Thanksgiving adventure in the mid-west

Curiously, even though I flew on the "busiest travel day of the year," I sailed through security and made my way to Thanksgiving with my family in the eastern-mid west. I arrived there at 11PM on Wednesday night and rented a car to drive the 90 minutes from the airport to my family's home. I really miss rural driving. There's nothing like speeding down a ribbon of black road in the dark, surprised by blind turns and the occasional ten-house hamlet-with-a-grain-elevator along the way. A few farms had their Christmas lights up already, and the outlined trees and houses had a welcoming glow.

The weather has been glorious, the kind of farm-land autumnal landscape that I miss while living in the city. The cornfields are a dusty mown golden brown, the long grasses and weeds in the ditches wave their spent seedpods against a brilliant blue sky, and the air smells crisp-- like snow is stepping up to the threshold. Last night was dark and clear and an orange moonslice hung low in a sky dotted with stars. I miss that in the city, too.

Back home in Cleveland there was a big stir in my "inner ring" suburb when a large wild black turkey decided to make its home in a city park founded in the former John D. Rockefeller estate. I saw the turkey once; nearly crashed my car into the one in front of me when I glimpsed the turkey standing on the front lawn of a little ranch house on a busy four-lane boulevard. That sucker was BIG-- friends who saw it in their neighborhood said it was tall enough to stroll down the street and peer into car windows. The neighborhood around the park loved that turkey; a co-worker who lives near the park said she thought someone would shoot a human if they harmed it. Alas, the turkey was hit by a car and its remains were picked up by the city a week before Thanksgiving. There's a moral in there somewhere, but I'll let those of you who read this figure out what it is.

I'm one of those few lucky sorts that wrenched (painfully)through my family trials earlier in my life, so visiting my mid-western clan is (mostly) a pleasure. We're not the football-playing, TV-watching kind of family on Thanksgiving; we just have a good meal and enjoy each other's company, often re-visiting the same stories over and over. Maybe you know what I mean. Lots of sharing memories with my parents and kidding of my niece-lets. My sister and I spend long mornings over coffee hashing over world events and gnashing our teeth about politics.




My sister has adopted a HUGE black DOG (think Black Lab in a Great Dane body), a blind Jack Russell terrier, and a tortoise-shell cat that has staked out its own bedroom by peeing in every corner. The DOG gets its kicks making jail breaks from the house to roam the neighborhood, the Terrier is of the leaping and racing in circles variety, and the cat, well, stays out of the way. I try to sit back and watch the show.

Some days I can't tell if I'm like that wild turkey; hopelessly out of touch with my rural past and making the best of it in the city. Or maybe I'm a city girl nostalgic for my long-ago nest in the wide open spaces. Maybe the turkey's undoing was that it couldn't navigate the boundaries between the two. I can certainly sympathize when I'm staring out my window in the city, peering up through the orange glow of sodium vapor lights for the glimpse of a star in the night sky.