I have read blogs on memories and holiday blues. Times are forever changing and those holiday memories we hold so dear, we try and hold tighter. We know those were precious times we won't get back.
When I was a small kid we always went to my grandparents for Thanksgiving. We would drive forever it seemed before I saw the wooden "Uncle Sam" that held the mail box in front of my grandparent's farm. We went every year without fail, it was tradition, something that grandma expected of us and something we wouldn't dream of missing.
I use to sit in the corner of that big kitchen, watching the hussle and bustle of my aunts and grandmother cooking. The room would be so hot from the oven and morning stove, but I didn't care. I loved to be in there.... Just to listen... I would try to be invisible just to hear the chatter, to hear stories, and the gossip. A few times my grandmother would notice me in the corner with my big eyes and bigger ears and change the subject. I loved to hear her talk, and talk she did, a mile a minute. I never knew anyone like my grandmother. She knew everyone, their history, their family, everything it seemed.
Grandmother didn't have a large house so card tables and tv trays were set up in the living room and back south room. After filling your plate you would have to jostle for a place to sit. The men always went thru line first, loading their plates and grabbing big glasses of ice tea and they would retire to the back room. Their afternoon would be spent playing cards and the only time we heard from them was when they beckoned one of us kids to find mom or one of my aunts for pocket change for their poker games. The cigar and cigarette smoke would hang thick in the air. Sometimes I watched, but I soon grew bored. The kitchen is where I wanted to be.
As I grew older I would get small jobs to do such as stuff the celery with pimento cheese, put the sweet pickles and olives in the fancy glass dishes...and when I was much older, I got to wield the electric knife to carve the ham, turkey, or roast beef that was always on the table.
My grandmother loved to cook. She was a small woman, barely a hundred pounds. Holidays for her meant dessert. Cakes and pies, and cheesecake and cookies and everything imagineable would be crammed atop the chest freezer on the back porch for dessert. I never knew why such a small woman who never seemed to eat a thing, would splurge when it came to dessert. I learned years later when she told of a story when as a child, her mother never made dessert. Times were tough, her mother would only cook the basics. The hired hands that worked on her parents farm would buy a package of cookies every week for their own dessert. They kept those cookies stored high on top the cupboard and would get them down after their evening meal. The men would eat their cookies and give my grandmother one cookie each night. She told us of being that small child and how she looked so forward to that cookie every night. I think thru the years she has tried to make up for it, to satisfy that sweet tooth of that child in her.
One particular Thanksgiving my mom and one of her sisters were at the stove. Stirring and stirring, talking and doing a hundred things at once. There was some concern over one of the pots on the stove. A serious discussion ensued. Soon the women were all gathered at the stove stirring the pot, much like doctors in consultation of an ailing patient.
There was a small castrophe in the making. It was the gravy....it was lumpy.
They all looked it over, stirred and stirred and it still stayed lumpy. Another pan was brought out, more broth added, the gravy grew...and it was still lumpy. Yet another bigger pan came out, someone grabbed a strainer and another pan.
Then it started...the giggles. They stirred and strained and dirtied more pots and pans and laughed uncontrollably. Finally the gravy was contained in very large pot on the stove top. They had done the best they could to save it...save the gravy. Each of my aunts, my mom, and grandmother would walk by, stir it again, look the other in the eye and start to snicker again. They couldn't look at each other, they couldn't look at the gravy, it would start the giggles, uncontrollable giggles. Too many cooks in the kitchen they would say with another giggle.
The men came thru with their plates, if they frowned and commented on the gravy having a lump, the giggles started again. When the gravy was passed, they couldn't pass it across the table with a straight face.
It was the only year that the gravy was lumpy. At different times thru the years, at different dinners, someone will ask for the gravy. It will get passed and my mom and one of her sisters will smile a wry smile and say..."remember the year of the gravy?"...they still snicker and giggle at the mention of gravy at grandma's table.
Many Thanksgivings have come and gone from that particular one. My grandmother is 86 and there won't be many more Thanksgivings in her future. When she is gone, the farmhouse will be bull dozed in. It is too old, needing too many repairs. The house in past years, isn't quite as full as it was when I was a kid. People have passed, relatives have moved, people make other plans. I often think to myself, weren't we the lucky ones? We knew family, we celebrated family, we were thankful. Times change, traditions change, families are scattered far and wide.
Thanksgiving will be celebrated differently from what a lot of us remember growing up as a child. Some will be surrounded by family. Some will eat alone. New tradtions will be made, and old ones will die out quietly. We will all be thankful for what we have now and what we did have in the past.
I hope each and everyone of you will understand what I mean when I say that my wish for all of you this Thanksgiving is ...
....lumpy gravy.
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