Miss Janet had finally had enough of us.  We paced back and forth to avoid freezing.  Finally she arrived.  Her van had broken down and she’d gotten it repaired, probably with money she didn’t have, and she’d found us just before frostbite did.  While we howled in pain, peeling our socks from our flesh and filling her van with the foulest stench known to man, Miss Janet never complained, never said "I told you so," never reminded us about the $8 a night—even though she should have.  Instead, she cranked up the heat, stopped at a grocery store, and told us she’d make us some hot cocoa back at the house, the kind you make on the stove.

So on Thanksgiving I will always be thankful for Miss Janet’s candied yams with marshmallows, and the kindness that made them.