It's the day after Thanksgiving and life is good.

Ahhh, Thanksgiving has once again come and gone, the leftovers are in the fridge, and all is well here at the little house on the lake. And of course the day was filled with memories of Thanksgivings past but also of those yet to come.

The woman of my life cooked the turkey yesterday in a "stand alone" roaster, I am sure it has a name but I don't know it. All I know is my grandmother, Nana, had one as well, although somewhat older, and every Thanksgiving Day she would cook the turkey in it. Her house would be filled with the smell of turkey and turnips. The other 364 days if the year it always smelled like apple pie, Nana made a mean apple pie.

And of course back in those days we would have to get dressed in our Sunday best, some of us in suits and some of us in dresses (I'll let you guess who was in what), and pile into the "beach" wagon. When we were kids my father always bought station wagons. The one I remember best was the '65 Mercury, sky blue and white, two tone with a rear seat which faced to the rear. This is where my sister and I would sit. Wherever we went we rode backwards, never knowing where we were going but always knowing where we had been. It's still like that now actually. Well, that's not exactly true, I know where I would like to go, just not sure how i will get there.


We would head to her house for dinner and most times there were some of the cousins and Aunts and Uncles there. There would be football games in the field in the back (there were none on television in those days). All was good in the world. Of course we were kids and I am sure there were troubles. In fact I remember when the Cuban Missile crisis happened. It was a school day in October, when I was in the first grade. It was about 11 AM when everything stopped at school and we were all herded down to the gym and put on school buses and brought home. We weren't told why (we didn't take the bus to school, we walked so this was unusual). I remember when I got home, my mother was strangely nervous, but being five years old, I didn't know what it was other than she just wasn't the same. The adults all thought this was the end. We as kids never knew how close we came.

Where was I? After dinner and dessert was done, we would sit around and visit. The adult males would fall asleep and the women would do the dishes, no dishwasher at Nana's. We kids would hang around and play games and then when the Dad's woke up we would pile into the beach wagon and head over the river and through the woods to home.


Yesterday Tonya cooked her half of the dinner using some wonderful recipes she found in Taste of Home Magazine and we headed over to my son's house. We had a wonderful dinner with his wife, my granddaughter, his father-in-law and him. we ate too much and fell asleep, and all was good with the world. And when Tonya and I got home I thought how thankful I am for everything I have. We don't have alot of material things, Tonya and I, but we have each other. And the dog. And the cat. And our kids and grandkids. Life truly is good.