Season 8 Thanksgiving Special: False Safety or Right Where We Left Off (Refresher)
CHANGE… change, change, change, change, change. Change has been an ongoing insecurity of mine, throughout this whole series, and this season, especially the theme, has reared its ugly head again. Last year in the installment Mitchmas (27) Part 2: The Last Pizza Night, I said that Rich and Barbara Anderson were planning on moving to Wyoming. In the spring of this year, they in fact did move. Last month, Kid moved to Cincinnati, finally fulfilling the insecurities I had about the Andersons moving away that have plagued me for nearly a decade now. Last season, I wrote an installment called October-December, about my mental health declining during those months last year.
On Saturday, November 22, 2025, a week after Kid moved to Cincinnati, Paige and I drove down to celebrate a friendsgiving with Arden, Marshall, Aspen, and Kid. Coincidentally, Rich and Barbara were visiting them too and when we arrived, Barbara‘s sister and brother-in-law were there as well. After Arden gave her aunt and uncle the tour, we visited with them for a while, and they left to go back to Wooster, Rich, Barbara, Arden, Marshall, Aspen, Kid, Paige, and I went out to an orchestra concert.
After the concert, we walked to a restaurant called Albert’s. Our waitress was named Clarissa. She took our orders, watched as we loudly caught up, and got to know us throughout the dinner. When we had finished eating she said, “would you guys like to go onto the roof?”
We all looked at each other and smiled. Clarissa led us up to the roof, which had already been closed down for the night. That was ideal because, while it was a nice roof, it wasn’t super big. We walked to a table toward the front of the rooftop balcony and Arden suggested, “Mitchie you should sing!” I obliged and everyone joined in as I sang a ton of songs.
As I said the 2 part season finale last season, was about my mental health declining in the fall of 2024, and me coming to the conclusion that in a professional sense I had learned the wrong lesson from Covid. However, I learned the same wrong lesson from covid in my personal life as well.
As I depicted in my most recent book, The Greattastic Adventures 2: Fractured, in 2016, my neighbor, Greg, told me that the Andersons wouldn’t live next-door forever, and I spent the next three years dreading that moment. When it finally came at the beginning of this series, I was distraught, but by the end of season one I had learned that no matter how far away we lived the girls and I would always pick up right where we left off, when we got back together.
In season two I started to move forward, but then Covid hit, forcing August and Aspen back to Columbus. This created this weird false safety around change because while we were all moving on, we were still sort of trapped in our childhood. Then after three years, August, moved for good, got pregnant with, and married to an abusive man, and I started dating the woman who was destined to become my wife, all within the course of a couple of months. In other words, as we grew up and changed, Covid, created a false sense of security by trapping us in our own childhood, and then we struggled to cope as real adulthood hit.
As we stood on that roof singing our hearts out I thought back on when Arden surprised everyone for Christmas back in 2019, with my help. In the installment, I wrote about that event, after everyone found out that she was back in town I wrote, “I will always be friends with my “sisters” and they will absolutely come up from time to time, but the last 6 months have basically just been me living in the past. Feeling sorry for myself because all my friends are gone, or are about to leave. I think it's time that I stop doing that, branch out and just live my life- instead of crying because a chapter has ended. Because even though they're gone, whenever we get back together, we can pick up right where we left off.” And I think that was a lesson I needed to relearn, especially now that they are all officially living life in other cities!
Hope you all had a Greattastic Thanksgiving, I know this is really late, but umm, there’s been a lot of planning and writing for other things and just other life things happening soo umm yeah… have a Greattastic day… bye!
