The best thing about Thanksgiving weekend is connecting with family.

It’s something we take for granted. Until it’s gone. As we get older and our grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles slowly begin to disappear from the table, you know you should have cherished each and every moment.

The first time I realized the importance of family was when I was away at college, without a cellphone or the internet. I wasn’t deprived. I just didn’t dream they were going to exist.

For students today it’s much easier to stay connected.

In a rundown dorm room in an old hotel in Pittsburgh (as far away from Palmerton as I was willing to go) we had a landline for inbound calls only. If I wanted to call home, I went to the pay phone by the elevator and called collect (no phone cards then either). I am embarrassed to say my mom would refuse the charges. As a divorced mom, she cut corners wherever she could.

I’d get the refusal and quickly run back to my room and wait for her to call me.

On a standing basis, we had a prearranged time.

Much to my roommates’ distress, my mom decided it would be every Sunday morning at 8 o’clock. No matter how late we stayed up or where we were the night before, I had to be at the phone at 8 a.m. Sunday.

We’d talk for a few minutes and that was it for the week. Unless there was a problem and then I’d make my way to the pay phone.

Only once during that time did my mother call me unexpectedly. And my roommate did not like it.

When I first arrived at college my roommate and I had an instant dislike of each other. We were both journalism students but that’s where the similarity ended.

She was from a city. I was from a small town.

She had a boyfriend across town and I hung out with the nerds down the hall.

She was rarely in the room and the one time she was, she didn’t appreciate that when she opened the door to leave the room, my friends had sealed the opening shut with newspaper.

She happened to be in the room on Oct. 18, 1977, when the Yankees won the World Series for the first time in a very long time.

My roommate was annoyed because she had to find me. I was running up and down the hallway screaming.

This year when the Phillies were in the Series, my husband was texting his sons throughout the whole game.

To be able to text in 1977 would have been amazing. And we would have bypassed my one-semester-only roommate.

No, we wrote letters the rest of the time. Handwritten letters.

My grandmother wrote letters to me, too. She would put things in the letters such as a tea bag, a dollar and once she stuffed a hot chocolate packet in the envelope.

I came home at the holidays and for the summer, traveling with friends or taking a taxi to an interesting section of the city to ride a Greyhound bus.

Some days there was an extra bus that left in the afternoon, but most of the time we pulled out in the dark at 5 a.m.

Either way it took forever to get home. At least eight hours because of all the stops.

Forty years later, I can still smell the diesel fuel and the stale air in the bus.

And on those journeys, I vowed those days to never ride a Greyhound again.

To date, I’ve kept that promise.

Those low spots made those special moments at home so much more meaningful. There wasn’t a cross word during that time. Those where the years my brothers stopped being annoying.

Both our mom and grandparents are gone now. The memories of turkey not being done on time or the sweet potatoes my mom forgot to take out of the microwave - three years running - will stay with me for life. My brother Mark and I chuckle every year about it. Now we have our own memories, like the year I sent the turkey carcass home to New York with him instead of leftovers. All grocery bags look the same.

Even though my brothers and I text each other, I can say we don’t text often enough.

It’s never enough.

And we certainly don’t pick up the phone as often as we should.

Funny, we have all the technology now and we still allow ourselves to be distant.

Do you need to pick up the phone and connect?

This holiday weekend might just be the time.