Apple, Pumpkin, Mince

Thanksgiving Day dawns clear and cold with the promise of snow. Death doesn't stop for a holiday so my daddy has already left for work by the time I wake up and my mother is in the kitchen, elbow deep into pie making - family tradition demands apple, pumpkin and mince – and my mother is hands down the best pastry baker in the family. My grandmother trusts no one else for the pies.

A bottle of cooking sherry, only partially camouflaged by the coffee pot, sits innocently on the kitchen counter but it tells me what kind of a day it's likely to be. It's just after seven in the morning and my mother is pleasantly buzzed. Remarkably, alcohol has never affected her baking skills and the pies turn out perfectly. It's more than I can say for our family holiday.

We're due at my grandmother's at noon with dinner served at two. The house smells of dinner rolls and evergreen and the table is immaculately set with her best china, her real silver, her delicate crystal glasses and a linen napkin at every place. We are fifteen this year - five in my family, my grandparents, Uncle Eddie and Aunt Helen and all six of the New York side of the family, including (to my grandmother's consternation) their tiny, sharp toothed, yappy chihuahua.

“We couldn't find a boarding place that wasn't full,” my cousin Elaine explains apologetically, “But he'll be no trouble, Alice. He's housebroken and very well behaved and doesn't shed a bit. And we brought his kennel. Just in case, naturally.”

“Naturally,” my grandmother agrees skeptically, “But if he gets underfoot.......”

“Oh, absolutely,” Elaine assures her, “We'll see to him.”

Nana doesn't look convinced - truth to tell, she looks downright skeptical - but she shrugs and lets it pass. My grandfather is less charitable, scowling at the small dog and wondering aloud if he kicks the flea bitten, little rat bastard, will he bounce. Cousin Elaine pales at this and hurriedly shuts the poor thing up in an upstairs bedroom where he eventually barks himself into exhaustion and silence.

Dinner is a tense affair with everyone save my daddy and the kids drinking too much. At one point, a quarrel breaks out between my mother and grandfather and my mother leaves the table in tears. No one gets up to follow or comfort her and no one dares chastise him. The meal ends in a bitter, stony silence and even the pies are forgotten. Nana sends one home with Uncle Eddie and Aunt Helen, one with Elaine, and one to the Armenian family next door. My grandfather falls into a drunken stupor in his reclining chair while my daddy goes back to work and everyone else lends a hand packaging leftovers and cleaning the kitchen.

At some point, it starts to snow - light flurries at first, just enough to be pretty - but when Nana checks the forecast, there's 4 to 6 inches predicted by morning. It's more than enough to panic the New York relatives into an early departure.

“Well,” my grandmother remarks more to herself than anyone else, “That's that. And we don't have to do it again until Christmas. Ain't that something to be grateful for.”

Indeed it was.

The Girl in the Red Knit Hat

For the first week, I didn't miss the girl in the red knit hat.

She was one of those anonymous figures that you saw regularly but didn't really register, not quite invisible but just a part of the landscape of the downtown bus station. It was a sad place, loud and dirty, neglected and usually smoky with exhaust fumes and diesel. It attracted the homeless and the desperate, the travelers who had no clear destination but were just looking for a way out of the city. It gave you the sense that any other place would do as long as it wasn't here. You could buy or sell drugs on the corner, stalk and rob the out-of-town gamblers who frequented the nearby casinos, or panhandle your way to a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the deli around the block. Shootings were not that uncommon and often went unreported. It wasn't a pretty or proud part of the city and no one wanted to get involved.

The girl in the red knit cap favored the corner across the street, just outside the fence of the old library building. She was tall and angular with dark, stringy hair and always carried a scarred up, old suitcase held together with rope and a ragged backpack. Often she had a guitar case slung over one scrawny shoulder and a faded Community Coffee can tied to one hip. She played for spare change and unfailingly would smile at anyone kind enough to throw a quarter or a crumpled dollar bill into the case or the coffee can. Her voice was shaky and quavery, raspy as metal on metal, but she sang nevertheless - out of tune and off key, to be sure - but never missing a lyric or a chord change. Old Baptist hymns, mostly, and some traditional twelve bar blues on her more profitable days.

It was late October when I realized I hadn't seen her in awhile, not at the bus station or on the courthouse lawn or the riverfront park. The weather had turned and as there was no sign of an Indian summer, I imagined she'd checked into one of the local shelters or boarded a Greyhound and headed farther south. New Orleans, I thought, or maybe the Florida coast, someplace where she wouldn't need a heating grate to keep warm at night.

