remembering

No one need look here for Thanksgiving Day wisdom, I will not, that’s fer sure, that’s fer dang sure. Memories maybe. In my bedroom upstairs, the larger one on the left at the top of the stairs and over the kitchen, delicious aromas wafting up. Turkey roasting, pumpkin pie. Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, a longest weekend, no school until Monday. Cove School. This year Bay District Schools had the week!!

Cool outside and okay for going barefoot except that autumn, fall of the year, the chinquapin trees covered the ground with their spiny produce. 

Edible, I never ate one, the Indians, Native Americans roasted them, the squirrels ate them. Stepped on and they were bad or worse than stickers, sandspurs. Ours was a yard one had to know where not to walk barefooted. 

The cinquapin trees, in which our father had constructed us a small platform dubbed “the treehouse,” disappeared when the garage was built in 1948 to accommodate the new Dodge sedan. Mama had insisted no new car until a garage was finished, because the 1942 Chevrolet was dotted with turpentine pitch from sitting outside under the dripping pine trees all its six years with us. The garage was built exactly where the spiny ones fell.

A couple years later the Plymouth station wagon came to live with us and the carport, actually an open air garage, was expanded to hold both cars. Along with the house, it’s still all there. That's an oak tree in the foreground, hanging over Massalina Drive. Beyond, a three-trunk magnolia grandiflora that I stood on the front porch with mama and our dog Patsy one morning in 1938 as my father and Old Dave planted it, a healthy little stick of three twigs sticking up, because mama had always wanted a magnolia tree. As Robert and I walked by last week, I wondered if the upstairs bedroom of my growing up memories would smell so wonderful on Thanksgiving morning.

Thanksgiving morning 2016 ->

DThos+