Tag Archives: family

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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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HEAT WAVE

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There was a heatwave, not unlike this one. I was living in Bowling Green then, my sister was spending the summer with me, taking classes, and we were fiends for tennis. Boys wouldn’t play with us. Well, they would, but they didn’t like it.


We hit the courts one fine bright noon. Kathy remarked how deserted it was. We had our pick of courts with the sun bearing down on them, our little water bottles sweating in our hands. “Where is everybody?” she wondered.

“Inside, where they belong,” I replied. “You know people are dropping like flies, right?”


“Huh? “

“This heat, it’s killing people from Chicago to Memphis and anyone with sense is in the air conditioning, if they can find it.”


She looked blank, I shrugged, like it was of no more importance than if I was passing along something interesting I had just read about King Tut’s tomb. We played three sets of tennis, and feeling fine, but not total idiots, decided maybe we should go in search of some air conditioning, too.


We gathered our cans of balls, our tennis rackets and tiny tennis towels, our skimpy water bottles and took ourselves off home.


What I remember most about that afternoon is this. We were young, not too bright, and as fit as we ever were or ever would be. We were golden.


I write this in a chair that rocks, swivels and is in possession of a matching ottoman upon which my feet rest. The sprinkler rakes the big windows to my right, but I am not going out there any time soon to turn it off. I calculate the window of safety in which I might venture out to save my plants. It is a grave kind of arithmetic, even though, while it is hot, I have been hotter, and I am not sure it is so awful out there. I mean, it feels bad, but not that bad. Yet, I peek through the drawn blinds — no I don’t, I wrote that for effect — and take my pulse and try to remember when I last hydrated.


Because now I’m old.


Decidedly unfit.


And if I am honest, a bit of a scaredy cat.


There have been medical issues, not many or long-lasting enough to say I have a (fill in the blank) condition. But I creep around like maybe I do. I stay out of hot tubs, am cautious in a sauna, I weigh up my stamina for a walk around the neighborhood.


As if I could walk around neighborhood, anyway. I am almost recovered from a wonky hip issue, one that has vexed me since Christmas. The pain has migrated all over the place and is now, I think, in the last and only place left to be. And I am so much better. I can pick stuff up off the floor now. But it has gotten my attention.


I suppose I’ll never hold another tennis racket. I can’t get a bead on pickleball, and I suspect it is a pride thing. And while I have never been the biggest fan of summer, I have a soft spot for the girl I was once in it. The one with that backhand, the mean second serve. That one, who thought nothing of tennis at high noon, and 96 degrees. That one, who was always game, even if she wasn’t always best suited for the weather. I want a piece of her back.


She would be out there right now, mulching or pulling weeds, She wouldn’t care if it was hot. She would be at the nurseries this afternoon, looking for plants. Come home. Dig some holes. Maybe I need to quit twitching the curtains and just go out there to meet the day, whatever kind of day it is. If I only make it to the porch to drink iced tea, well, that is something, too.

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Decoration Day, Then and Now

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My grandmother called it Decoration Day and told stories of picnicking among the stones of her departed family members, in a prairie cemetery in Indian Territory, in what is now east Oklahoma. The Paxtons would descend on the windswept and flat parcel of land and spend the whole day. They sang. They played games. They cleaned the graves of dead flowers and planted new ones to be buffeted by the wind, but that was just fine, because it gave the impression of dancing, those bobbing heads, in a stark and lonely place, there, on the outskirts of town.


I think she wanted us to recreate the picnic at Elmwood Cemetery or, rather, she wished we could, but knew such a thing would be impossible, unseemly, not done. The story appalled my mother. But Granny never failed to mention it on those long-ago Saturday mornings as she popped the trunk and hauled out tools, watering cans and washtubs full of flowers.


We followed her, our Keds and Red Ball Jets growing wet at the toes, then cold and uncomfortable as we trudged up the small rise to the place where our people lay, all of them, a case of serendipity having orchestrated both sets of grandparents with plots in spitting distance of each other.


“Look for the statute of the girl missing a finger,” she called over her shoulder. “That is our landmark.” And there she is, Bernice Fitts, who left this world at the age of eighteen, a giantess missing a finger, pointing, and not pointing, in the direction of the grandfather I never knew.
We were always excited, but subdued, too. We understood, as much as we were able, that this was a solemn duty and there were things here, mysterious and big, echoes of Sunday sermons, bellies of whales, lion’s dens, the dead to rise again. All of it scary and thrilling and incomprehensible.


But it was fun, too. An outing. A tradition. We were not a family to visit the cemetery regularly; we didn’t decorate graves for the seasons, on holidays or the birthdays of the departed. We might wander up to Elmwood on a pretty day, a moody afternoon, but never to linger.


