Following The Tide

It used to be, every year at Thanksgiving we would all gather at our small, three bedroom home and eat dinner. Momma, one of the best cooks in the West would work day and night preparing sweet potato and apple pies, turkey and dressing, green beans w/potatoes, greens and cornbread, fruit punch and of course...jellied cranberry sauce.

As we grew older Mom gave us more duties to help out with the dinner preparation. My sister helped with the baking and cooking, I helped with the vegetable chopping, floor mopping and dish washing. Mom took great pride in her Thanksgiving dinner and training a new cook and increasing the risk of a dish turning out wrong was not going to happen. As she says, "Now is not the time to ride a new horse."

We'd pile around the table, Daddy would say Grace and we'd each say our Verse. Mine was "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." Each of the children said a verse and the feasting began!

As the years swept by the dinner companions changed like the tide; it would swell and recede in that some years there would be so many folks we would have to eat on the porch, the other years it would just be four or five of us. And like the tide it was constant.

Early one chilly November morning, two days before Thanksgiving, my father died. My family swelled into town and filled our home. It was one of the largest Thanksgiving gatherings I had ever attended and except for missing my father, one of the happiest! What we didn't know then was that as we buried Daddy, the Thanksgiving tradition was buried in the same grave.

The very next Thanksgiving we went to my sister-in-law's home and Mom again worked magic by creating spectacular mouth-watering dishes. And while I worried that I wouldn't have a good time because the meal would not be at our small cramped home as it had since my birth, I just accepted it. After all, I still had my family, the food was still cooked by my mother and we all said our Verses.

This year we spent Thanksgiving surrounded by my baby brother's girlfriend's family at her gorgeous home in Peoria, AZ. The food was delicious, they allowed me to eat and watch the game in the den, and it was a pleasant time. I miss my father and my nieces in Vegas. I miss my sister who chose to have dinner with her friends. I miss my older brother and his children but I know this is just another flow of life's tide and although it's small, one day it will swell and be full again.

Photo courtesy astrocruzan