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Predicting and Not Predicting the Weather

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A good fifteen years ago or more, during one of those balmy winters we enjoyed, the ones where spring had well and truly arrived by mid-February, my father stopped by one Saturday as I worked in the yard in shorts and a tee-shirt. He had his rounds and I was somewhere between coffee with his pals and bean soup at the VFW.


“If this is global warming, I think I might be in favor of it,” he said. He was no longer the fellow who was so hot-natured that you couldn’t buy him long-sleeved shirts, much less a nice sweater for Christmas. Hw had become that old man, decked out like all the other old men, looking identical in their flat caps, golf sweaters and corduroys, no matter the time of year.


But even Daddy in those days would not have known what to make of the summer we just survived, the summer the entire world seemed to experience. He might not even have noticed, as I barely did, because when it was this hot my mother would have kept him indoors and would have hidden the OMU bills from him.


I am enjoying the change in temperature, even though it is overcast and a little humid. When I can’t get out into the day, I manage to stick my head outside a couple of times and breathe in…what? Can one breathe in the cool, actually? Maybe. I can experience it for the delivery it is but I am keeping my powder dry as it pertains to any predictions for winter.

My favorite weather expert remains Ryan Hall. He cautions us not to read too much into what he or others say this far out bout El Nińo, but all indications point to something significant occurring this winter. Especially snowfall.


But just where, and how much and when, exactly–well, that remains to be seen.


And, don’t we kind of prefer that? At least a little bit?


My mother tells the story of driving to Henderson for the annual Thanksgiving Day football rivalry between Owensboro High School and Henderson High. She left the house in a short-sleeved dress and thin sweater, the weather unseasonably warm.


It started snowing at half-time and by the time she and her beau, my father, drove home, the fields were covered in several inches of snow and they couldn’t see the road. Once in the city limits, there were six inches on the ground.


My father dropped her at home on Triplett Street, right where the old hospital used to sit. He drove the car home, it being my grandmother’s and her being persnickety.


He then walked back to my mother’s house from Hill Ave. in the snow, and their date continued until he was shooed off, around eleven, and he turned around and walked back home.


I am not much for romance, and neither were my parents, I don’t think. But I love this story, the youthful ardor of it, the handsome young man walking all that way, collar up against the snow, head down, hands in his pockets. My mother waiting for him looking out her front window, and wondering would he actually make that journey, and ooh, yes. Look. There he is, emerging like a developing photograph through the white and white and whiteness of snow, a dream, and even better, not a dream.


We are smack dab in the uncertainty zone for winter weather this year. We might have a mild, barely there winter, shirt sleeves in February, a happy jump on tomato season come April.


Or we might be buried under buckets of snow. I’m hoping for at least one surprise, that morning we wake up and without even opening the blinds we know something big happened overnight.


Or like that away game eighty years ago, something monumental, memorable, like the thing that caught my parents by surprise, caught thousands of people by surprise, but really, in their beautiful youth, it only happened to them, for them.

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Decoration Day, Once

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It seems early this year, Memorial Day, or the month seems long, but of course it is neither of those things, just a trick of the calendar, not unlike the way the clock plays tricks on us when we turn them back or spring them forward. 

When I was a child my mother filled the trunk of the car with iris and peonies, bunches as big as barrels, swimming in old galvanized tubs filled with water.  Tossed along side them were scissors and ancient knives with rusty blades, relics that lived their wretched and used up lives hidden away in the dark and cobwebby garage. In their neglected state they looked menacing, but even as kids we could tell they wouldn’t be up to the job of cutting stems, removing bruised and broken leaves. 

Elmwood Cemetery was busy on those Saturday mornings in late May,  some families more organized and serious than others. We filled up jars and cheap vases with water at the spigot, Mother selected stems of peony, stalks of iris and gathered them together, but we were slapdash as a family in this pursuit.  

Two or three of the kids had broken free and were running around, mother sloshing water and dropping flowers as she struggled up the slope to our family plots, mostly wanting to get her duty dispatched for another year. Other families approached the same task with an orderliness we lacked.  They had baskets, and hand tools, and arrangements professionally done. 

