Holidays are always a special time for our family. The Thanksgiving of 1967 was a four-day holiday. For the first time my dad, mom, my sister, Christy, and I went as a family to my grandparents’ farm outside of Kiowa, Oklahoma.
We drove up on Thanksgiving Day to enjoy the traditional feast at sundown. My grandparents had moved from an upper-middle class home to a tiny house built in the 1890s. The entire dwelling was four rooms with no AC. The only heat was a wood stove.
As we gathered around the kitchen table the warmth from the wood stove offset the cold wind blowing and shaking the windows. This experience was new to us. The table had four chairs; Christy and I sat on two chairs in the other room. Mom and Dad slept on a bed in the front room, Grandmother had the sofa, Grandfather was on a cot, Christy and I were in sleeping bags on the floor. An alarm went off at 3 a.m.; Grandmother got up to
put more wood in the stove. The dawn brought more cold wind, more wood into the stove, and Grandmother’s homemade biscuits.
My grandfather told us the history of the farm as we ate. These acres were originally part of the Chickasaw nation long before Oklahoma became a state. Grandmother’s family had settled here as part of the civilized tribes of the Indian Nation. Her brother, James, and his family had lived here until the dust bowl of the Depression. They had moved to California 35 years ago. The house and the farm had not been occupied all of these years. Grandmother commented, “Yes, George, they can see that.”
Our day was a tour of the farm down to the pecan orchard. My great grandfather had planted 12 trees over 80 years before. The trees were magnificent towering up to shade the borders of the bottom pasture. Our task was to gather both the falling nuts and knock down more from the trees. We built a fire out of fallen branches. Then the work began. There were hundreds and hundreds of pecans. My grandfather’s method to knock down more nuts was to use a 12-gauge shotgun.
After a lunch of sandwiches around the fire, we loaded up big burlap bags of pecans for the bumpy ride through Buck Creek back to the house. With more wood in the stove, the evening was one of story after story of my grandparents’ past. If we had been at their old home in Texas, the television would have captured our attention. Instead, we travelled back in time as my grandmother explained living in a tipi out on the prairie.
How my grandfather saw his first self-propelled vehicle in 1903 when he was 5 years
old, a steam driven tractor. It was a magical night.
The next day we sawed, chopped and split wood for hours. I broke an axe handle that sent the axe head flying close enough to Dad to make him duck! It takes a lot of wood to heat a house for the winter.
That night we learned how my grandparents played basketball in college. My grandmother showed us her arm and leg scars from being pushed into chicken wire.
The wire was used as temporary court boundaries for women’s basketball. Games were rough and tough. We learned how they met when Grandfather’s brother, Uncle Taylor, was Grandmother’s basketball coach. That holiday was so different than any Christy and I had ever experienced. It sparked not only a closeness with our
grandparents, but also an interest in learning more about our family.
Seated around the wood stove feeling the delicious warmth, listening to the blowing wind rattle the windows, and watching my grandparents’ animated faces as they stepped back into time is a memory that has lasted 55 years.
By the way, as we sat and listened, my grandmother had us cracking pecans and picking out the meat. The smell of pecans always brings the memory of that night rushing back. Even though it turned out I was allergic to pecans, that made me Grandmother’s favorite…because I would not eat her pecans!
