Thanksgiving 2
Friday, November 28th, 2008
Later in the afternoon, the tabletop would be so full with serving trays and bakeware that its wood grains would be hardly visible. But long before the Thanksgiving meal was prepared, we fell asleep together in his bed, my feet dangling above the bedframe shaped like a sleek racecar and him curled into a blanket cocoon. The day’s activities had worn my son and I down and there was still more holiday to be had when our eyes opened.
The house was already filling with the smell of sweet roasted turkey and baking pumpkin pie that wound up the stairs to the children’s rooms on the back side of the house. Sleeping is easy in this room. With two bodiesr, the beds that sit near the floor can be made warm. At the foot of the bed is the old wooden rocking chair where Charlie’s mother rocks him and his baby sister to sleep. On the bookshelf are a hundred books that stand upright or lay perpendicular to one another in the wooden shelving filled with stories I once read to children and now they are beginning to read back to me.
The walls are tacked with photos from past birthdays and loved ones who live in far away places, and posters with characters they love. Together this sights create the carelessness and dicovery of what has so far been their happy childhood.
For November, it was uncharacteristycally warm and we ran in the front yard and played. I chased him up the sidewalk while he wrote his tri-cycle and it was so warm outside, I didn’t need my jacket. We tossed the football aroind while his mother strung Chrismas lights in the bushes. He’s throw the ball a few feet into the lawn and I’d chase him and try to strip the ball from his arms. His sisters, older and younger, would temporarily involve themselves in our games, then go their separate ways to play with dolls on the front porch steps or sit in tiny plastic cars woith their feet portruding so they could drive themselves around the perimeter of the house.
And, then there’s the house. Two stories tall and the same color as sunshine, the big open windows that refract afternoon light and smile back with its lower-level glass paned smile and winks with eave eyebrows.
We took a walk, the girls and I, followed an L-shape further up the sidewalk to either street corner. Without crossing the intersectiion, the girls would tap the stop sign and we’d turn around go back. We collected oeafs together, especialluy crisp ones now that December is almost here.
“Oooh, here’s one from a Japanese Maple,” my oldest daughter says.
She’s ridden my shoulders down to the first stop sign and while it used to be easy to carry her four-year old lankniess from place to place, she’s now six years old and 60 pounds. Standing next to me, she’s already half my height. I set her down at the curb after watching her shadow swat the octagon and replace her with her baby sister, who’s’ only three.
In the afternoon tree shadows and manicured lawns, we walked through the streets quited by Thanksgiving. Cars lined the streets and all around us, faimiles had collected to eat and watch football. But we were playing our own games while the turkey was roasting slowly in the oven and the house trimmed. On a day when families gather around the table to share their thankfulness for the year that was, we were creating new memories together then enduirng a tiredness not caused by massive eating, but from enjoying the day.