Their cars were neatly parked while ours looked like a bank robbery gone wrong. The odd angle, doors open, trunk popped, a sense of chaos and abandonment, accomplices scattered to the winds. It seemed half the town had turned out to tend  their dead, and while it wasn’t exactly a somber morning, there was a propriety that dictated greetings be limited to slight nods, if that.  Unusual for a place in time that valued neighborliness, just not right now, not here. On this we did not intrude.

And yet, we were interested in our neighbors, or rather the neighbors of our loved ones. We marveled at how both sets of grandparents were buried just a few yards from each other, even though the families didn’t come to know each other until my parents married. Over there distant cousins, just here the great-grandparents of children with whom we went to school.  Names we knew from family stories when we should not have been listening. 

We walked around this little neighborhood to visit them all and if my father went with us to decorate the graves, he told stories and made connections that were sweet and almost always funny.  We fought over who would get the little flag they handed out at the cemetery entrance for veterans, the one that went on our grandfather’s grave, he a soldier of the Great War. Placing it was a honor,  although we didn’t quite understand.  Mostly we just did the sibling math,  there being only one flag and five of us, so getting your hands on it first meant something.

Memorial Day always seemed to catch us just a little by surprise.  We might have a cookout, but it was always an afterthought, a last-minute affair, as if the end of the school year and the thought of a yawning, endless summer exhausted us all.  

Time has changed custom, and duty, and what grows in our yards.  The peonies my mother counted on have long since bloomed in our gardens.  Iris are now specimen plants, no longer grown in great swaths that line walks and foundations and along the dark patches of fencerows, where they smelled deeply of purple and damp earth. 

Perhaps I’ll call around and see who is up for some impromptu gathering, because we should do something, although Memorial Day seems less like a holiday to celebrate and more like one to observe. I’ll see who may want to meet up at Elmwood, the highest point in the county, the reason this acreage was chosen.  Lay some flowers I have brought from my yard, place the flag at my grandfather’s stone, see again irises, peonies in galvanized buckets, and the green grace and the gentle slope and children running as they call to each other, “over here.”

“Over here. I’ve found them. We are over here.”  

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Spring and Not Spring

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One more, just one more good snow, then I will join you all in dreaming of spring.  And that is an easy thing to contemplate, what with the weather as balmy as it has been this past week or so.


Yesterday I dug in the dirt, even though I made up chores to do, and today screams spring, even as we wait for severe weather, as predicted for tomorrow. 

But still, we know how to ride those storms out as they herald spring as surely as those big fat robins in our backyards. 

Like all good farmers, I have been pouring over seed catalogs and websites since Christmas, and have put in a couple of orders for pepper and tomato plants.  I would prefer to buy those locally but I am experimenting with dwarf and micro plants this year, and it is the rare Kentucky tomato grower–professional or backyard amateur — who would consider any tomato that didn’t contain the words “big,”  “bigger,” or “better” in it. 

Last year, taking myself ‘way too seriously, I ordered premier zinnia seeds from a speciality grower.  Now, zinnias are just about weeds, and I never bother with starting them indoors, but instead I shake them out of the paper packet right onto the ground when I take a notion. I certainly don’t buy them in pots at the nursery. 

Let me say,  these special seeds were a disappointment. Too uniform, too color-coordinated, too, well, boring. This year I am returning to Lowe’s and Rural King, picking up two or three packets, and letting the wind take the seeds wherever and however it desires.  I like the variety and the serendipitous nature of it, the effect is so much more pleasing to my eye.  And cheaper, too. 

My Christmas tree lies in the drive like a beached whale, awaiting Ruth to arrive with her little chain saw, where she will dismember it and take it home to her woodpile in the country.  I study and research the best time to prune my hydrangeas, and it is simple, really, but somehow it confounds me.  I know the date is fast approaching, but I forget how to make the cuts that will give me strong stems and vibrant blooming. 

My boxwood needs feeding, my sidewalk needs power washing, the storm door need to be replaced.  The sky pencil holly by my back door–the one I put there so I wouldn’t hit my head on the light fixture every time I went outside–needs to be repotted, the pansies need revitalizing. 

