My oldest memories of Thanksgiving are pseudo-memories, stolen from the dusty home videos that now litter the basement junkroom at my house and ratty packs of photos in our kitchen cabinet. In the earliest of these, Hannah and I are two bonnetted and befrippered babydolls with complacent looks being handed and jostled about by the then-strangers whose faces now hold such dearness and meaning for us: aunts, uncles, older cousins, and most of all the freshfaced woman who beams all her mother pride into the camcorder--and at the man behind it. It's strange for me to think of them then. Of course, it's strange to think of my own foreign little mind then, acquiring a new idea that would inscrutably begin to insinuate itself into the other concepts that were gradually coming into focus: sister, mom, dad, family, smells, lights, color, temperature. A specific blend of all of these: Thanksgiving.
I cherish most the memories of the Thanksgiving family reunions that my dad's side of the family began to hold yearly in Camp Dogwood or Camp Lookout in Georgia. Hannah, Daniel, and I would plan ahead for weeks, making detailed lists of items to bring, packing and repacking, fighting over the best suitcases, and regaling the littler children with stories of the years before. Events like these loomed large in my mind because they were so rare. Cramming eight children into a large van and driving for 12 hours was hardly an experience my haggard parents wished to repeat too often. And, as I recall the year that infant Willem bawled for a marathon three hours through the darkness on the way to Lookout Mountain, I have to commiserate.
Of course, once we arrived all I remember was the rampant fun to be enjoyed. Bunkbeds, fooseball, watching "While You Were Sleeping" and "Much Ado About Nothing," triumphing in multiple games of Boggle, suffering in multiple games of Ping-Pong, preparing and consuming lavish meals, decorating cookies, collecting leaves and berries for the Thanksgiving banquet garnishes, exploring the surrounding woods, bonfires to the choral accompaniment of John Denver and Christmas Carols, prank warfare between the cousins, and talent shows in the chapel. I loved to wander out by myself in the cold, especially at dusk, and tell myself stories...although I felt guilty preferring my own company to the rowdy carousing of my cousins. Half of the enjoyment in those solitary hours was in knowing that steamy fragrance and cheery clamor would greet me the moment I stepped back into the lodge.
Thanksgivings have changed as my generation has grown. We no longer reunite each November. Weddings, which occur at least once a year, have assumed that position. Since attending Covenant, I have not yet celebrated the occasion at home. Although I've never been one to get homesick or depressed, I do feel melancholy as I compare the carefree enjoyment of my childhood to my seasoned appreciation for Thanksgiving now.
It's the heedlessness that I miss most, the assumption of wellbeing. The ability to step out of the toasty lodge into an icy twilight and wander, thinking big thoughts uninterruptedly, free to return when I please to an environment that has remained reassuringly unaltered.
As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored... [Nabakov, Speak, Memory]
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