Back to the table
I'm on the road today, bound for Boston, to one of those scaled-down modern Thanksgivings. Instead of using up all the leaves in the old dining room table just to seat the grownups--and a card table or two for the younger kids--we'll be just four. It's the way of the world. In the 1950s, you couldn't throw a rock in Bradford County PA without hitting one of my mom's relations, generations of them clustered around the gentle hills and good soil of the Susquehanna Valley. Same with my father's clan in Indiana.
Since then, decades of jets and cars and jobs have swizzled my family evenly into the long drink of America. Working in countertrend, I have stayed pretty much in one spot for fifty years, but to no avail. You move, they move--it amounts to the same distance.
My sister dropped by the other day with a big box of old family photos. And there they all are again, those missing from the table, the dead and the living, distant in time, distant in place--brought near again in memory--in sepia, in black and white, and color faded as a dream. I sorted out a selection to take on the road, to bring them back again to the family table, where even though the bird may be smaller, the thanks will be as great.
posted by Dale Hobson @ 11/26/2008
6 comments
6 Comments:
Pleasant thoughts of bygone days. No more hunting on Thanksgiving morning as I always did with my father in Deposit. But we'll have the once-a-year rutabaga and my mother's sausage stuffing and cranberry relish, but this year we picked our own here in the Adirondacks. There will be ten of us, and yes, the little kids will sit at their own table. The past lingers on. Our families (four generations of Hobsons and Foxes) were and are a lot alike. We are all blessed.
Oh Dale, you are a treasure. I so enjoy your words that I send them on to friends.
This particular post brought tears to my eyes.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The holidays are tough this year, my first alone. You made me cry but in a good way.
My wife told me that people didn't dream in black and white until the advent of B/W photos and early TV. How would we know? Did people note what color their dreams were or weren't before that?
Pardon me for stepping on anyone's holiday spirit, but some family members are best left in the photo album. Family holiday gatherings can be a cornucopia of stress, overblown expectations and festering discord. It's a great way to revisit the past, but often has less to offer for the future.
Our family, too has morphed and moved. We also brought out the old photos and filled the empty chairs with memories and many laughs of Thanksgivings of the past............much to be thankful for.
Shirley
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