Lots of spring-like activity on my tiny plot of land.  

But also, a winter birthday still to embrace.  The big plans and the big notebooks I have to record my insights, my revelations, my goals and aspirations.  If I make to April with any of that, I doubt it.

“The world is too much with us…” Wordsworth tells us, the “getting and spending,” the way we “lay waste our powers.”  It feels right, doesn’t it?  With the news so awful, and nothing we can do about it.  With our aging hips, and empty nests, and disappointments and frustrations when people don’t do what we think they should.  But then, those fat robins, showing up, just because they can. 

Or those zinnias, too perfect, or too wild, but still we smile when we see them. Fresh compost and mulch, a gentle digging in the dirt.  Enough.  More than enough if we let it.

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Notes on the Passing Scene – Winter 2026

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I get it, how skiers at high altitudes sit out in big chairs, après ski, faces to the sun, sunglasses, snow all around and ear warmers on but jackets off.  And smiles! You have never seen such smiles.  They look toasty and warm, and beginning to burn. 

I did much the same on Monday, but on my little deck, and wearing a down vest but still, my face to the sun, coffee, and the soft gurgling of the gutters as the snow melted.  I got a little bit warm, even, and almost fell asleep.  I, too, was warm and toasty and grateful for the sun and the snowmelt.  Not even a taste of spring, but a reassurance that nature has a way of righting herself, eventually. 

Some years it is mild and stays mild and we know by now that spring is on the way, has been trying to barge in the back door since before Christmas.  This will not be that kind of year, and I reckon we will have more cold, and maybe even one more snow before true and glorious spring. Even so, now is the time to start planning those gardens and my thoughts have turned to tomatoes. 

Once more I am going to try my hand at tomatoes,  just one more time.  It’s not that I can’t grow them, although toward the end I get tired of watering and they are an embarrassment.  Well, maybe I  am the embarrassment.  It’s the squirrels that do in my efforts.  But, dreaming on my deck as the sun shone, I decided to turn my dedication to tomatoes I can grow in pots.  On my deck.  Where I can keep an eye on them. 

My research tells me loads of tomatoes are perfect for container gardening.  Some produce fruit that is full-sized, or almost full-sized, something the literature and old-timers call “good slicers.”  Cherry tomatoes, too, and bush varieties, all great options for small places.  I’m up for it, but they aren’t easy to find. Live plants I can reserve now for spring delivery are expensive, and I have no luck starting plants from seed.  Well. Clearly if I go this route it won’t be a homesteading move, like making my own clothes and killing my own meat. 

Next to research alarm systems and security systems, both passive and active to notify me of squirrel activity. The way they denude my cherry tomatoes, gnaw on my Beefsteaks.  So far they don’t know I have a deck.  I’ll report back in July if that changes.

Let’s talk cupcakes.  Birthday cupcakes.  Finally, I have some little folk to share my birthday celebrations and it makes me so happy.  Last year we all gathered here, my sweet sister-in-law, Judi,  planned the whole thing, and no small thing it was, either.  An elaborate meal, party napkins, there may have been streamers, just a festive atmosphere and the family gathered at the weekend, little kids running around. 

The twins have a March 1 birthday, close enough to mine to justify a joint celebration and there were cupcakes.  Now, their mother is a faithful and serious watchdog of their diets, and it is possible they had never seen a cupcake before.  More likely, this was the first time they made the connection between cupcake and  delicacy.  They still talk about them.

These are children who prefer snacks like frozen mango chunks, pineapple chunks, and  I hope you are you sitting down — raw red peppers. Or yellow ones, if they must. I gave their big brother snow peas once because he was still hungry and all I had at hand were snow peas.  He devoured them and asked in his sweet little lisping two-year-old voice,”Are there more vegetables?” And here’s me all out of white asparagus. 

I love that they love vegetables and fruit. I sneak pieces from their bowls when I visit, and you know what?  It is delicious and refreshing and makes me ashamed of the Milky Ways I have hidden for “emergencies.” 

