Home Is Where the Table Is
One summer, eleven years ago now, I visited my husband’s extended family in Pennsylvania. I remember my husband’s younger cousins chasing me with a crawdad they’d found in their uncle’s pond. Little did they known I had grown up scouting Tennessee creeks for such critters and still took pride in the fact I could catch one by pinching its back and pulling it out of the water, its pinchers dripping as it clipped air.
I just laughed and stood still as the crawdad flailed, thoroughly enjoying being teased like family.
That night, after a meal, my husband’s grandma invited me to look through her quilts. There was an entire pile of them full of deep color and triangular pattern. To my surprise, she said, “Pick one out.”
I was engaged to her grandson, and yet I had never expected such a gift. Moreover, I had never grown up with a grandmother, since one had died when my mom was pregnant with me, and the other had died shortly after we moved from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. (At one point, around five years old, I had asked a gray-haired woman visiting her house if she could be my grandma. She accepted, of course, because what else could she say to a beaming child? But I don’t remember seeing her again.)
Two years after I received that quilt, I traveled to Wisconsin to visit my husband’s extended Petersheim family. Singing before family meals, passing hot bowls of food, interacting with cousins as if we shared blood. I had never grown up with cousins, just as I had never grown up with grandparents, because most of mine lived in Pennsylvania. Therefore, the instant rapport and acceptance also felt like a gift.
It is really no wonder my husband and I eventually moved to Wisconsin with our two young daughters to be close to that gift. And though unforeseen circumstances caused us to move home, I will always cherish those two years because of the relationships we deepened while we lived there. My eldest daughter became best friends with her second cousin. Two of my husband’s cousins weekly babysat our girls, and now those cousins have transitioned from little girls themselves into beautiful young women.
Time changes things, and family seems the way we measure change the most.
Nine years have passed since my first hunting season. The table is larger. Each year, more plates are set. Last night, the white farmhouse held thirty-nine, and sixteen of those were under seven years old. Last night, we again sang before the meal, again passed hot bowls of food, again caught up on news and recalled memories (like the time I woke up to cows trying to climb our Jeep).
At ten that night, after we tucked our girls into bed—my daughters’ second cousin sleeping on the floor beside them—I crawled beneath my cousin’s quilt, made by the same hands as the quilt I have at home, and I was flooded with gratitude for the gift of acceptance I have received from this family from the time I changed my last name to theirs.
They loved me when I moved out to Wisconsin, and they loved me even when I left. Family is how we measure change the most, but we also don’t give up on each other when that change inevitably comes. We continue to love and accept with open arms because we know that life’s greatest gift is found in the ones who are gathered around our table.
The ones who, regardless of where we live in the world, make us feel right at home.
Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving memory? Please share! And this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for you, my dear readers.
Be blessed!
Jolina
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Advance praise for my fifth novel, How the Light Gets In!
