If Thanksgiving lasted a week instead of 24 hours, this would be its final and most celebratory day — the last verse of the hymn, when voices sing louder and the organist pulls out all the stops. It would be the  gratitude you feel after sickness, relief tinged with wonder that the body can be again as it once was. 

The last day of a week of gratitude would be a crescendo of thanks, cymbals crashing, timpani rolling, a fanfare of trumpets. 

And because this week of thanksgiving would be ending on the birthdays of two people dear to me — a daughter and a brother — there would be a special surge of gratitude for the presence of these two people in my life.

Come to think of it, a week of thankfulness might prove so invigorating that next I’d need a month of it.