So, I hope to celebrate with the twins, even if it is for an hour or two with gifts and fun and a few red peppers.  As long as there are cupcakes.  Since I will be there, too, of course there will be cupcakes. Pink ones. 

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Snow Days Remembered

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My grandmother would tie a woolen scarf  under her chin, and tie similar scarves under ours, and take us outside, into the knee-high snow, to play Fox and Geese. 

By my reckoning, she would have been fifty-eight years old, my brother and I not school-aged yet. She stamped out a large circle in the snow, then stamped radiating lines across the circle until she had created a wagon wheel with spokes. 

She was the Fox, and chased us around the perimeter of the circle, using the spokes to bring her closer to her prey.  We were the Geese.  It was an elaborate, frozen game of  tag she played as a child,  and for a time we, too, were children of the prairie, fluffy snow flakes flying, a small game on a winter’s afternoon, after chores, before a lamp-lit supper. 

We didn’t last long at the game, and of course we had no chores, and supper was whatever she had and fully illuminated by OMU.  But first we had snow cream, which froze our small brains, and we ate it because we had begged for it, not because it was all that good. 

Well, it is pretty good, the sugar never melting so that sandy sensation in the mouth, the race to get it down our gullets before it melted completely as we scooted the last little clumps of ice around our bowls with half-frozen spoons. 

On such afternoons my grandmother was most her Indian Territory self, practical and uncool, making us wear odd garments, socks for mittens, wonky sunglasses she found in the back of a drawer to protect our eyes from the snow’s glare.  I liked those sunglasses, and was embarrassed by them, and she didn’t seem to notice or care. 

Even then, especially then,  I was easily embarrassed. The get-ups, the old woman’s scarf tied around my brother’s chin.  But she was also more amenable to us playing in the snow than my mother.  Granny played with us out in it.  She gave us shovels and then quarters when we cleared her walk.  She laughed. No, she giggled as she chased us, a fine, frosty tinkling. 

Snow in my own backyard meant fun at first followed by bickering. Snowball fights that ended in tears, disagreements on the construction of the snowman, even when the the snow did not cooperate.  We never completely dressed one, never could agree on material for the eyes, never a carrot for the nose but a stick, and it didn’t matter anyway, because his head got knocked off right sharpish. 

What stressed my mother most was all the piles of pajama bottoms and jeans stripped off and sopping on the family room floor.  Snow encrusted mittens and sock caps draped on every radiator, the way we were overheated and freezing at the same time and the monitoring of our running noses. 

She might make hot chocolate, but her heart wasn’t in it, and I think of her in those moments less like a McCall’s mom and more of a down and out waitress at a late night greasy spoon, slinging hot drinks for the drunks. 

All of this, though, wasn’t the real essence of snow days. A snow day was a protracted event.  Would it snow, how much, how deep, school or no school?  Conversations we held lying across someone’s bed, our chins propped on our fists as we stared out the window into a winter gloaming.  We didn’t have weeks to anticipate a snow storm, a few days at best.  We had Marcia Yockey, our tri-state character of a meteorologist, drawing on a board with thick black markers, her checkmarks backward, because she was left-handed. 

We were earnest in our discussions, cooperative, even, because it took a team to dissect the vicissitudes of Ohio Valley weather patterns.  That river, always the dividing line, a bridge span dictating snow or rain, wind or calm, something we understood before we could talk.

I should have been born in the frozen North. Or the prairie, perhaps, like my grandmother.  I thought this as a child. I Think it now. There are those who call me insensitive, here in my warm house, longing for snow.  I don’t have to work in it, get out in it, even.  That is true. But still, I love it, and like most things we love, I can’t do too much about it. I love it for its  powerful, beautiful and, sometimes, destructive nature. The thing I await, and for which I prepare.  My self small in comparison.  And in all of that, a specific kind of joy. 

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A New Walk for 2026

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The joke is I celebrate the New Year with Papua New Guinea, and then have the rest of the day to go about my business, sweep up dropped Christmas tree needles, nap, and retire around eight to read and dream of 2026, to be startled awake later on as neighborhood fireworks disturb my sleep. 

