Where I grew up, thanksgiving had a season. When the last of the maize was in, the work stopped and the singing started, and it went on far longer than anyone needed it to.
Nobody organised it. An older woman would begin a line and the rest of us would answer her. The songs were old and the words were simple and the point was the repetition.
The harvest was not always good. I remember years the singing happened anyway, in a thinner voice. That is the part I did not understand as a child. We were not thanking God for the size of the pile. We were thanking Him for being the kind of God you can sing to in a thin year.
In the city, thanksgiving has no season. Nothing stops. If I want to give thanks I have to decide to, and then I have to defend the time.
So I built the habit deliberately: one song, out loud, before the day begins. It sounds small. It has reordered ten years of my life.
The chorus I kept from those harvest fields is the one I still sing on the days nothing has been gathered: You have never once been late.
