We each carry Thanksgiving memories, from earliest childhood to the first years as a young adult, far from family, to the years of building unique traditions of our own.
When I was young, we spent Thanksgiving with our parents’ closest family friends, Matt and Shirley Banks. Because they were dairy farmers, too, our entire daily schedules meshed the best. I remember Dad saying we just couldn’t go share a meal with family that didn’t start until 2 or 3 o’clock. So, noon it was, and my sisters and I loved going to Matt and Shirley’s, whose four children matched up closely in age with me and my three sisters.
Their house, a big brick home with a stained glass window on the main stair landing, was so fun to explore. It seemed enormous to me, and we rarely sat still. We loved the back “hidden” stairway just off of the kitchen, and it made a great spot during the inevitable rounds of hide and seek.
There was an old player piano that captivated me, though I lacked the ability to pump it well enough to play all those rolls of magical dots that created music. Just last week, I told Shirley that piano was better than magic to me, a kid taking piano lessons, grudgingly, and hating to practice. I tried to conjure up a way to have our annual piano recitals held in their home. All I needed to do was work on my leg strength, and I’d be all set.
While the adults worked on pulling the big meal together, our focus as kids was planning out a day of fun. Milking time was 4 o’clock, so we had to devise our schedule accordingly.
If the weather was mild, my sisters and the three Banks boys liked to explore outdoors. The big house captivated me too much, and luck was on my side. Kathy, just one year older than me and the only girl, decided we needed to organize a club, so my sister Debi, next in age to me, paid our dues and we held our meeting — where else, but on the secret stairway.
Kathy had way cooler toys than we did. A Chatty Cathy led the lineup, followed by a make-it-yourself creepy crawlers set. Sixty years have passed by, but I can still recall the unique smell of the gooey mixture that we placed in molds to create spiders and bugs of all shapes and colors.
After the Thanksgiving meal, then play time, followed by desserts, it seemed in no time flat my parents rounded us all up to head out because milking time was nearing. If all went well, and there weren’t newly freshened heifers or big challenges, we would return after the milking was done, our parents to play cards together as we all enjoyed leftovers from the big noon meal.
On the drive home, all was quiet as the good food and fun made us sleepy. I spent that time wisely, willing my brain to figure out a way to make that player piano bend to my will. With the power of magic, maybe I could trade our own boring piano that operated only with human fingers for the other-worldly one that played complicated melodies, the keys pressing up and down the entire length of the keyboard with no fingers anywhere near it.
