When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was always at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Grandma bought the twenty-plus pound turkey and on Thanksgiving morning, stuffed the bird full of home-made dressing and started it roasting at about six in the morning. When we got there, the smell of roasting turkey filled the entire house and made your mouth water.
Grandma and Grandpa had five kids, so there were a lot of people there. Grandma's big dining table sat twelve, so that's where the adults ate. We kids ate at the kitchen table once we were old enough we didn't need a high chair.
The kids got their plates filled first, either by their mothers or if they were old enough, by doing it themselves, but we couldn't start eating until all the adults were seated and Grandpa said grace. After that, we'd head back to the kitchen for turkey, regular and oyster dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and some of the other stuff all the other women fixed.
There was no shortage of food since about everything came from the gardens Grandma, Mom, and all the other women planted and cared for over the summer. Aunt Elizabeth always brought green beans cooked with bacon from the hogs Uncle James slaughtered every fall, and Aunt Mary usually brought sweet corn she'd canned. Aunt Sue was the salad lady, and always brought two. One was always a Waldorf salad made with fresh apples from the tree in their back yard. The other was usually a Jello salad of some sort, sometimes pear from their pear tree and sometimes from the berries she'd frozen.
Aunt Jean's specialty was the rolls she'd made that morning. They were lightly browned on top and just melted in your mouth when you took a bite. She said she'd gotten the recipe from her mother but she'd never tell anybody what it was.
Mom always took creamed peas, and she never brought any back home with her because they were so good. The peas came from her garden and the cream sauce was made with milk from Bess, our Jersey cow.
All the women also brought dessert too. There'd be cake and pie and peanut butter cookies, but my favorite was always Grandma's pumpkin pie. She never used store-bought pumpkin. She had Grandpa plant pumpkin seeds in between his corn rows, and when they were ripe, Grandma would go out and pick all the pumpkins and put them in her root cellar so they'd keep.
A couple days before Thanksgiving, she'd bake several pumpkins until they were mush and then mix up her pie filling with the pumpkin, eggs, cream, and spices. She'd put that mix into a pie crust she made with flour and lard and bake three pies the night before Thanksgiving. Lard is supposed to be bad for you now, but Grandma's piecrust just flaked away when you bit into it. Just before everybody sat down to eat, Grandma would make whipped cream from the cream Mom brought so everybody could have a big dollop on their pumpkin pie.
It was fun being with all my cousins, but once I turned thirteen, it was more fun being with the men after the meal. The men would all go into Grandma's living room and talk while the women cleaned up and washed the dishes.
My whole family were farmers, so most of the talk was about what their crop yields were or how many piglets that one sow - the sow that Uncle James almost sent to slaughter because she looked too small to breed - how many piglets she had and there wasn't a runt in the bunch. Sometimes the talk would be about politics, but usually talking politics led to what the politicians were doing to grain prices, and the conversation would gradually get back to how far apart was the best for corn rows or something like that.
I learned that I could sort of steer the conversation if I wanted to by asking Grandpa a question. The men would be talking about picking corn and I'd say, "Grandpa, how did you pick corn before you got a corn picker?" He'd smile and start talking about horses and walking the field picking by hand. My three uncles would join in too.
"Yep, I drove those horses when I was only six."
"James, all you did was sit on the wagon. Dad trained those horses to pull that wagon through the field without being driven."
"Remember having to brush them after we got done before we could eat? Glad I don't have to do that anymore. I just shut off the tractor and head to the house."
Usually after half an hour or so, half the men would be napping and I'd be feeling drowsy. Rich food will do that to you, especially if you have to try everything so none of the woman will think you don't like what they fixed.
I didn't take over Dad's farm after I graduated from high school. Farming was OK, but I didn't get all enthused about plowing and planting like David, my younger brother, did. From the time David was old enough to hold on, he rode the tractor with Dad every chance he got, and by the time he was ten, he could drive it. I was happier reading and building model airplanes.
Dad knew farming wasn't what I wanted to do, so the summer before I was a freshman in high school, he sat me down and we had a talk. He said if I didn't want to farm, I should go to college and make something out of myself. He said if I liked building models, maybe I'd be good at designing the real thing and I should think about becoming an engineer.
I didn't know if that was what I wanted to do, but I took all the math and science classes my high school offered and my senior year, I sent my application to the University of Illinois. Dad seemed really happy when I got accepted, but he was also a little worried and so was I. It cost a lot to go to college, even back then. He said he and Mom would help as much as they could, but I'd have to work my way through school.