I no longer desire the riotous New Year’s Eves of my youth and young adulthood.  No longer spend hours, days, really, figuring out what to wear, who I will be dressing for, who I will be celebrating with, where I will be and kissing whom when the ball drops and the countdown ends and everyone around me is roaring and laughing and having a high old time. 

My earliest New Year’s Eves were spent with my brother and Granny Opal.  We begged to stay up until midnight and she made a show of allowing it, knowing we would never make it, not really.  She gently shook our shoulders at the stroke of twelve, bells and firecrackers going off  in the distance, so faint a sound that by morning we wondered if we heard them at all. 

Now I hatch a plot to babysit on New Year’s Eve to give exhausted parents a small break at the end of the year.  I am not so kind; I want to spend time with the little ones and this is the stunt I pull, and I need an excuse in case some well-meaning but misguided friend or friends should invite me out to celebrate in that desperate “are we having fun now” way I remember from years past. 

I might deign a late lunch, the late part making it festive.  But that is all. 

I crave quiet and contemplation and a new notebook with blank pages too pristine to make a mark on, not yet, not until I am sure.  Odd how the waves of white pages invigorate me, all that  possibility, and everything hopeful and glad. By February the careful penmanship will be abandoned, goals and plans having given way to lists and chores, reminders for doctor’s appointments, trips to the dentist. 

But every new year deserves some thought and consideration.  Especially since this past year was such a stinker.  A nagging health issue, nothing life-threatening or dire. I just couldn’t walk.  Hardly at all.  I didn’t even have the good grace to break a bone, just a repetitive use injury that took forever to figure out. I tackled the holidays last year like I was crazed, and messed myself up.  And now, a  full year later, I’m still not recovered, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

And it was a dark tunnel, too, giving me a glimpse of what old age can look like, feel like, be like.  I didn’t care for it. 

I have found a new intervention, a protocol that is working well, finally, and I am grateful for the skilled and kind practitioner who helps me. The tunnel is less dark, and not even a tunnel anymore, as I think about it.  A little bit of a wobble, I think now, but a year-long one, and it is my job to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

I’m often lazy about my health, my intentions, so many things.  I am not my age; I truly believe I am 35, maybe 40, but that’s about it. My body begs to differ.  But you know what?  I come from prairie stock and that is going to come in handy as I work through my exercises, build strength and recover. 

My father went about everything like he was killing snakes. A broad-shouldered ‘bull in a china shop” kind of fellow. My mother’s people were delicate.  So tuning in to that sensibility can’t hurt, either. Had my parents visited Giza, my father would have not truly experienced  the pyramids until he had walked over and kicked them. My mother’s attitude?  “I can see them from here.”


Somewhere in there is where I live, between the avid adventurer and the diva in the sedan chair, swooning in the heat. The brawny outdoorsy type and the petite fleur with fallen arches. I resist the fainéant approach that was my mother’s, although I am every bit as lazy.  It just isn’t how I see myself. Now, though, I might need to embrace both approaches  if I am going to thrive into my dotage. 

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Home for the Balmy Holidays

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And so this is Christmas.  Balmy temps and curling ribbon everywhere.  Stray strips of Scotch tape stuck to my pants, grocery bags on counters ready to be unloaded for family traditions, nothing fancy but reminding me of my mother, my grandmothers, and Christmases when I lived in a state of high anticipation, sick, almost, and beside myself. 

Any other Christmas I would be pouting because it is so warm, but I have been assured that, as warm as it will be this week, there will be a dip into the low twenties, maybe even the teens at night, and all that volatility satisfies my need for atmospheric drama, so I sit around thinking about where my “warm room” might be if we lose power in an ice storm. 

Not that an ice storm is predicted. 

Yet. 

We know from Luke that on the night of Jesus’ birth the shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks at night.  Fall and springtime are the seasons for that, so perhaps on the first Christmas the weather was a bit balmy, too. A nice temperate 50s or 60s, 70s, even, and also a good time to travel for paying those taxes. 

