Harvest

November and November memories. That is what the harvest brings.

For me this means thoughts of Kansas, of cousins, of candy corns and love.

When I was growing up we went to Kansas for the harvest. My grandparents were farmers. They grew wheat. They had cows and chickens. And a big family.

We would gather on the farm every November, children spilling from every room. The men would sit in the living room talking politics with their deep voices. The women populated the kitchen and dining room, preparing all of the food. The children ran from one room to another chasing each other or hiding from each other, out through the plant-filled sun room, through the sliding back door into the yard and around the house only to come running back in through the front door.

Sometimes a few of us would go for long walks around the property. We climbed on hay bales and fed stray cats and hunted for animal bones in the trees that lined the edges of the street. We'd touch the electric fence. We'd get chased by the mean rooster. We'd beg the older cousins to entertain us.

 After it got dark, we'd play Kick The Can out under the moonlight with all of our dads. Once all our energy was spent, the boys would go to sleep in the attic and the girls would bed down on the dining room floor, being lulled into dreamland by the deep voiced hum of our fathers talking in the adjacent room. The next night we'd switch and us girls would have the pleasure of sleeping in the attic. 

On Thanksgiving day we'd all drive out to the neighboring town, to the big church that could house our large family event. My grandmother had 10 living children. She had 22 grandchildren, some of whom had children of their own. Second cousins would come to eat with us. Great Aunts and people "once-removed" who we'd never met before or had met so infrequently we didn't remember them well. It felt like a whole rural town had come to eat together, except one way or another we were all related.

The men would gather at the tables, continuing their political discussions. The women would gather in the kitchen to continue making the food. And the children...we'd run through the church, exploring all of the secret passageways, all the hidden corners. And we'd eat. And eat. And eat.

Those "secret" passageways are some of my fondest memories now, though I suspect they were not nearly as secret as we felt they were. Still, playing in that church made us feel as though we'd stumbled into a real life Clue mansion.

**

These days we have Thanksgiving alone. Just my small family of four. We make our vegetarian meal and give thanks around our small table, enjoy our food off of the nice dishes, the ones I only get out at this time of year. It's a quiet event. We buy pie from the store because I'm so bad at making pie crust and it always makes me cry. Somehow the crust is all wrapped up in my memories of my grandmother.

Sometimes I feel sad for my children that they have such a small family and live so far away from extended family, that they don't get to experience the comforting chaos of gathering a small town's worth of family members together in one space, even though I know my children probably wouldn't enjoy such a thing anyway. Instead, I make them listen to me go over the names of my father's brothers and sisters, the names of their children and their children's children. It gets harder every year, the more babies that are born and the less I know them all. We laugh about how hard it is for me to remember everyone and then I tease that there will be a test later. But I don't actually expect them to remember even just the original 10 siblings' names. My children have met so few of them. Even my husband never met them all. And none of them ever got to meet my grandmother.

We eat our meal quietly and aside from the food it almost feels like any other day. But I still hear the whispers of the men's deep voices, the clanking of the women's cooking, and the cousins excitement deep in the recesses of my mind. I can still smell my grandmother and remember the way she made everyone feel like the most important person in the world. And I know that even if we can't see her, she's here with us anyway, gathering all our hearts together even when we are apart.