That was a year ago and the weather has turned and turned again since then. And I still keep watch for that red knit hat.

"Everything passes, everything changes.  Even the mountains don't stand still." - Marty Rubin

12 Hours to St. John

It was 12 hours to St. John - a long and tedious drive with my grandparents, my mother, my brothers and two dogs and me all bickering every mile - Nana was in favor of spending the night at Brooks Bluff, a charming and rustic little collection of cottages off the beaten path in the Maine woods but my mother wanted to drive straight through and the feud escalated until my grandfather lost his temper and threatened to a) turn around and drive straight back or b) leave us all, dogs included, on the side of the highway.

“Oh, for Christ's sake!” he finally bellowed and slammed one meaty fist on the steering wheel, “If you don't all shut the hell up, you can damn well hitchhike for all I care! One more word is all it's going to take!”

I didn't know about anyone else but I wasn't completely sure this was an idle threat - the old man was known to be hot tempered, unpredictable and willing to cross a line to make a point – so I burrowed down with the dogs and hoped he'd forget about me. The outburst had the desired effect with my mother and grandmother withdrawing to their separate corners and the boys doing the same. The tension was heavy and oppressive but at least it was quiet.

In my family though, things were never forgiven and forgotten and having the last word might well have been an unwritten gospel. The remainder of the trip was uneventful but the sense of dread never faded. Even as we arrived on the island by dinner time the next day, I was waiting for it to spill over and drag us all under. Instead, we unpacked and made ourselve scarce, anxiously pretending that nothing was amiss. Just as we'd been taught. Just as we always did.

Also as usual, we had no company for the week that my grandfather stayed. Aunt Pearl and Aunt Vi and Miz Clara had readied the house as they always did but they were conspicuously absent. None of the local fishermen dropped off anything from their daily catches to welcome us home. No children visited. The old telephone was silent. It wasn't said outloud, of course, but we all knew the cause of this cold shoulder and knew it would pass. To the village, my mother was a middle aged good time girl, sass-mouthed and affable but with deep roots. She was well liked and popular. My island-born grandmother was respected, adored, and maybe just a little feared. She and my mother fit in. But my grandfather was seen as a contemptuous outsider, loud and boorish, with only his money to recommend him, what I once overheard Miz Hilda refer to as “Alice's unfortunate choice”.

Precisely a week later, Nana drove him to Yarmouth to catch a flight back to the States. The house she came back to was filled with food, friends, warmth and hospitality and it mostly stayed that way the remainder of the summer. Life out of the shadows became good again.

A Long Spell of Gray

After the first few days of the fog, Nana had managed to run a length of clothesline from the back door to the wood shed and convinced us it would be an adventure to fill the woodbox while holding onto the rope with one hand and not be swallowed up.

But after six days of being fog bound, even this was losing its charm and tempers were beginning to fray.

“You got stock in Nova Scotia Power and Light?” my mother snapped at me when I left the sunporch lights on overnight.

“Shut the damned back door!” my grandmother angrily hollered at her, “You weren't raised in no barn!”

And so it went. We'd worn out the dominoes, Monopoly'd ourselves into a stupor, run out of card games, re-read every precious book and written letters to everyone we knew. Nana couldn't face another minute of knitting and in a fit of temper, my mother had ripped out half of her crocheting. Driving was treacherous, we couldn't do wash, and the fog horn was on everyone's last nerve. The pale, gray fog was thick as molasses, wet and dense enough to squeeze like a sponge. It obscured the road, the driveway, the old Lincoln, even the dogs de-materialized after a few steps from the back door. We were a thoroughly unhappy and irritable bunch.

When it still hadn't cleared by the eight day, we were barely speaking and the natives were restless. The tourists had abandoned us for the clear skies of The Valley, there'd been no mail for a week, the fishermen were desperate and the factory was shut down. Only those who lived within walking distance of the church had made the perilous trek for Sunday services and while James had preached, it was only to a dozen or so good souls, some of whom were openly suspect about the fog being a visitation from the devil himself.

“It's a fog bank, for pity's sake,” James railed at them, “The good Lord doesn't send bad weather as a punishment! It will pass!”

“One can't abide such superstition and ignorance,” Miz Hilda remarked to my grandmother later, “It's a fogbank not a Biblical plague!”

It was to be a record breaking sixteen more days before I woke not hearing the fog horn, over three weeks of the precious summer season lost, and it would mean lean times for the whole village that coming fall and winter. Even so, with the return of the sun and blue sky, there was light and warmth and reconciliation. They were things to be grateful for after a long spell of gray.