But not when you are expecting a child, of course. And not on the back of a donkey. 

We assume a donkey, and I think we must stick with it, because surely Joseph didn’t let Mary walk.  In a college class years ago the professor lectured on the steep and rocky terrain of the region, with dramatic drops from the Galilee hills to the Mediterranean coast. A trip of any distance can be difficult, but this one, surely more arduous than most. 

I let this weather remind me of a distant land, a distant time, rocky climbs and descents, the vagaries of living with obligations, inconvenient timing, life in general.  Different, and not so different from us. So much to get up in the morning to do and very little of it our own idea. 

There is almost nothing in my Christmas preparations that pays tribute to the original Christmas story.  Not the cookie baking, the candy making, the frantic house cleaning, the wrapping.  While I place my nativity set with great care, it occurs to me I used to collect them, and where are they now?  The handmade clay figures crafted in South America, the delicately carved ones I found out west.  Others I can no longer remember.

But this little one my mother had, so tiny all the figures fit in a round box the size of a tin of fancy salt. This one I keep near.  It lives in its little box in a drawer in the living room throughout the year.  I see it sometimes when I am looking for an old recipe of my grandmother’s.  Her recipe boxes live in that drawer, too. 

Being of the House of David, Joseph had to return home to pay taxes.  He had no choice but to walk, and Mary had to go, too.  In many ways we live a great distance from the first Christmas story. Sometimes we enjoy the lively debate over time line and the possibility of kings from the east, stars in the heavens. We, with our giant brains, we think and ponder and select and argue and muse and interpret charts and writings and texts, to make sense of the story.

And then there is faith. That thing that can’t be argued, quantified or proved.

Many of us make the effort, rocky as it can be sometimes, inconvenient as it often is, to return home at Christmas.  This may be our own House of David, with a long lineage and tradition, or the homes we have built with our own two hands and with the hands of others who we now claim as family, our familiars.  Those places where we might  seek out the brightness of hope in a dark night.

And suddenly, there it is.  By Christmas Day the light is already returning.  As promised. As always.  This Christmas let me wish each of you that moment when you feel the love and warmth of others.  When your heart expands and you love them back.  When, if only for a twinkling, you find yourself well and truly home. 

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Cold, Then Warm, Still Christmas

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The bitter cold of the past few days will give way to warmer weather, with the possibility of downright tropical heat as we near Christmas.  Or that is what my little buddy, Ryan Hall, is telling me.  Sweet Ryan is teasing the possibility of record heat on Christmas Day.  Seventies, y’all.  Seventies.

Now.  Let that settle. 

Two days ago I traveled to Louisville, leaving home in the single digits.  I had extra coats in the car, a sleeping bag, gloves, an unbecoming hat but one that would see me survive, should I somehow get stranded during the two-hour trip.  Nuts and chocolate, water, a working flashlight. I wasn’t heading out to explore the Northwest Territories, but I was ramped up like something big was about to happen. 

Next week it looks like I may have to break out the shorts. 

But Ryan–who you can find on YouTube at Ryan Hall Y’all–promises lots of drama getting to those record temps.  Cold, then warm, with storms and unsettled weather every few days, so there is that to look forward to. And I do. 

We have had warm Christmases before, and the worst in my book, are the ones that are just like the fall, all that warm weather protracted, a sameness I find maddening.  I would never choose to live in a perpetually perfect climate.  Would prefer a place that builds to the crescendo of a true and snowy winter, ebb into glorious spring with some dramatic storms for visual interest, then settle into a verdant summer, but one that gets cool at night.  Autumn, well, autumn can do what it likes,  as long as the leaves put on a show. 

Our recent taste of true winter, though, has been sufficient to put me in the holiday spirit, and I will happily drag through the coming rains and warming temps to finish my shopping and make incessant trips to the grocery store.  By all accounts, this winter will be changeable and dramatic and that suits me just fine. 

What then, to do with a summery Christmas Day?  

