Just Thanks

 

When I was a kid Thanksgiving Day was very Norman Rockwell-like, cramming many folks into a tiny northeast Nebraska farmhouse that had been in the family for multiple generations.  No insulation other than dozens of layers of wallpaper and square nails held the wooden plank walls in place along the crazy steep stairway that led to 2 tiny 2^nd story bedrooms.  Of course, the 2^nd story was not heated.  That’s what extra quilts were for!

There wasn’t an indoor bathroom, and until the 1960’s, no hot water and only a hand pump in the kitchen.  The kind you see as lawn ornaments today.  We all shared a traditional outdoor outhouse, which by the way still stands today, placed a respectable distance from the house.  A mere skeleton of its former self, but then, aren’t we all?

There was a propane stove that worked nonstop preparing the traditional Thanksgiving Day eat-until-you-are-miserable meal.  Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes topped with brown sugar and mini-marshmallows, pretend cranberries from a can, dinner rolls, gallons of strong coffee and pumpkin pie with buckets of real whipped cream.  I’m sure there was a veggie or two thrown in there, corn and/or green bean casserole most likely, but for some reason I don’t remember the details.  I guess I was more into the pie!

And the soda (or as Nebraskans call it, pop)!  We could drink all we wanted!  Grape and orange Nehi and Hires root beer, God life was good!!

The weather was always crisp and cold, the trees were bare and I honestly don’t recall a sunny Thanksgiving but it didn’t matter.  We’d invade the outdoors like a tribe of wild Indians (yeah, I know, not politically correct but whatever…) and do unsupervised kid-stuff while the women cleaned up the leftovers carnage and the “guys” did whatever “guys” did before cable/satellite TV on Thanksgiving Day.  Probably smoked Camels or Lucky Strikes and told each other lies, LOL. 

In case I haven’t bored you to tears yet, here’re some extreme details;

I can still see Grandma in the kitchen wearing an apron over her usual house dress.  Grandma was “not allowed” to wear trousers or drive and I would not see her wear pants until after Grandpa passed away in the mid 1970’s. 

She was a storybook Grandma but a so-so cook at best and without the assistance of mom and my aunts it’s likely the meal would have been a bit over, or under, cooked with the pretend cranberries from a can being the only “perfectly” prepared edible thing on the table.  Yes, if Thanksgiving dinner had been prepared by Grandma alone, we’d likely had popcorn and Hershey bars. 

Grandpa was a smoker and their house always smelled like stale cigarette smoke and fried food but for some reason it was comforting, not repulsive as we’re told it is today.  It was a perfect representation of the two people who lived, loved and fought there and whom we dearly loved.  It was an aromatic version of their Spirits. 

Moving on through time, we kids got older and Thanksgiving at Grandma’s lost its importance.  The grownups judgmental egos rose to the surface, they began feuding, the relationship between brothers and wives was fractured forever and the Norman Rockwell-like Thanksgiving Days ended.

So as I sit here in 2020, close to the age my Grandma was when the Norman Rockwell-like memories were created, treading water in a world that seems to want to drown us in bloated egos, fear and judgmental thinking, I cling to the happy memories of Thanksgiving Days past and remember what happens when “grownups” decide to be ruled by ego, fear and judgmental thinking.  How it shatters and ultimately destroys an entire way of life, murder in its most brutal form.

Another “rest of the story” awareness that comes along with layer upon layer of age, much like the dozens of layers of wallpaper on the walls of that tiny uninsulated farmhouse that now sits empty and decaying in northeast Nebraska. 

I like to think that underneath all those layers, applied by my grandma and great-grandma’s hands and among and between the square nails that hold the frame, and Spirit, of that generations-old farmhouse together, those happy Thanksgiving Days still live. 

The laughter, the clinking of the good china being set on the old dining room table, cousins chattering, smells of roasting turkey, baking pies, fresh brewed coffee, and most of all, the absence of bloated egos, fear and judgments, if even for a day.

Memories hidden, but certainly not forgotten, and for that I just say Thanks.

Just Thanks…..