Celebrating Thanksgiving Away From Family

This year, we celebrated a quiet Thanksgiving by ourselves. We had a nice dinner with turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, homemade cranberry sauce, baby peas (Larry’s favorites), croissants, and Aunt Muriel’s Pumpkin Chiffon Pie for dessert. (More about this later.)

 

We spoke on the phone with Larry’s brother, Casey, and the rest of his family. We usually celebrate Thanksgiving with them. (Christmas is usually at our house.) They had more people than we were comfortable with, but we enjoyed talking to them. Kim was with friends in Texas, and our niece, Carrie, was with her immediate family in Utah.

 

This was far from the first Thanksgiving we have spent away from the rest of our family.

 

In 1969, we moved across the country to Illinois. Larry had to go for work, so we packed up and traveled there. We were both very close to our families, and this move felt traumatic.

 

In retrospect, it probably strengthened our marriage far more than anything else we have ever experienced. We had to learn to depend on each other. We were all we had.

 

We also learned to be flexible. This did not come naturally to me, but this experience and others along the way taught me great lessons.

 

We made good friends, Carol and Bob Wilson, while we were there. This couple had a three-year-old girl, Denise. Kim was two. They became friends and playmates.

 

For Thanksgiving that year, Carol’s parents invited us to their house for dinner. (They did the same for Christmas.) Even though we missed our own families, these dear people made us feel as though we were a part of their family. And we were most grateful for them.

 

In 1971, we spent Thanksgiving by ourselves in Colorado, where we were living at the time. Larry’s job necessitated several moves. But we knew we would be back in California for Christmas, and we were looking forward to it.

 

In 1980, we took a Caribbean cruise over Thanksgiving week. Another friend, Betty, and her son, Bob were with us.

Thanksgiving dinner on the ship was an extravaganza with lots of food. We all dressed up for the occasion.

 

Of course, we spent three Thanksgivings in Japan.

 

The first year, 1998, I tried to make dinner to share with our neighbors, Misayo-san and her daughter, Kazue. It was only a partial success. I wrote about it in our book, 31 Months in Japan: The Building of a Theme Park.

I couldn’t get the ingredients for Auntie Wanda’s Pumpkin Pie, so I settled on a variation of Aunt Muriel’s Pumpkin Chiffon Pie (the same pie I made this year). Both recipes are in the cookbook from Oak Tree Press authors: Recipes by the Book: Oak Tree Authors Cook. (This is the link to the full-color version shown below. It is also available in Kindle and black-and-white interior versions.)

By the following year, I planned well ahead and made Auntie Wanda’s recipe. The same for the next year. I even baked a few for Kazue’s students’ Christmas party. They loved it.

 

Of course, we would rather gather with the whole family to celebrate, but this was another year when we needed to be by ourselves. Fortunately, we still like each other after all these years.

 

How was your Thanksgiving different this year? 

WHEN OUR BELIEFS ARE CHALLENGED

Today, my friend and fellow author, Janet Greger (J.L. Greger), will share with you some of the challenges of being a novelist. Sometimes our expectations for the characters or the plot don’t go as we plan. And sometimes our own expectations take an unexpected turn.  Lorna

 

In my latest novel Dirty Holy Water, I wanted to explore what happens when our basic beliefs are challenged. Specifically, what happens when we feel sorrier for villains than victims?

 Let me set the scene. Life is complicated for Sara Almquist. She's about to become engaged and leave for a vacation in India with her boyfriend when she becomes a suspect in the murder of a friend. Sara is used to being a trusted scientific consultant for the FBI and finds being a suspect unnerving, but not enough to prevent her from trying to help the police uncover evidence about the murder. The police and Sara quickly realize that the murder victim, Lurleen Jansen, was killed by a member of her own family. But which one and why?

 Read this excerpt from the first chapter and see if you can guess reasons why a family member killed Lurleen?

 Lurleen Jansen must have been a pretty woman once. Now Sara Almquist could see little attractive about Lurleen, except her expressive green eyes. Lurleen had called Monday and almost demanded that Sara drive her to El Santuario de Chimayó this week. Sara had hesitated but finally agreed to the field trip because Lurleen needed a friend.

 Although Sara had pushed the front passenger seat of her Subaru Forester back to the maximum, Lurleen looked like she was a piece of pimento stuffed in a green olive. Her face was red as she tried to close the clamp shut on the seat belt that strained around her green camouflage cargo pants and T-shirt. “Should have brought my seat belt extender along. Too much work to walk back inside for it.”

