Thanksgiving Memories

 

Thanksgiving is the only time I am homesick.  The solution is to take out the good memories and relive them.

My grandmother, Dar, is in the kitchen. The house smells of roasting turkey.

My brother and I share a piece of apple pie. He eats the apples, I eat the crust.

Going to the traditional Reading High vs. Stoneham High football game is a must. I cheer for my daughter's traditional Boston Latin vs. English High game. Decades later, I still search for the scores.

As an Army wife in Stuttgart, Germany, I invited people for Thanksgiving dinner with no idea how to roast a turkey. I went to the commissary and asked the kindest looking woman I saw how to do it. She gave me exact instructions. The turkey came out fine.

After eating all the traditional food at my father and stepmom's at a table with aunts, uncles and cousins they played penny poker.

Several years we drove to my housemate's Aunt Millie in Connecticut and loving Eva's tiny meatballs made with Welch's grape jelly almost as much as the rest of the meal. I wish I had the recipe. I'm not sure that I could find the jelly or least I couldn't the last time I looked.

Payerne, Switzerland. My boyfriend at the time had a separate little house for entertaining. My former Bostonian housemates came for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. My daughter brought the turkey from the army commissary. At the last minute, he wanted to invite several of his friends. We did, stressing to not dress up. They never thought that turkey could be so moist.

An English used bookstore did a Thanksgiving meal. Wonderful.

The mother of a woman who worked for me baked me an apple pie after her daughter told her that I felt sad about not having a traditional meal. 

My housemate and I proved two women can work together to put together a huge meal in the same kitchen with no disagreements, just good team work. We did it more than once.

My landlords decided to do a meal with many expats.

This year, my former landlords will do a meal but not until next month when they return from Cambodia.

My husband decided I should have Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving. We will have cranberry sauce, hot turkey sandwiches,which is the treasured meal the day after,  and in place of stuffing rösti, a traditional Swiss potato dish. I am looking forward to it and maybe it will be a new tradition. 

As for all my other memories, I can tuck them away in the drawer marked happy times.