Thanksgiving 2024 with My Granddaughter

 

My grandson-in-law Clark and his mom Myra

A little addendum as promised on the day after…..

Thanksgiving, November 23, 2023

Since I don’t drive after dark anymore, my kind grandson-in-law picked me up around 11 on Thanksgiving morning with the little boys asleep in their carseats, but as soon as we started driving and Jingle Bells jangled through the car speakers, Russell began to sing along…in tune and everything. What a delight! 

My granddaughter Connie

We sped up I75 to High Springs to pick up their mama and then wiggled 

and waggled our way over to Keystone Heights, my Thanksgiving dinner destination.

Around thirty minutes later, we arrived at Rusty’s and Myra’s house on Crater Lake Circle. I asked if this was the name of the beautiful lake seen from their back porch, and Myra said it’s real name was Margie Lake. I’d love to know the story behind that. Lily pads hugged the western shoreline and Rusty told me he’d caught bass and bream as well as seeing a few small gators pop up now and then. The lake was considerably lower for the past few years than it had been with the community thinking it was due to a new phosphate mining company nearby who was draining the aquifer. A current replenishing attempt is in the works with water to be pumped from Black Creek to an aquifer recharge area. (Water agency inks contract to start building pipeline from Black Creek to Keystone Heights). Rusty was very up-to-date on all the information affecting his property.

The aroma as I entered their home was heaven scent (yes, that is spelled correctly). Myra, turns out, is an awesome cook. She had prepared every Thanksgiving side imaginable including corn pudding and slippery dumplings. I gorged! And gained a pound according to the response on this morning’s weigh-in! Oh well, it was worth every ounce. If only I hadn’t brought home that serving of Paula Dean’s Pumpkin Gooey Butter Cake. I ate the whole thing before bed last night, and I know that is what did the damage but it was oh so good and my granddaughter made it.

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with loving kind-hearted people. As the afternoon chilled and dinner settled, we gathered outside around a crackling fire pit and watched the children test their athletic acumen on the trampoline and then hone their driving skills in a battery powered kid’s car. Oh, to have their energy again!

With darkness creeping in, the children were herded inside for bath time, so that Mommy (my granddaughter) would only need to put them to bed once they got back home. We drove through the dark with sleeping little ones back to my home in Gainesville…and suddenly….Thanksgiving 2023 was over, but I am trying to make it immortal by writing this down to read again and again and relive the day in the future.

Thanksgiving through the years

 

Thanksgiving has always been an important holiday to me and my family, celebrating every year with traditional foods and loved ones. There are many that I remember and many that I do not with a particular food taking the spotlight sometimes and etiquette blunders coming to mind at others. Most of my memories are of those Thanksgivings after Jim and I were married. One thing to count on with remembered holidays is that without fail emotions are involved.

My Aunt Sadie and my grandmom had a tradition of serving duck for Thanksgiving. I’m not sure where that came from, but duck was never high on my favorite food list. I can remember looking at the dark brown, glistening fowl with disdain and sorrow barely managing to take one bite. Those were the years I faked an upset stomach and satisfied my hunger with pumpkin and sweet potato pie. I felt guilty when Grandmom offered to make me some duck broth soup, her version of Thanksgiving chicken noodle, to which I had to reply, “No, thank you.”

And then there was the year Jim and my stepfather, Ken, went in together to buy rabbit dogs for hunting. We kept the cute little beagle type dogs at our home, and who could not fall in love with them, so active and loving and begging all the time. But no one was allowed to play with them, sadder and sadder, because that would supposedly ruin their hunting abilities. Autumn was always hunting season in Delaware. And those dogs were so productive, sniffing out rabbits and squirrels like nobody’s business. Have you ever seen a rabbit or squirrel skinned…not pretty. Of course, you can guess what we had for Thanksgiving dinner that year…at my mom’s house, not mine…fried squirrel and rabbit. Another year of the tummy ache. But I have to say that the dressing (not stuffing when you don’t have a bird) was pretty darn delicious. My mom was a great cook!