 Sara felt a twinge of guilt. She considered volunteering to get the seat belt extender but knew she wouldn’t. Lurleen had been her neighbor in the adults-only community of La Bendita until Lurleen and her husband Pete decided about five years ago that the two- and three-bedroom houses of the gated neighborhood were too small to meet their needs. It wasn’t jealousy that kept Sara from looking for the seat belt extender in Lurleen’s large house. Her reasons were simpler—she knew it would be difficult to locate something small, like a seat belt extender, among the stack of boxes and piles of junk in the house. She was also afraid what she might find. Lurleen didn’t waste time cleaning her house and only hired someone to clean it when a new infestation problem appeared. Some sort of pest, usually bigger than ants, appeared every year.

 Lurleen appeared to hold her breath and clicked the seat belt shut. “Pete’s being tight with me.” She smiled. “But I’ll get what I want.”

 Before Sara could make a catty comment, such as you must have asked for the moon this time, Lurleen changed the subject. “Thanks for agreeing to take me to Chimayó to get some holy dirt for Matt. He’s talking less these days.”

 Sara gave a soft sigh because Lurleen had reminded her why they were making this trip. Lurleen’s daughter Mitzi had become a foster parent for a one-year-old girl named Kayla almost twelve years ago. About that time, Kayla’s biological parents had another child, Matt. He was born addicted to cocaine and quickly displayed developmental delays. The New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department, better known as CYFD, had decided the two children must be kept together, and Mitzi had reluctantly agreed to become Matt’s foster care mother, too. When she was five, Kayla had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Eventually Mitzi had adopted both children. Lurleen had been supportive of Mitzi and her two adopted children during the long adoption process.

 Sara admired both women because it took guts to adopt special needs children. Although Sara doubted the holy dirt dispensed from a small pit at El Santuario de Chimayó had curative properties, she recognized faith was sometimes effective in helping patients. 

Buy Dirty Holy Water (paperback or ebook) at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0960028587   

 

The Kirkus Review for Dirty Holy Water is: "A thought-provoking, disturbing, and engaging mystery with a likable, strong-willed female lead."

The author incorporated her experiences in India into the novel

 

J.L. Greger is a biology professor and research administrator from the University of Wisconsin-Madison turned novelist. She has consulted on scientific issues worldwide and loves to travel. Thus, she likes to include both science and her travel experiences in her thriller/mystery novels in the Science Traveler series. Award-winning books in the series include: Murder: A Way to Lose Weight, The Flu Is Coming, Malignancy, Riddled with Clues, and A Pound of Flesh, Sorta. Learn more at: http://www.jlgreger.com

Learning to Let Go

Learning to Let Go

As I get older, I am more and more conscious of the “stuff” we’ve accumulated over the last fifty-five years we’ve been married. We’ve lived in this house for thirty-three-plus years. It’s a big house with lots of storage and a three-car garage. But someday, we may want to downsize. What will we do with everything?

Every time I get serious about purging, however, we seem to acquire more.

My brother’s recent death added a few more items. I have made a concerted effort to give away most of his things to people who will appreciate it.

I have kept a few family items, and they have been added to our stash.

The main item I kept was this tapestry.

Originally, it belonged to my grandparents. After my grandmother died, my brother took it home. It hung at the end of Grandma’s hallway for as long as I can remember. They moved into their house in 1928, and it may have been there since then. It is a really nice painting on heavy burlap of Mission San Juan Capistrano.

When we unearthed it at his place, it was so embedded with dust I wasn’t sure it could be salvaged. However, Larry brushed it off and then vacuumed it. We hung it out for several weeks, and it now looks like the piece I remember as a child. When I look at it, it makes me smile.

We talked to the mission about donating it to them. However, they already have a similar one and didn’t need another.

We’ve decided to keep it. It may become the cover image for our third San Juan historical. (We first have to finish the second one and then write the third.)

It took moving things around so we had enough room for it on our walls, but I’m glad we decided to keep it.

We also brought home the oil painting which had belonged to my mother. When Larry brought it out, it had a thick layer of dust and dirt. We couldn’t even make out the details.

Again, Larry brushed it off and vacuumed it. It still looked pretty terrible. Fortunately, our friend, Bob Schwenck, is a restoration specialist. He took the painting, cleaned it, and re-varnished it. The colors are back, and it looks the way I remember it.

Bob wanted me to keep it, but if I’d wanted it, I would have kept it when my mother moved in with us. My brother had it because I didn’t want it. This was easy to let go of. We will auction it and share the net profit with Bob.

So, we now have more “stuff” in our house. SIGH.

This year, I have lost many friends as well as my brother. I have become uncomfortably aware of my own mortality. Having had to empty my brother’s home, I am hyper aware of everything we have accumulated and how that burden will fall on our daughter when we are gone.

Yep. Time to start thinning our “stuff” down. Oh, but first, there are edits to finish and books to write…

Are you able to keep your “stuff” to a minimum? If so, how?