Thanksgiving Day

We ate lunch at our son David's home. It was a quite nice day with not a lot of people there. We enjoyed quite the American feast of turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, yeast rolls, pumpkin pie, chocolate pie and lemonade. Sherri's father, Charles Howell was there and Mama Doris, Becky, David Sr., Me (Minnie), Rachel Davis, David Jr., Sherri, Andrew, Melanie, Emily, and Sarah. Melanie played the piano for us...she is so talented and well practiced. She also played a song she had written (not yet on paper) and it was fantastic. Sarah also played and made up a song for Rachel. Andrew had just painted the new barn...honey white..and had to show it off to his granddaddy. I think about many times as a child the way we celebrated Thanksgiving. We would go to Quincy to my grandparents (Woodbery) home and grandma had cooked dinner. There was always turkey, peas, corn, dressing and probably a Lane Cake or Sourcream Pound Cake for dessert. We crowed around their red (asbestosed surfaced) table. Mary and I loved the corn...we still talk about it a lots. They, of course, grew the corn and peas in their garden. She said she took a couple of packages of frozen field corn, put it with water in a certain pan (she always used that pan so she did not have to measure) with butter and baked it in the oven. I don't know if it was the kind of corn or just the memory but it had to be the greatest corn in the world. A Lane Cake is full of rasins and nuts. I loved the pound cake...I think that's why I still love pound cake so much. After dinner we would sit around on the patio outside...beautiful colored concrete squares(red and green that my granddaddy had made)...and talk. That was the best part, listening to them talk. Granddaddy never allowed talking about insurance, politics or religion....he said that those were personal. They certainly talked about everything else, we listened. I think it is probably the prevelence of family stories that helped me get interested in family history when I was so young...10. I remember Uncle Warren showed us how to take a lizzard and rub his belly with a pencil to make him absolutely go sound asleep. I would never touch the lizzard though, so I was content with him getting the lizzard to sleep. Mary and I would also play on the hugh concrete drain/platform that granddaddy had made around the house to catch the water that drained off of the house so it wouldn't mess up grandma's flowers. If you moved the flower pots, there was always little grey bugs that rolled up into a tight ball when you touched them...we played with them too. It was neet to see the backside of the flower bushes, sometimes grandma let us pick some of the flowers. We played in granddaddy's magnificent barn (two stories), in the garden, with the worm bed and I suppose when they had tired of us we went to the neighbor's house to play with a little girl there ...Nancy Drew....paperdolls of course. Nancy always played with paper dolls.
In later years we had Thanksgiving at 'the camp' on Lake Talquin. This held a whole new set of adventures from exploring the woods to fishing in the lake. Many of the family would come on varying years and it was a great deal of fun hearing about other places where they had lived or visited. I miss my grandparents and my parents. Thanksgiving brings back many memories of family.