If ever you have loved me, if ever you have fed me when Ive hungered or warmed me when Im cold, then I am thankful. If youve healed me when I was broken. If ever youve forgiven me … if you have smoothed the wrinkles of my age with your sweet hand and calmed the fire within me when it raged, then too I am thankful.

Im thankful for the trees, their branches sweeping to the sky toward heaven, for the tumbling waves and the lumbering ocean, for the soft run of sand through my fingers, for the colors of the seasons, die shapes of the creatures, for the smell of flowers.

Thank you for the sand dollars and the curious shells the children find; thank you for the joys and wonders that sit before their eyes. Thank you for lovers who shimmer in the rays of the silver sun going down at the end of the day. Thank you to all our best feelings that grow stronger at the ocean, to the ill will that gives up in desperation and dies.

On a more personal note, Im thankful for women who like men with big bellies. Im thankful for the neighborhood bear that eats our garbage but doesnt eat me. Im thankful for all my old drinking buddies who havent found out yet where I live. Im thankful that the pants I wear have a smaller size than the number of years Ive been alive; Im thankful that my knees hurt only when I breathe (thats how I know Im still kicking). And Im thankful that my senses still have enough sense left to give my head something to do.

Thats what I wanted to say on this Thanksgiving.

I spent the morning at the cemetery today. I think dawn is best for feeling the spirits that swirl around you. The air is wet even without the rain, the leaves on the trees sag with heavy color, the fence posts lean wearily with age. And the moss on each stone is a marker, that the silent work of each busy soul is almost complete, and by the time the stone has lost its carvings, that the spirit will have ascended into heaven.

Ive come to say thank you to the men and women, to the children and grandmothers and stepfathers and to all the people whose land we now care for as our own. Thank you to the first ones, who came here on foot and by canoe, who taught us reverence for the land and all its bounty. Thank you to the ones who came after that, in ships and in wagons, for pointing our way onto the Peninsula. Thank you for the buildings youve left and the peculiarity of your marvelous architecture. Thank you for your quiet churches with their hand hewn pews, their white painted steeples and proper picket fences. Thank you for your ladies in lace and gentlemen in tie and vest. And thank you too for your raucous taverns and rowdy bars, for your blaspheming fishermen and fist happy loggers on Saturday night. Thank you for a parade of colorful people that have streamed like banners throughout our history: your hooligans and temperance women, your politicians and city boys (who talked too fast and had too much to sell). Thank you for your scoundrels and scalawags, your blacksmiths and schoolmarms and storekeepers and cranberry men. Thank you for Oysterville and Ocean Park and Long Beach, for every home and hamlet in between, for every hideaway that lost its name (or never had one in the first place). Thank you for showing us the Columbia River and for Lewis and Clark and (eventually) for leaving the Native Americans in peace to live life in their own fashion. Thank you for the pictures youve left, of freckle-faced little boys holding lunch buckets and toe haired girls running through the fields, their ponytails waving in the wind.

Thank you for your words, for the chronicles and the journals of your lives on the Peninsula oh so long ago. Thank you for bequeathing to the people a sense of history and a passion for remembering our sacred past.

And as a message to all us old men: thank you for my chair, for my TV, for my bathroom (oh yeah, and for my wife, too).

Wayne Downing is a refugee from Seattle. He lives in Ocean Park with his wife Cecelia. His daughter, son-in-law and grandson live in Long Beach, Calif.