Thanksgiving is a reunion holiday for my family. It is a time when three generations converge on one house to laugh, play, talk, sing, and share a few enormous meals together. Biscuits as big as your fist with butter and homemade preserves for breakfast, and turkey, ham, cornbread dressing, bowls and bowls of vegetables, and cakes and pies for dinner, all made from my beloved late grandmother’s recipes, serve the seventy or so people who have come together to celebrate.
Sometime during the day the highly treasured family heirloom, The Thanksgiving Book, is brought out and shared, and the storytelling begins, reminding us all of why we have gathered together. An eight-inch-thick photo album, The Thanksgiving Book is filled with photographs of our family, all of which were taken at previous Thanksgiving celebrations. These pictures go back more than thirty years to the first Thanksgiving reunion that marked the beginnings of our tradition, the time we came together to comfort our grandfather and one another as we mourned the loss of my grandmother, Annie Ruth Lambert Brown, known to all as “Grandmomma.”
Although there are members of my family who never met my grandmother, or were so young at the time of her loss that they have no memories to call upon, everyone knows who she was. Each of her four daughters resembles her in their own way, and their children in turn also carry features that someone can point to and say, “Those are Grandmomma’s eyes” or “That’s Grandmomma’s smile.” As the great grandchildren who never knew her savor the sweet taste of a dessert made from a recipe handed down over four generations, they are told about Grandmomma. As the newest cooks in the family learn to make cornbread dressing and giblet gravy from scratch, they hear of how Grandmomma used to make it in the early morning, and of how the smell greeted all as they arrived at her house for a holiday meal.
Grandmomma was a short, plump woman with a face that always bore a smile. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and piled her silver hair high on her head, and nearly always had an apron tied around her waist. There were warm hugs upon greeting and departure, goodnight kisses for the lucky ones who got to spend the night, and a comforting hand on the shoulder of the one who walked next to her into church.
Grandmomma indulged her many grandchildren. I remember my cousin and me sitting at her feet, eating boiled peanuts she had just taken off the stove, as she watched the Lawrence Welk Show. Whether it was homemade peach ice cream, strawberry and rhubarb cobbler, or her famous Texas Pecan cake, there was always a dessert in the house to look forward to after the dinner dishes were cleared from the table. On warm summer afternoons we sat on the front porch and shelled peas or shucked corn and listened to her as she told us about her early days, our grandfather, and our parents.
The first great loss my young heart experienced was on the evening I learned that Grandmomma had died. I was inconsolable and grieved her loss deeply as did the rest of the family, especially my grandfather, who was never the same after that evening. Sometimes I look back and regret that I was so young at the time, too young to know then that time spent with someone you love is precious, because that time is not guaranteed. Realizing this now, I make sure my daughter, Meagan Katherine, has ample opportunities to spend time with her extended family, especially her grandparents.
Known to her as “Granna” and “MaMa,” Meagan has loving and unique relationships with both of her grandmothers. Whether learning to quilt, playing rummy, watching old black and white movies, shopping, or making peppermint candy, my daughter loves the time she spends with her grandmothers, and understands that because of it she grows a little more toward becoming a woman, when she will one day be a mother and then a grandmother and will in turn hand down traditions and delight the heart of a child as only a grandmother can. Once as I watched my child learn from my mother how to make biscuits from scratch and listened as Mother told Meagan of how she learned this skill from her mother, I felt once more the pain of my loss so many years ago, and wished I could sit on the porch and reminisce with Grandmomma again.
My child loves her grandparents just as I loved mine and looks forward to the time she spends with them. She helped me write this book and its companion, Why I Love Grandpa, as a way to memorialize our love for those dear to us. Together we made a list of what each of us enjoyed about our grandmothers, and we thought of what we admired most about the many grandmother-grandchild relationships we observed during the photo shoots for this book.
With this book Meagan Katherine and I celebrate the grandmothers we love and recognize them for the many caring gestures they have extended to us. We also celebrate the wonderful grandmothers we met along the way, those who provide continuous and unselfish affection, who welcome new grandchildren into the family no matter what their origin, who soften the hard lessons of life, who remember their youth and relive it when given the chance to do so, and who speak with a wisdom and understanding that enriches the lives of those who are listening. With this book we hope to give grandchildren a special way to reach out to their grandmothers and speak to them of what is in their hearts.
With each year something about our Thanksgiving tradition changes just a little. Those who were once children make the right of passage and move to sit at the adult tables. A new leader emerges within the youngest generation and rallies the cousins together in mischief. A son now helps the father; a daughter now hustles in the kitchen while the mother rests. A grandfather, the religious beacon in the family, passes the torch to a grandson who offers a prayer before eating. As we witness these changes take place, these signs that our family is ever evolving, someone inevitably says, “I wish Grandmomma could be here to see this.” We mean this, of course, in the temporal sense, because we know that she is still with us—in our hearts, every day.
