When I was a child, my Thanksgivings were always spent with my mother’s side of my family. We gathered at my grandmother’s house in the crossroads village of Berryville, Illinois, catty-corner from the general store that my grandparents had run once upon a time. My grandmother’s house is now gone as is the store and the Church of Christ where we attended. So many of the people I knew are gone as well.

I still have memories, though, of the days I spent among these folks, not just my aunts and uncles and cousins but also the people of the community who crossed my path from time to time: the kindly woman who ran the store after my grandparents, my Sunday School teacher, the older gentleman who sometimes played the fiddle at the store, the man who baled the hay on our farm, the family who had a strawberry patch where you could pick your own, the couple who played pinochle with my aunt and uncle. Good people, all of them.

It might have been easy for those who lived in the larger cities to dismiss us. After all, what sort of influence or power did we wield? I didn’t know it at the time, but all these people out there in the heartland were teaching me what it meant to matter to one another. Even when we gave into our flaws—maybe we were alcoholic or promiscuous or violent or criminal—we stood by one another. Farmers came together to help the sick or injured bring in their crops. Community members collected money for funeral flowers when death had come knocking. We delivered food to the hungry, sat with the sick, did house repairs for the elderly. No one had to be alone.

There was a time before I came along when my grandfather couldn’t pay the mortgage on his farm. My uncle refused to help him. I assume there may have been some bad blood because at that time my grandfather had a drinking problem. Without my uncle’s help, the bank foreclosed, and the farm was lost. I like to imagine this was the first step toward my grandfather’s sobriety. Sometimes we have to say no for the sake of those we value. This same uncle would give my mother and her youngest brother a place to live when my grandparents moved north to Dixon, Illinois, where they worked in a state hospital. My grandfather worked as an orderly. My grandmother was a cook. They finally came back downstate and moved into the house cattycorner from the general store and there they stayed, my grandfather living a sober and measured life, until he died when I was five months old. My grandmother stayed in her house, and she cared for me before I started school because my mother, a teacher, needed childcare while she was working. I remember a cousin and his wife, newlyweds, living with my grandmother for a time. I used to peek around the corner of a doorway, fascinated when I caught my cousin and his wife kissing.

My purpose in all this remembering is to invite us this Thanksgiving week to consider the value of the individual life and to express gratitude for those whose influence we carry with us. Although, it’s been years since I’ve lived anywhere close to Berryville, I’ve never forgotten the people, either family or community members, whose lives continue to matter for what they taught me. For the most part, we didn’t have money, we held no sway, and sometimes we made mistakes, but in the end we were there for one another. We knew something some people never learn. We knew how to take care of people. We knew what it meant to forgive ourselves and others. We knew how to love.