In the mid 80s after we had moved to Florida, Jim’s sister, Jean, and brother-in-law, Peter, flew down from Minnesota to visit us for Thanksgiving so we invited all the near-by relatives to our home for the yearly feast. That included Jim’s aunt and uncle, Jean and Russell, his brothers, Howard and Jack, and their families, about 20 of us altogether. Good thing we had a porch for the kids! I baked the normal turkey with stuffing in my mom’s old turkey roaster and all the usual sides of green beans, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and homemade yeast rolls. I was not a connoisseur of gravy so Jean, the sister, took over that job and she turned out to be an expert at it. The episode that prompts this particular Thanksgiving memory is a little embarrassing and not one that I’m all that comfortable sharing. Peter is still alive but Jean passed away a few years ago. We had all just sat down to eat, and Peter dug in right away. The rest of us bowed our heads as the other Jean, Jim’s aunt, said a beautiful grace over our bountiful spread amid the sudden cessation of the noise of eating utensils. No one said anything and no one ever mentioned it later, but it remains as a fixture in my brain that I would like to forget. Peter and Jean had a wonderful time visiting us, I hope. We went to Disney and Peter attended a golf tournament in Tampa while the rest of us went to Busch Gardens. Jean was a feisty little sister and I remember her getting into a squabble with someone about cutting in line. Isn’t it funny the things our minds choose to remember?

After Jim passed away in 2012, his sister-in-law, Juanita (Jack, her husband passed away in 1987), always invites me to the family Thanksgiving dinner at her home in Bronson. She makes the turkey, stuffing, and ham and all the kids (six of them) bring the sides…except for the green beans. Nobody makes green beans like Juanita. Her secret is bacon and home-grown beans. Back when I ate meat, I filled up on green beans! Now that I don’t eat meat I hesitate about going, but we did have some wonderful meals at Juanita’s. She is a great cook and her children have learned well from her. I could always expect new desserts like hummingbird cake and no mundane pumpkin pie, always something special and different. And she had the largest and most beautiful Thanksgiving cactus ever…or maybe it was Christmas cactus. I never could tell the difference. She could grow anything she put her mind to.

Family is such a treasure at Thanksgiving. This year my daughter is in Scotland so she will miss the big feast here. She insists she will enjoy haggis and black pudding while I will travel with my granddaughter and family to her in-laws in Keystone Heights. It will be my first time at Rusty and Myra’s home and I am looking forward to it. An addendum to this Thanksgiving remembrance may be added later. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Another Thanksgiving

The following true story is really about thanks giving, about receiving and knowing how to accept a gift.

Seeing all the decorations in stores for Thanksgiving brings back the memory of a particular one. It was early November of 1993. My husband and my employer ganged up on me to make an appointment with a dermatologist about a mole on my temple that looked suspicious to them. They wouldn't give up, and I finally decided to go.

The doctor barely glanced at the mole before telling me I needed to see a surgeon right away. She made the appointment for that same afternoon, something I thought impossible. The plastic surgeon echoed her words. The very next day he removed the mole and the surrounding tissue and did a skin graft. Just before Thanksgiving I received the lab report. The mole was indeed an invasive malignant melanoma, but thankfully the surrounding tissue was clear.

I had a huge bandage (it seemed huge, anyway) and some stitches. I was very thankful for loved ones and dear friends who would not take no for an answer.

The morning I went for the surgery everything was so poignant. I remember the chill in the air as we raised the garage door. In fact, I can almost feel it right now, the feeling was so intense. As I looked outside, moving soundlessly through the sky, and huge because it was so close, I saw the Goodyear Blimp, in town for the football game the next day. The quietness of it and the chill in the air steadied me somehow.

My daughter had come from a little over eighty miles away to go to the doctor with us. She only had one child at the time, my grandson, Jimmy, who was 2 years old. Of course, she left him at home with his dad. When we got back home from the surgeon’s, she wanted to stay and cook Thanksgiving dinner for us the next day, but all I could think about was the pain I was feeling and how my son-in-law must be climbing the walls by now with Jimmy. So I emphatically said "no", and Jim and I spent a lonely Thanksgiving eating chicken noodle soup.

My point is...why couldn't I have accepted the gift my daughter wanted to give? What a wonderful Thanksgiving it could have been, but I was stubborn and thought I would be putting everyone to a lot of unnecessary trouble. The important thing I overlooked was the happiness it would have given my daughter to be doing something for her mom. She was trying to show her love and support for me, and I actually refused it

I was always taught to give is better than to receive, but now I wonder at the truthfulness of that. Perhaps, to receive a gift can be giving a gift as well. And sometimes it is better to receive than to give. Many times, I think, it’s one and the same thing.