The Kids Table They Sat Me At

Let me tell you about the forty years first, because you cannot understand what happened at that table unless you understand what that house used to be.

Tom and I bought the farmhouse on Marsh Road in the fall of 1983 for twenty-nine thousand dollars and a handshake with a man named Elmer Doss, who threw in the chest freezer because, he said, a family that size would need it. We were not wrong about the family. We raised two children in that house, Daniel and his older sister Rachel, who lives out in Colorado now with her own crowd and could not make the drive this year, which is the whole reason Thanksgiving had moved into town to Danny’s new place to begin with.

For forty years, Thanksgiving was mine.

I do not say that to brag. I say it because it is simply true, the way it is true that the Cedar River floods the bottom field every April. Every fourth Thursday in November, the Ellison house on Marsh Road filled up with people. I started the pies on Tuesday. I got up at four on Thursday to put the bird in, a twenty-two pound turkey from Hartley’s locker in town, and by the time the sun came up over the Vander Pol place across the road, the whole house smelled like sage and butter and woodsmoke.

I had a system. The good china came down from the top shelf, the set with the little wheat pattern that was Tom’s mother’s, and I washed every piece by hand the night before even though it was already clean, because that was part of it. I made the place cards at the kitchen table with a felt pen, and I let whichever grandchild was underfoot that year help me set them out, and I always, always put the children at the big table with the grownups, because Tom used to say a family that splits the kids off to eat alone has forgotten what the whole thing is for.

We said grace holding hands all the way around, and Tom said it, every year, the same words, and when he got to the part about those who could not be with us he would squeeze my hand twice, once for his mother and once for mine, and I would squeeze back.

That was Thanksgiving. For forty years.

Then Tom’s heart stopped on a Tuesday in January while he was out splitting kindling by the shed, and he was gone before the ambulance even turned off the county road, and nothing was ever the same again, and I will not pretend to you that it was.

The first Thanksgiving without him, I tried. God help me, I tried. I got up at four. I put the bird in. And somewhere around the time the sun came up I sat down at my own kitchen table and could not get back up, and Danny found me there when he came by at ten with the kids, still in my robe, the turkey not even seasoned, crying into a dish towel like the house had fallen down around me. Which, in a way, it had.