Something someone said about all the Thanksgiving that her eyes have seen made me think about a couple of holidays.
In the mountains, it was always the tradition to kill a fattened hog after the first hard freeze so people could store the meat cold in their smoke houses.
My Daddy was like Atticus Finch. He didn’t hunt or shoot regularly but when he tossed off his glasses, raised that rifle to his shoulder, he never missed. One shot did it.
There is one Thanksgiving that I remember vividly. I was nine.
Mama sewed me a cute new outfit to wear to my grandparents’ little tin-roofed shack, a tree house my cousins made out in the woods (no girls allowed), and a two-story barn that looked nothing like the little house.
Maw-Maw kept her washer tub with a wringer out on the back porch. It was a big step up from the washboard and creek she had used for years.
My aunts, uncles, and many cousins arrived for the day on this particular Thanksgiving. For months, PawPaw had been fattening up a hog that would feed them through the months to come.
Daddy took his rifle from the car trunk, loaded it, and headed for the backyard. My cousin Susan and I stopped playing with baby dolls long enough to watch. The hog, in a pen near the barn, fell dead with one perfect shot from Daddy.
All day long, they sweated as they “dressed” the hog, using a large butcher knife to cut first the tenderloin and then bacon and ham. In an enormous black cast pot set atop a low-burning fire, they boiled the fat into cracklings for cornbread.
I won’t go into all the details because those of you who are city folks probably wouldn’t enjoy it. From the black pot would also come lard, the fat boiled down to be used in homemade biscuits. Crisco is a lard substitute, but nothing makes a more delicious biscuit than lard. You can find it on the grocery store shelf. But let me warn you: it costs more than Crisco.
As we pranced around with our games and climbed to the barn loft to tell stories, Daddy and Pawpaw worked all day.
Pawpay was in overalls, and Daddy was wearing navy work pants and an old striped dress shirt. The work was hard, and standing over that boiling water was hot, so he stripped down to his tee shirt, even though the temperature hovered around 40 degrees. Mama came out and collected the meat that my grandparents would can or that Mama would put in our freezer back home.
When I grew up, Thanksgiving was very different from those in the Appalachians. One year, I worked the day at USA Today and then had a quiet supper alone. Once, during the two years I lived in Indianapolis, three friends came to visit: Jimmy, his wife Sharon, and Jimmy’s brother.
We laughed, we ate, and then we took their truck out and found a Christmas tree lot. Those two guys dragged that tree up to my second-story apartment, and we laughed happily as we decorated it.
“The way to a friend’s house is never far,” read a magnet that Sharon bought me. I kept it on my fridge for 25 years until I somehow knocked it off and broke it.
I still think about it and the friends who traveled almost nine hours to have a home-cooked Thanksgiving meal with me.
For 28 years, I hosted a big gathering for Thanksgiving, and then COVID-19 struck.
We had the Waffle House truck the following year, which exceeded joy.
This year, it will be just Tink, me, and the dogs, snuggled before a fire.
Our dinner will be meatloaf, my famous mac and cheese, peas, and homemade biscuits.
I will be most thankful for surviving a very sad 2024 because of friends lost.
But, at least, I survived.
Barely.
Ronda Rich did have some good news in 2024. Her new book, Sapelo Island: A Stella Bankwell Mystery, released on October 29, is a bestseller. Thank you to all who made this happen.