The morning is grim, rainy and dark, but it is warm, 55˚. Nothing is moving in the stillness of the air. The rain will be with us all day. Already the wet leaves are matted to the ground and cover the deck. They stick to dog paws. I’m not venturing today. I’ll stay cozy and dry at home.

What was most exciting about Thanksgiving week was we only had two and a half days of school. We got out on Wednesday around 10:30. I remember doing no school work on Wednesday; instead, we made Thanksgiving cards or we colored turkeys. My favorite part to color was the feathers on the tail. I was a creative genius in the second grade. I remember using a couple of colors on the tail to soften the brown. Red was one of them. I added green grass at the bottom of the page. I remember clumps which looked like blades of grass. The cards always had a turkey on the front. Inside, the Happy Thanksgiving often slanted down the page. I couldn’t fit the whole message across. My mother always loved the cards and gushed compliments. The cards went on the table. They were works of art too beautiful for the fridge art museum. .

The morning is grim, rainy and dark, but it is warm, 55˚. Nothing is moving in the stillness of the air. The rain will be with us all day. Already the wet leaves are matted to the ground and cover the deck. They stick to dog paws. I’m not venturing today. I’ll stay cozy and dry at home.

When I was a kid, my mother made all the preparations for Thanksgiving. She shopped and bought gigantic turkeys which lasted for days. First was Thanksgiving dinner in the afternoon then a repeat that night. For our Friday dinner, we had open turkey sandwiches covered in gravy with stuffing and cranberry sauce on the side. I used to make my favorite sandwich: toasted bread, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and a dollop of mayo. My mother used to put butter on her turkey sandwiches. When the turkey was nearly bare, my father took over. He stripped the turkey of almost all the meat, and my mother made turkey salad. The swan song, so to speak, of the turkey was soup. The bone and the rest of the meat went into the stock pot to boil. Meanwhile my mother chopped carrots, onions and celery. After the carcass was removed and ceremoniously put into the trash, my mother added the vegetables then finally the noodles. My father loved turkey soup. His mother made it with rice, but he was perfectly happy with the noodles. I never got tired of the turkey. It had so many different transformations, all of them wonderfully tasty.