What with working a full time job and studying my ass off, I made it after five years. All the work to get my degree in Mechanical Engineering paid off with a good job that I'd start two weeks after graduation. Dad was about to burst with pride at what I'd accomplished, but wasn't happy that job was four hundred miles from home.
My new job was great. I was getting paid for doing work I'd dreamed about doing since my first design class in college, and I was getting paid well. I got a furnished apartment that was a lot nicer than the dump I'd lived in while going through college and bought a better car, still used, but a lot newer and nicer.
I even partied a little with the single guys in the office, but not for long. I'd been taught to save my money, not fritter it away, and sitting in a bar drinking beer with a bunch of guys seemed like frittering to me. I was looking for a girlfriend too, but bars didn't seem to be the place to look. There were a lot of girls there, but after buying drinks for a couple only to have them thank me and then go dance with somebody else, I decided those girls were only looking for a good time rather than a boyfriend.
I looked around at the women at work as well, but at the time, most engineers were male and the only women around were secretaries or clerks and most of them were already married.
Wendy wasn't married and she was cute and smiled all the time. She also had a nice figure. Wendy was the HR Manager's secretary though, so she was pretty careful about getting involved with anybody. As she explained to me, if she went out with me, the other people might think I had an inside track to HR that would get me bigger raises. I didn't think it would do that, but I gave up after asking her out twice.
Hannah would have gone out with me, I'm sure, but Hannah didn't interest me. She was the secretary to the Engineering Manager, and seemed to be a little stuck up because of her position. I didn't have to have a woman who was beautiful like Hannah, but I did want a woman who was nice to be around.
I did date a few of the other women, but we didn't click. I think mostly it was me. I just wasn't into fancy dinners and club hopping like they were. After six months, I'd pretty much given up on the women at work and started looking elsewhere. My problem was that "elsewhere" was places like the grocery store and my apartment building, and it was pretty hard for me to just walk up to a woman I'd never seen before and ask them out. That all changed one day when I'd come home after work and was walking to the door of my apartment building.
The woman was trying to carry two suitcases and a couple of boxes at the same time, and she was having trouble. The suitcases weren't that big and neither were the boxes, but the woman wasn't very big and she couldn't keep the boxes under her arms while she lugged a suitcase in each hand. I got to her right after she dropped a box for the second time.
"Would you like some help?"
She looked up at me and smiled.
"That would be great. I should have made two trips, I guess, but I didn't think it would be this hard."
I said I'd carry the suitcases, and she smiled as she sat them down.
"I didn't think I had so much in these, but they're heavy."
Well, they weren't really heavy, but like I said, she wasn't a very big woman either.
She didn't say much when we took the elevator to the fourth floor, and she didn't say anything except, "This is home", when she stopped to unlock the door. I followed her inside with her suitcases and then asked where she wanted them. She said, "Just anywhere. I'll unpack them later", so I sat them down next to the couch and asked if she had more to bring up.
It was about half-dark at that time of day in October, so I hadn't really seen her well outside. In the lights of the room, I could.
She looked a little older than me, not by much, maybe a couple of years. I'm not sure what it was that made her look that way. Maybe it was that she didn't have the "cute" features of a twenty-something girl, you know, the little perky nose and skin without any lines. Her face was more mature looking somehow.
She smiled again and said she had six more boxes in her car but she thought she could manage. I shook my head.
"No, I'll help if that's OK. It'll take you a lot of trips and I don't have anything better to do."
As it was, it still took us two trips. Evidently she favored minimizing the number of boxes over minimizing the weight of each, because the first one I picked up out of her blue minivan must have weighed sixty pounds. I grunted a little when I picked it up and she chuckled.
"I had a hard time getting that one in my van, but I thought it was just me."
"What's in here? It feels like a block of concrete."
"It's my books from nursing school. They come in handy sometimes so I never sold them. Can you manage, or should I unload some of them?"
I didn't want her to think I was some sort of weakling, and once I had the box by the bottom, it was more bulky than heavy so I said I'd be OK if she'd open the doors for us. By the time we got back up to her apartment though, I was struggling. She asked me to set the box on the table and we went back down for the last boxes.
I carried two this time, but they weren't quite as heavy. They were her shoes, she said, so that was probably the reason, though I didn't know why a woman needed two boxes of shoes. I had the shoes I wore to work - plain black oxfords - one pair of running shoes for the weekends, and one pair of work boots I had for when I went to construction sites.
When I sat those two boxes on the floor, she smiled again. I was starting to like that smile because it sort of lit up her whole face.
"I can't thank you enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten my books up here without stopping to rest a few times, and I'd still have been carrying boxes if you hadn't come along."
I grinned.