Usually I would  pout and spend most the day bemoaning my bad luck, as if the thermometer is the true meaning of Christmas.  I know better, of course, but being bundled up and happy as I visit friends and family is the linchpin of my holiday fantasy.  Candlelight Service with my family on Christmas Eve, then walking home in the cold, the air crystalline and our breath billowing clouds of white. Laughter, and gentle ribbing as we bump along to the warmth of a welcoming hearth.

In fact, that last bit really happened one year, so not a fantasy.

The promise of more snow later on has improved my mood immeasurably. In fact, I am looking forward to this late December warm-up.  There are leftover leaves to rake.  There is a box of anemones I never got around to planting, and wood hyacinth, too, which I think I ordered by mistake.  Maybe it’s not too late for them, and I love the idea of one more dig in the dirt before the New Year.  

And Christmas Day seems a hopeful time for coaxing new life. In the bleak mid-winter, and all that.

I don’t know.  Maybe just buying all that down outerwear has shifted my mood, or perhaps I have grown reasonable, tempered, let’s say, as life spools out in its own way. But I can see me come December 25th, sipping mimosas on the deck, mariachi music in the background, sun on my face, dirt under my nails, happy as a Christmas clam.

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No Holiday Prep Here–And It’s Divine

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Any other year I would have purchased my turkey by now.  Would have fretted over it, the size, the brand, frozen or fresh?  Would have wondered if you had already beat me to the best turkeys, the most favored size.  Too small and you run out, too big and risk setting the oven of fire, which I did, three years ago.

The canned pumpkin would have been bought, also my favorite pecans, possibly the yams.  There would be a notation in my calendar indicating what date to buy bread so it can get properly stale.  One year I bought my bread too early, thinking, stale bread is stale bread.  No, my friends, it is not. 

On these errands I would be thinking of how I drove my grandmother around to gather all the staples for Thanksgiving.  The bread from the discount bread place.  Celery from Wetzel’s.  Maybe the turkey from there, too. 

This year, I will prepare pies, and only pies.  And even that isn’t a requirement, but a suggestion if I feel like it. 

For the first time in decades, decades, I tell you, I am not fixing a turkey, nor dressing, nor yams nor cranberries, nor nuthin’. Except maybe those pies. 

When my brother-in-law’s daughter floated the idea of hosting Thanksgiving at theirs, he laughed and said, well,  good luck getting Kathy and Greta to let loose of doing the dinner. He honestly thinks we enjoy it. And now I wonder if my Granny Opal loved all the preparation and work as much as I assumed she did. 

Kathy and I jumped, or would have if either of us were able, at the idea of showing up, eating, and going home.  That we had to drive to do it, a nice little hour and half jaunt through Indiana, well, that was even better.  An adventure, an “over the river and through the woods” sort of thing.  

It must be said, I pride myself on doing the Thanksgiving food, but I have grown weary of it.  Kathy, less enamored with cooking than I, prides herself on her house, big enough for us all and comfortable, well-appointed with centerpieces and decoration that have required thought and artistic expression. 

She can cook, but the aggravation of preparing the meal while trying to feed kids who mess up the kitchen and get in her way, well, it’s been a nice set up.  I cook, she cleans and decorates, and the kids, if they can be bothered, drag out to my car to help carry in the bird, the dressing and various pots and pans full of food.

But this year.  This year!  We have accepted Mandi and Chuck’s kind offer and we will turn up on the day to feast and feast and feast some more. Spend the night if we want.  Spend two.

Here is the other thing.  We will not even have Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving.  We will gather on Friday to accommodate a couple of conflicting schedules, and that is just fine, too. 

Never did my family do this.  There wasn’t a pressing need, really, but even if there might have been, my mother was not one to flex.  

We were lucky as a family that we all lived close enough to see each other often, so it didn’t seem a tragedy if a few were missing from the table. We would see them on Saturday. 

But nor did my mother guilt my married siblings when they spent a holiday with the in-laws.  She insisted they do, sometimes, if a set of parents were aging and and she felt like she would have years with her children they would not. It was a kind and thoughtful gesture in her matter-of-fact way. 

