... Thanksgiving from when I was a little kid. Actually there are two: one about my dad, and the other about growing up in a small town in south Georgia, with grandparents nearby. Recently at work, one day this week, I was telling someone about my dad saying the 'sandwich was his favorite part'. Which is sort of strange when most people who gather with family, pot luck dishes, traditional holiday fare do not include anything even remotely resembling sandwiches. There will be a turkey in all it's basted and glazed glory, cornbread dressing topped with gravy, various vegetable side-dishes like green beans, broccoli souffle, rich and creamy casseroles with the slightest bit of veg included, mashed potatoes or rice that will cause you to need to nap afterward. But nowhere in that menu is 'sandwich'.
The thing he liked best about the event (other than anticipation) was having a big enough turkey to provide plenty of leftover slices of meat for the following day. He would have a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich (bread toasted, please, with home-made mayonnaise) and add a slice or two of turkey to the stack. That right there was his most enjoyable part of the holiday. Usually not actually on the holiday, but constructed and consumed the day after or the day after that, however long the roasted turkey would last before it was turned into soup.
When I was very young, my parents built a house they lived in until my dad died. But as newlyweds with two small children money was understandably tight, and they were not able to buy as much land as they would have liked. The purchased enough to construct a house, and moved in, establishing themselves on the property they could afford. As time went by and they were able to save, they added more real estate, buying the other half of the lot ajacent to the one the house was sitting on. On that now enlarges space, there were a number of trees: pines, sweet gum and some half dozen pecan trees that were part of an orchard planted years before.
For many years, when I was young enough to be in the single digits, I recall my grandpa coming to our house on Thanksgiving day and helping my dad cut down a tree. Most of the trees they cut down were large sweet gums, often described by woodsmen as 'trash trees'. Worthless as timber, that have no value when land is logged over for pulp wood and trees are trailered to a plant to be used to make paper, or sent to sawmills for turning in to lumber for construction.
The interesting part is that this was so long ago, that it took two men to cut a tree down. In this present era of modern conveniences, cleverly designed machines with electric starting systems, it is difficult to realize how trees would be harvested forty or fifty years ago. Long before the gas engine was adapted to be used in sawing: creating chain saws that would cut through massive trunks in a matter of minutes. Not only was it an all day project, he would be digging, chopping with an axe and struggling to uproot that tenacious stump for days afterward, plugging away.
When he was finally to the point that he could stop shoveling dirt out of the hole, after getting the obstinate stump removed, and hauled away, there was always too much dirt left over. There would be a pile of dirt for months, sitting there on the site of the missing tree, mounded up even without the stump there taking up space. How could that be? That the dirt had mysteriously expanded so that there was excess even though he had finally manhandled and uprooted that stump? Did it have to do with the phase of the moon, and digging at the wrong time? Was someone sneaking in dirt to add to that pile his children had delighted in all that time, relishing their ow personal mini-mountain of mud pies? It eventually settled, leveling out, to be turned into lawn or covered with straw for flowerbeds. But even now, it baffles me that they could take that huge stump out of the hole, and still have too much dirt for backfill...
No comments:
Post a Comment