Turkey Day 2018

I started writing before I started sharing on this blog, so a few posts may be slightly out of date, but still meaningful enough to me that I want to share. Without further ado, here is something I wrote on Thanksgiving.

It’s Thanksgiving day, or should I say Black Friday Eve. It feels more like the latter due to stores opening on Thanksgiving and commercials depicting a family rushing through supper to get to their favorite stores. It is a time that I, in my 22 years of wisdom, am not proud of. Where we as a culture have almost completely removed a holiday composed of ideas of giving thanks, and replaced it with that of a “holiday” based on greed. Even at 22, that bothers me, but I don’t think the trend will reverse and may even go so far as having Thanksgiving drift away and be replaced by an entire week of shopping. I digress.

I came down to Sparta to stay with my grandma last night. We hung her outside Christmas lights, but didn’t dare turn them on in November. We then hiked to the barn over hills of mole holes with a shovel and wheelbarrow. We were headed to load up some manure one of her good friends, Joe Don, had left her for the garden. I shoveled a load in the wheelbarrow, and we were soon back on the move. We dusted her hydrangea, pots she uses for raised beds, rose bushes, and the bare soil that borders the porch delegated to tomato production. All of this work wasn’t going to make the hydrangeas or roses bloom, nor make lush, red tomatoes pop out of the ground this winter. It only confirms the old saying, one that I'm still learning – good things come to those who wait.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not a reader, but last night and this morning I put my reading cap on, buckled down, and read a 200-page book in less than 24 hours. This book wasn’t for school, nor was it a difficult read by any means. This was a book written by a man named Rory Feek, a man who writes about his extraordinary, ordinary life. His new book is titled Once Upon a Farm, and was released earlier this year. Having read his previous book, I was eager to get my hands on the second one. I figured Sparta would be the best place for me to read based on the fact that we were both usually in bed by 7:00 p.m. And that’s what we did. We headed to our rooms and I left the light on to read. I read about an hour and a half until my eyes started to gloss over the words and politely urged me to go to bed. I finished the few pages I had left in the morning before the Macy’s parade. Rory has already had a more extraordinary life than I ever will, but there is something that attracts me to what he has to say. He writes with elegance, humor, and most of all, truth. Maybe that’s why I can’t put his books down and why I have decided to write a journal, just in case someone might read it one day and something good will come of it. Time will tell.

Getting back to our Thanksgiving festivities. For several years, I remember going to Ava to enjoy a home-cooked Thanksgiving meal with my dad’s side of the family. For years I remember getting up early, Mom making the finishing touches to the food she prepared to take, and then loading up and making the hour and a half long trek southeast towards Ava. Our first stop would always be at my great aunt Mildred’s house in Ava. Without fail, when we walked through the door into the small living room, the TV would be on and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade would be going strong. For the next 30 minutes or so before heading to meet the others, we would all be sitting in the living room talking and watching the parade. We would then load back up and head towards the place we were having the meal. I remember always being met by the greetings of family members we might not have seen since last Thanksgiving and the smell of all the food people had prepared. Today, we did not stop at Mildred’s house nor go to Ava. I watched the parade with Mamaw until I hitched a ride with my parents to one of our cousin’s houses in Ozark. Attendance has dwindled at our Thanksgiving gathering. One by one, it seems every year the crowd slowly grows smaller. Losing one of the older members of the family has yet to be replaced with continuous attendance from the younger members. Moving on without the ones who came before us who are gone, but can’t be forgotten.

As I do my best to learn from each passing day, I hope we all can take some time from our busy lives to reflect on how much we have been blessed and do our part to make the best of every day that we have.