Although I worry sometimes we blow off too many family obligations–any kind of obligation–these days.  Attending the funeral, choosing skiing over the holiday with family.  Just not showing up, however that may look.  This new bunch of people we have about us — notorious for not showing up.  The ones aggrieved at going to the office three days a week–how cruel! Never mind an entire workweek. 

But this year, I see how this easing of tradition has suited me just fine.  Better than fine. I see how it reduces stress for my niece and her husband with the three little ones.  They can be with his family on Thursday, all relaxed and happy.  Then with us, in Indiana, also relaxed and happy. 

How surprisingly easy it has been to let some things go. 

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Boo, 60s Style

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The weather is just about perfect for the lead up to Halloween. Suddenly much colder, rainy, with leaves slicking the streets. Dark mornings, a sense of foreboding by afternoon. Lots of staying inside and looking out into a world transformed into a blustery something, that is familiar and foreign. The fretting–would we still be able to trick or treat in the rain? Would our costumes melt before we made it to school, before the parade around the neighborhood that started just after attendance was taken?


Parents, and by parents I mean mostly mothers, lined the sidewalks for the spectacle, maybe even walking us to school since our vision was often obscured by our vacuum-formed plastic masks. Perhaps they were on standby to take our costumes home, I can’t remember. Some costumes were elaborate, I suppose. I never noticed. I shuffled along with self-conscious steps, thinking only of my own get-up, wanting, and not wanting, everyone to look at me.

Down Frederica Street, to Griffith Ave., then up Alderson Court, and in through the back door of Longfellow School. What learning could have taken place between that parade and the cupcakes some mother would bring a few hours later?


Even before elementary school, I must have been dressed in store bought costumes, the ones with the face mask attached to your head with a fiddly elastic band. The flimsy smock of a dress to show you off as a princess, or someone else pretty, worn over your clothes all twisted and uncomfortable. The costumes came bundled in plastic wrap, dangling from a hook by the cardboard top. There must have been glitter involved because it clung to my face for a couple of days.


And those masks, those false faces of torture. The eye holes than never quite matched up with your actual eyes, the way the nose holes scratched your face, the mouth hole wet with condensation. The temperatures might have been autumnal, but inside that mask it was a sauna, but so much went into choosing the costume I never complained. I thought I would be in trouble if I took the mask off. Or the magic would be gone, or something.


But sometimes the weather wasn’t blustery at all. It might be sunny and hot, remnants of a summer that just wouldn’t die. This was wrong in every way. Sunny and cool was acceptable. Hot and humid was not. I remember almost nothing about those Halloweens, except a great disappointment.


As my siblings and I got older, we were less interested in the Ben Cooper store-bought costumes, whose masks were, let’s face it, always a little bit creepy and not in a cute way. They were for babies, anyway, and we were surely not that. We began to make our own, but we put forth the least amount of effort, dipping into the rag bag for inspiration.


Our dad was a World War II buff, so we had plenty of G-issued gear–map cases, ammo belts, and helmets to choose from. Our repertoire then, ran from Army Guy to hobo. If Mother felt energetic she might burn a cork and give us five-day-old stubble, which worked for both Army Guy and hobo. That was the extent of our theatrical make-up.


When we were really little we hit our own block, then we went to our grandmother’s, who never once recognized us. After working over her neighborhood, we visited her best friend, Beulah, who didn’t recognize us, either. She invited us in anyway, and once she discovered she knew us, brought out full sized candy bars she had set aside for us. After you hold one of those – it took two hands — Trick or Treat was over. We sat on our spines on her living room sofa, sighing and resting and contented.


I have one friend who loves Halloween and the sophistication and terror of her costumes astonishes me. Last year she scratched on my backdoor all done up as a witch, screeching my name. My heart leapt to my throat –I knew it was Linda, but in truth, it took a minute.


I don’t have trick or treaters in my neighborhood now. Churches, communities host events, the “trunk or treat” outings that provide a safe environment for the little ones. I get it, but sometimes I long for a glimpse of tiny children, all scary and proud, shuffling through leaves and dragging plastic pumpkins and pillow cases, parents watchful, just outside the range of a vacuum formed mask, the illusion complete.