A Day of Thanks

What truly matters

It is Thanksgiving tomorrow. In the holiday of my childhood, it was close to sacred. It was family, cousins, fun, aunts, uncles and lots of great food. Abundance with gratefulness.

If we happened to go an hour north to Grams (mom’s mom) house, dad would start the day by going pheasant hunting along the rice fields of a fertile northern California. He would bring home his brace and us kids would have a grand time with the pheasant feet, pulling on the exposed nerve to make the claw move. We were kids. It is what kids did back then. We became grubbily re-acquainted with fellow cousins we only saw a few times a year. Kids who always managed to fall back into a routine of play and camaraderie which imbued the contented and secure world of children. Children who got to maybe watch a cartoon on Saturday morning. Kids who rode in the beds of open pickup trucks and lived to tell the tale. Kids who ran all over the small town my Gram lived in and were just kids. We didn’t know what the adults were doing because we didn’t care. Clueless to the world and it’s problems, the way a child’s life should be.

There was the old sun porch at the back of the house, full of unwanted belongings, whose owners had moved on. What I wouldn’t give to have access to that room today. There was an old road sign that my delinquent aunt stole in the middle of the night in the 1930’s. There was a spooky dressmaker’s dummy, standing eerily in the corner which would scare us all to death. The old iron bed frame would bump up against the wall when any of us tried to make our way further into the stuffed room and we would run away, squealing with terrified delight.

There was the giant gaping furnace intake, covered with a grate in the floor, which made us all shiver with childish terror as we walked over it. We would imagine what could be just below us, lurking.

As I look back, I now know that Grams house was a classic Craftsman style. Beautifully full of unseen memories that seem to linger in places so connected with the past.

I see the red pulls on all the cabinets, like I could reach out in my head a draw the past into my hand. It was a home that had seen my great-grandmother arrive and never leave due to an unexpected stroke, bedridden in her daughter’s bed, death finally coming for her, many months later. It was a bed that had seen my grandmother weeping and her daughter watching from around the corner. It was a woman weeping with all that she was, because her husband just committed suicide and left her with 4 children, ages 2-12. Another victim of the Great War, just a delayed death. My mom was the little girl of 4, who watched her mom and vowed to never love anyone so much that it would hurt like this.

Gram in the apron and her glamorous sister in black

That house saw men off to war and saw men come home. It held the woman who loved them and she was held by God Himself. Her prayers availed much and her grandchildren are blessed because of her faithfulness. I have no doubt.

As I sit in a small bungalow in Florida, it is so very far away from that little girl. Far away from the roots snaggling oh-so-deep into that California soil. I wonder if I take some of my grandmother and who she was with me? Is her stoic presence, her Godly faithfulness, actually running through my blood? Did her pain magically pass through me? Transform me?

My mom, middle and her sister in pink

I do not know tough times. But she did. She was “a half a year older than the year”, she would tell us, when we asked how old she was..in that rude way of children. It would shut us up and make us do the math.

It cements in me the knowledge that I am so much more than meets the eye. Maybe I have her immune system, which fought off the Spanish flu in 1918. I would like to think so.

I don’t have many stories with Gram, because I was a caboose. By the time I rolled down the track she was aging and just not that into me. But, I do remember her telling me about the San Francisco earthquake. At the time they lived in a little town in the coastal range and could see the flames from their house. Her entire family (14 of them) got on their knees and prayed because they thought for sure it was the end of the world.

My mom tells the story of her uncle, who was a bigwig banker, taking Gram and her kids to see Seabiscuit. Mom got to pet his legendary snout. Little did she know she was stroking the velvety nose of history.

Mom talks about how, when she was in middle/high school from 1941-1945, they all took turns manning a tower equipped with a paper, identifying the outline of airplanes. And how, all of a sudden, their Japanese neighbors and friends just disappeared. Gram’s house was a home that heard all those conversations. Conversations about what could be bought with their limited ration cards and whose card had what left on it. I still have those books.

Those were hard times. Those people knew hard times intimately and they lived.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”~ G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

That seems to be exactly where we are today.

So, today I choose to be grateful. Grateful to all those who have gone before me, shaped by the hard times, so I can enjoy this day, this weekend, this life. Here is to you, Gram. Thanks for the prayers. ~S