Traveling for Thanksgiving

(There will be, as it turns out, a few embargoed posts over break...)

This is a thing I do now. A thing I do really since I moved away from home to go to college.

I remember those early years - my parents still lived in Ohio and they would drive up to Ann Arbor and get me, and we'd all ride home, usually stopping at a favorite restaurant on the way home (about midway; there was one, as I remember it, in Milan, Ohio). Then later, after they'd moved to Illinois, I took Amtrak - a couple hours to Chicago, a wait in Chicago, and then maybe a bit over an hour to my parents' town.

Then, when I was in grad school in Illinois, I lived with my parents - so I did not need to travel.

Now, of course, I do. A couple years early on, when my brother and sister-in-law were having Thanksgiving at her folks', they drove down here. Logistically then it was easier for them to travel than it was for me: back then, before I learned of the stations in Longview (and later, Mineola), I had to get someone to drive me to the local Greyhound stop, get on Greyhound, get off in Dallas, get a taxi to the Dallas train station, and then get on Amtrak. (It's so much easier driving the 2 and a half or so hours to Mineola). And repeating it in reverse when I come back.

But after my dad's knee surgery in 2006 or so- which did not turn out as he had hoped - traveling got a lot harder for them. So now I do it. This year it's easier than in the past because we get a week off - so I left yesterday and should be getting up there about now.

But yeah. Traveling at Thanksgiving is important to me, I guess. I admit this year with some of the kerfuffles (my mom having cataract surgery, which I really do need to be there to help out after, and my dad still having people coming in in the aftermath of his pneumonia adventure, and now I hear my niece may have some kind of "little virus" and I really hope that maybe my brother and sister-in-law delay traveling a day or at least that she's no longer contagious by the time she gets there...) I thought, "Wouldn't it be nicer not to travel, to just stay home, to get a couple days of sleeping in, maybe make a big batch of soup or something for Thanksgiving and just sit with my feet up and watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' or whatever on the TV while I eat it?" but yeah, I also know there will come a time when there won't be a parental home-base to travel to (my brother and sister in law are twice as far from me, they have a v. small place, and other family often claim the air mattress in the basement....and I am getting too old to camp out in a sleeping bag in someone's house).

So this year I travel.

But I also think of some of the childhood travels. We didn't travel EVERY year, but a few years, when my paternal grandparents (or at least my grandmother) were still living, we went to their house in Coloma, Michigan. They ran a resort there. I just barely remember it. (My grandmother died in 1982 and had been in the hospital for almost a year prior; my grandfather died in 1976). I've tried to locate it on Google Maps without having an actual address for the place; I think maybe I did (based on the presence of a large cylindrical construction that used to serve as a water tower for the property. Of course it is no longer owned by my family; in fact, the sale of it after my grandmother's death, my father's share of that helped fund my college education)

But for several years when I was a kid, we went there. My brother and I slept in the twin beds in my dad's old bedroom; my parents slept in what had been a guest room there. I think one year we stayed in one of the cottages....that may have been the year my uncle and his (then-new) wife came down for the holiday.

Like a lot of childhood memories, they tend to run together. I remember one year driving home to Ohio, there was a huge snowstorm and it was almost a little scary - I think that was one of the years my dad had the van, because we were in the van, which was big and sort of cold (it was a Dodge Tradesman, pretty stripped-down, because he used it for hauling field equipment - it just had the front bucket seats and one bench seat right behind them). I remember that as the year I had my stuffed Tony the Tiger but I don't think it could have been, because I got that around 1973 or so, and I think I only took it with me that first year I had it. And I remember one year my uncle Bill and maybe my Aunt Debbie came down for the holiday....My parents have a framed photo my dad took, of the whole family around the table. My brother is a small child on our mom's lap...I am perhaps 8 and am grinning broadly at the camera with that stupid grin I used to use every time I got my photograph taken. (That was well before the kids at school beat the idea into my head that I was a funny-looking kid or perhaps a little ugly. At 8, I didn't care. Didn't care if I was cute or pretty or whatever it was little girls were supposed to be then....)

Then again, my uncle is grinning at the camera in a very similar way, and I remember my dad having the same grin...so maybe it's not so terrible.

I have a smaller, later photo, when it was just my immediate family there - it's the one photo of my paternal grandmother I have in my posession. I am looking off to the side - I am perhaps 10 in the photo - I don't know what drew my attention. (It's possible that year another relative was down, my dad was taking the photo of just the immediate family, and Uncle Bill or whoever it was said something that got my attention right before the shutter clicked). There are two more places at the table than people sitting there (my dad was taking the photo) so it's possible that other place was Uncle Bill....I know one year he surprised us showing up without the big hippie beard he used to have and when my dad commented on it he laughed and said "Oh, I got mange from the dog" and I thought he was serious... (Which is probably why I remember it, 40 or more years later)

The house was small, the kitchen was even smaller. My grandmother smoked (but tried hard to refrain when we were there because she knew my dad and also my Uncle Bill disapproved). Some years the weather was bad enough we were all stuck indoors and I remember playing interminable games of Hangman with Uncle Bill. One year my mother taught me to knit and I knitted a scarf for my Kermit the Frog doll.

After my grandmother died, a couple of years we went to my Uncle Tom's house. It wasn't as far, which was nice, but it wasn't quite the same, and it was one of those "bring sleeping bags and sleep on the den floor" things and....that's just not as fun. And my brother and I were getting older and I found that kind of camping out where you didn't really sleep to be less fun. At some point, we started just staying home for the holiday, and then not too long after that, I was off to college...

And now these days, I travel. It's far, it's long, the house is crowded and sometimes I wind up having to do things in ways I'd rather not, but....it's also important and I know I'll miss it when I can't do it any more.