Views of Thanksgiving

My granddaughter gave me a hand drawn picture as I dashed off to work. It was one viewpoint of our Thanksgiving weekend: our house surrounded by overpowering bushes, a smiling sun beside a curly cloud blesses the worried looking, striped cat perched on the roof. From our two cats’ viewpoint, it was a good thing the sun was shining – they spent a lot of time on the roof and in the trees out of the reach of the visiting chow-mix called Sunny.
Sunny is a friendly dog who is great with kids but views cats as her mortal enemy. From Sunny’s viewpoint it was a frustrating weekend of restrictions as we tried to protect the cats and to keep her from barking “cat alert” every time she saw them.
Our pine straw littered yard, thrilled my daughter-in-love. New Orleans gardeners pay big bucks for a bag of pine straw to mulch their plants. From her viewpoint our yard was not messy, it was covered with a gold. She spent her spare moments gathering up as much as their car top carrier could hold.
Aprons and baking dictated the weekend for the five-year-old and many of the adults. She and her brother stirred and kneaded bread Friday morning. He likes cooking, but he especially likes my toys. He was so excited about coming to play with them – he could barely stand it. I did everything I could to maintain that image including presenting him, his dad and uncle with a Big Loader track to assemble and animate. We overheard someone say, “this is really neat.” I don’t think it was the three-year-old.
Once the bread was in the oven, I gathered up my stuff to go into town. The three were busy assembling the Big Loader Before I left, I asked the guys working on the Big Loader to turn off the oven in 20 minutes. 50 minutes later, the smell of burning bread broke into their play time.
Two blackened loaves of bread sat waiting on the counter when I returned. My husband asked, “are you going to use a cheese grater to scrape off the black like they suggested in the Tightwad Gazette?” I hadn’t thought about it, but it was a good excuse to try out the tip and I really wanted some homemade bread. A few minutes and a heap of black crumbs later, I had two smaller loaves of bread with golden, scratched sides – they made scrumptious turkey sandwiches.
The toddler simply saw a lot of things that she wanted to do – all by herself. Saturday afternoon, I assembled flour, salt and water to make cookie cutter shaped decorations for the Christmas tree. She wanted to ‘woll’ and cut the dough just like her big sister. She grabbed the cookie cutter and jammed it down on the dough and the edge of her big sister’s finger in her eagerness to stamp out a heart shape. The next morning when the decorations were ready to be painted, she squeezed a pile of puff paint on a floury stocking. Before she could empty the tube, we handed her a paint brush and showed her how to smooth it out. She grabbed the brush, pushed our hands away saying, “I do it” and brushed it herself.
From our country folks’ viewpoint, the city folks amused us with their excitement over pine straw and their fascination and then disenchantment with a miniature horse farm. We visited the farm Friday afternoon. As a farmer’s daughter, I dismissed the smells which accompany any animal farm and followed the grade-school daughter in her rubber boots between the plops of manure in the pasture to the dog-sized horses who nuzzled our pockets for treats. Miniature people find even miniature horses a bit overwhelming.
Sunday afternoon, tired and stuffed with holiday goodies, they loaded up. Sunny proudly perched in the co-pilot’s seat defying the cats who watched her from the top of a nearby tree. The cats began purring the moment my son opened the door and shooed Sunny to the back of the van. After they left, the cats came down and reclaimed their house. From their viewpoint, the best part of the weekend was the meoment the van loaded with pine straw, grandchildren and one dog faded out of sight.