Saturday 11/21/09

UMHH! Reading at FDL "Pull Up A Chair" without my beloved Christ Hardin Smith who has had to retire due to Lupus(?)and a new child, still I love the talk of food and cooking and traditions,etc. ths time about everyone going to grandma's house and "feeling" that I didn't have a grandma. I had Aunt Hazel,Aunt Cecil and Aunt Ukidene and they all lived in Oklahoma and there was always a coldness there that I now know was because my mother conceived a child and gave birth in 1943 and the child was given up for adoption and this was all kept from my father who would have understood ironically.Thsi all came out in about 1993 when the child now a man finally was able to track Mama down. I believe that he thought he would embarrass her but we are not that kind of family.
At any rate the talk of families getting together hurt today. Amy is going to Arthur's family, Barbara is gone to New Mexico and Judy is going to her family in Santa Cruz and so we will have a small family dinner with way too much food which we will eat all week until we grow weary of warming up gravy and green beans and at last the carcass is boiled into broth for something later.
I have family in Pennsylvania,a son and his wife and their two wonderful boys. I hardly know them and have never had Thanksgiving or Christmas with them. I left my son and daughter to be raised by their father's family and I went on off into the wilderness. The British call women like that bolters and say that nothing can be done with them-the Princess Diana's mother was considered a bolter. She turned to religion in her maturity-I am more fortunate in that I have had grandchildren to care for and a daughter to worry about and a sister to care for and a living to make.
I am sad right now wishing that I could be preparing for a crowd but I will insist that we put up the big table in the living room and get out all the fancy dishes and set a proper table and light candles and give thanks for what we have and all that we have received. We will put on pretty clothes for the dinner and share washing the dishes later and eat too much dessert.
I have a new cranberry recipe although my favorite remains the cranberry chutney recipe from back in 2005-Judy and I ended up Christmas dinner just sitting there eating the chutney. I love cranberries and they are verboten now in these days of cumadin but I will eat them Thanksgiving-not as much as I want but just enough to be Thanksgiving.
I have been thinking of my parents and how hard their lives were and the sacrifice the family made to get out of Moscow,KS. WHEW!! we were almost destroyed by that but here we are. My parents were very successful in Denver where their work ethic and humility was acknowledged and no one knew about Dorothy Mae's unwed motherhood and so could not scorn my troubled father behind his back.My father was so supportive of women,loved them, always referred to his mother who had only one leg due to the rickets from her childhood supposedly brought on by the starvation her family endured when her father left the family to fend for themselves while he went to Scotland to receive the 32nd Degree of Masons. Her family name was Suggs. My father had a lifelong fear of mystics because of this story and was always nervous when the mystical streak showed up in me along with the fragile emotional make-up.