Thanksgiving

     Yesterday we went down to the farm where I grew up for an early Thanksgiving dinner with my grandparents and extended family.  Since the dinner was at 2, we did some shopping before heading down.  That was how I came to be squatting in a bathroom stall at PetSmart, rolling Clara's pee-soaked tights down her legs while she chit-chatted with her stuffed animal, Mingo, and the woman in the stall next to us worked out some serious issues with her intestines.  Always pleasant, the vagaries of public restrooms.
     Anyway, we got Clara changed.  I convinced her to let herself be strapped into her car seat by promising we'd see some cows out in the country.
     Simon and Clara have sometimes watched a Youtube video of cows dancing to electronica when she is bored with her toys or getting ready for bed.  Therefore, Clara thinks that all cows dance.  When she saw angus heifers dotting pastures near the highway, she excitedly said, "Dance, tows! Dance!"
     "In real life, cows don't dance," Simon said. "Just in pretend."
     "No.  Dancing tows.  Dancing tows!!"
     "Sweetie, if I could make those cows dance, I would," Simon said.
     I indulged in a brief mental image of Simon playing a fiddle, hoedown-style, next to a herd of holsteins.
     My grandparents are around ninety.  It takes about an hour and a half to get to their house from Boise. They still live at home and my grandma still keeps a tidy house.  They have the same recliners and chairs around the living room that they had while I was growing up twenty-five or thirty years ago.  They also have the same toys in a small cabinet near the inside bathroom.  There is a big schoolhouse with a bell, and little toy children that are actually wooden pegs with their hair painted on.  The wooden children pegs fit in a plastic swingset and merry-go-round.  There is also a pair of monkeys that hug each other with velcro-ed hands.
     When we arrived, Clara made a beeline for the toys, even though we haven't been down for nearly a year and it's unlikely she remembered where they were.  She probably used her crazy child toy-intuition to find them.
     At dinner, we used my grandmother's big red kitchen stool for Clara's chair.  Pulled up to the table, it put her at roughly the same height as everyone around.  She combined my silverware with her own and attempted  a few bites of baked squash with brown sugar crumbles using two heavy, silver spoons and forks.  It was predictably disastrous.
     My mom sat on the other side of her and lavished her with affection.
     "Give Gramma a kiss," I instructed Clara.  She tilted her head slightly towards my mother, as if to say, "Yes, you may bestow a kiss on my cheek."
     Clara ate two bites of a homemade roll with butter and jam and demanded to be helped down from her stool.  Then she emptied my gramma's crochet basket of all its yarn and filled it with toys.  She hauled the toys back and forth, from one side of the room, where the toy schoolhouse and toy cabinet were, to the other side of the room, where I was positioned to place forkfuls of pumpkin cream cheese roll and ice cream into her mouth.  Such a decadent existence.
     She soon found the piano and the organ and provided an un-melodic, yet merry backdrop for everyone's conversation.  She also discovered the bathroom on the front porch. To the lay person, it's nothing spectacular, but Clara is somewhat of a bathroom connoisseur, having spent so much time in them during these potty-training days.  She liked that the sink was low enough for her to reach the spigot.  She has never yet been able to reach the spigot on any sink.
     When it was time to leave, Clara said, "I don't wannu doe home."
     Though she will probably utter that phrase many times in her life (hopefully she will eventually learn to say "go" instead of "doe"), it was the first time I'd heard her say it.  That was significant to me.  I'd often felt the same way when leaving my gramma's house after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.
     The long chain of generations gathering together is comforting, and I wondered if Clara had sensed that. My family have a knowledge of each other that allows us to pick up old conversations where we left off several months, or even years, ago.  There's a family shorthand.  We say "up on top," to mean the fields that lie on the rimrock hill near my grandparents' house.  We say, "It's all," rather than, "It's all gone."
     It's a simple house. Outside there's a gravel driveway and fields all around.  We had eaten at a long table, where everyone could see each other.  There was singing in four-part harmony: "Great God the Giver" before the meal and "America the Beautiful" afterwards. My mother has an exceptionally beautiful voice, and I saw Clara watching her sing with fascination.
     In such a place, with such company, the things people wear seem rather irrelevant.
     Yet, what I found growing up out there, and what Clara doesn't yet know, is that on the deserty, isolated farm, personal change seems hard to come by.  The struggle for it is almost always externalized, sometimes rather violently.  A big old elm tree along the highway is abruptly chopped down.  A toppling house, having spent decades in various states of disrepair, is finally, suddenly dismantled and the ground underneath leveled and plowed to become part of a neighboring field.  These tangible changes soothe a farmer's inner turmoil.  The farmer has not been taught to change herself.  She has learned that the landscape is the thing to change, the weather the thing to fight.