Yet, Memorial Day was sacred, although we never used that word. But to ignore it, to miss one, would wrack me with guilt, and my sister, too.


Now, we call up, half-ashamed, asking if the other has taken flowers to the cemetery, hoping the answer is yes, so we are off the hook. The answer is always, no. We scurry around then, and gather plants and a watering can, and tend the graves in the most perfunctory of ways. But we feel better afterward, and both of us sigh with relief and satisfaction as we pull out onto Breckenridge and get on with our day. A duty done.


My mother was in the habit there toward the end of buying hanging baskets she would place on the graves and retrieve later for her summer garden. This was a great idea I thought, yet it worried her someone would steal them, so she sent me out early on Tuesday morning to bring them home. And people do steal them. Never our pots because they weren’t special, just some impatiens, still too small to make much of a display, but the nice ones, the specially made arrangements, these disappear.


We need not discuss what makes people do this, how low-bred, how disrespectful. We know exactly the sort to help themselves to a remembrance left for a loved one. To dwell on it is to wish for a stone hut on an isolated island in which to live out our days, away from people, just about all of them. To give up on them.


And some days I do give up on them. But not most days.

And some days I remember so clearly being a child of four, seven, ten.
The cool and damp of a May morning, the bucket of peonies in my grandmother’s trunk, children running in a game to find their grandparents who are only stories to them, faded photos, this gray stone. Another child, or just so recently a child, her head bending on a slender neck, her upraised and fingerless hand, showing the way.

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Thanksgiving, My Way

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The week has arrived, the time I can see my sweet family gathered around the groaning table, all sharp angled elbows and knees, girls in stiff blonde pigtails and patterned dresses, little boys with freckles and gap-toothed grins, as we admire the golden bird, mama in her cocktail apron and papa in a suit, a suit, mind you, big smiles all around, for Thanksgiving is HERE!


Someone ought to smack Norman Rockwell in the face.

No one’s Thanksgiving looks like that.


I have gone from nostalgic, warm-hearted, expectant, aggravated, downright mad, exhausted, and back again. I am hosting and the list of things to do has been long, with incessant trips to the grocery, the hardware store, the on-line stores, and still I realize I have nary a decorative pumpkin to grace the dining table.


And right about now, I don’t care.


My sister sets an impossibly high standard with her home decor. Her house would be festooned with tiny pumpkins, exquisite turkey figurines, and other things I can’t name but find beautiful…the first five minutes I am there. Then the babies arrive, and I intend to hog them, and nephews and nieces arrive, and I want to hog them, too, but they are adults now and they no longer get the appeal of putting fat cardboard puzzles together.


So, my lovely guests will only have the struggling amaryllis on the counter to gaze upon. But the little ones will know right where to find the toys, and will make a beeline for them. From where I sit right this minute I spy two toy trucks, purposely placed by my nephew, Cy, “charging,” just like the Roomba he is obsessed with. I debate moving them. He will look for them as soon as he hits the door.


There has been more to pulling the house together than I anticipated. Fortunately, I have my pal, Ruth, who was here two days in a row and worked me like a dog. She worked, too, and honestly, I would be in a weeping, wobbly mess right now if it hadn’t been for her. She should be around my table on Thursday, too, come to think of it, so grateful am I for her help and friendship.


As I write this I am in the early stages of making Chef Jean Pierre’s turkey gravy. It will take hours. But gravy is my spirit animal and I could eat it with a spoon, and have. That I can make it early and reheat it on Thanksgiving with no ill effects, well. I’m pretty grateful for him, too.
Early this morning and driving to get the last of my cooking supplies, I worked myself up into a right state. So put upon, so taken for granted, what was I thinking? But then a checkout person was kind and helpful, and I felt–begrudgingly–my mood lift a bit. Still not done with it I called an old childhood friend, and she finished lifting my mood the rest of the way.


In my snit it occurred to me I might ask for help from my dear hearts. What a concept. They are not mind-readers, after all, and then I thought of my Granny Opal, a widow who didn’t drive, spending a solid week preparing for our Thanksgivings. I always helped in the kitchen the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but that was about it. Her table would already be set, the house warm and inviting. I honestly used to think she loved preparing for us, all of it, the cooking, the cleaning. But, did she? Who knows? I am sure no one ever asked her.


So, I sent out the word: I need someone to bring me two large bags of ice. Go get the dishes and silverware from Kathy and bring them over here. Here is what I will have around here to drink, feel free to bring whatever libation you might enjoy. Come early if you want, and I would love that. Appetizers at one. We will eat at two.


Watch out for Cy’s trucks tucked under end tables. And please leave them alone. They’re charging.