The Thanksgiving to Remember (or forget)

"I don't want to alarm y'all, but I'm feeling nauseous."

Words you never want to hear from the person sitting next to you in a packed car going 85 miles per hour down the interstate.

My Thanksgiving takes me to Houston every year to see my extended family. We sit elbow to elbow around the table, eat delicious food, share stories, laugh and enjoy each other's company. For me, this is usually the only time I see my cousins all year. I must do better. 

The next day, Black Friday, we all opt outside. We pile into cars with all the leftovers and head down the road to "the property" in Brenham, Texas for fresh air, more family, and more good times. It's tradition. A full day of snacking and catching up around the bonfire. S'mores and Starburst when the sun goes down. Then it's back to the city.

I rode with Matthew, Abby, Michelle, Baby Lynnie and two dogs. Matthew was behind the wheel. We were picking on him about calling 911 about debris in the road earlier in the day. Michelle and I were in the back seat with the baby. I was holding a tray of dehydrated fruit and nuts. There was not a lot of room.

What is typically an hour and 45 minute drive took a bit longer after those fateful words from Michelle, who, mere seconds after alerting us to the brewing situation, became the latest victim of a brutal stomach bug that had already taken out several members of the family.

Matthew quickly pulled into a random parking lot. Michelle lost her leftovers, declared that she felt much better and we were off again. Each of us felt comfortable enough to laugh about the near miss. We shouldn't have.

"Pull over."

85 miles per hour and five lanes of traffic to cross... it just wasn't quick enough this time. It happened. In the car. We made it to the curb of an exit ramp outside a busy shopping center (again, Black Friday) and Michelle jumped out to finish what had begun. 

Abby and I pulled our shirts up like masks. 

Poor Michelle, who once again announced that she felt much better (like we were believing that again), obviously took the brunt of the situation, along with the dashboard. 

The damage was done. And we now had to handle it. In a parking lot. With not much more than baby wipes and the clothes on our backs. Michelle was a trooper and did the bulk of the cleaning. I'd like to say I helped, but I did not. I cannot handle throw up. Abby and I stood behind the car and giggled at the absurdity of the situation and secretly prayed that neither of us got sick. I make no apologies.

Did we need a little help? Sure. But not police, fire or ambulance. Somewhere in the dash cleaning process, Michelle managed to hit the car's "redial" button which called 911 loud enough for us to hear outside the car. The dispatcher thankfully did not send anyone our way. We had enough of an audience with the shoppers dodging our car, which was now parallel parked outside a restaurant. The show we were putting on was ridiculous.

Abby, Matt and I rallied and came up with enough wipes, stray tissues and a t-shirt or two to clean the car. But there was still the matter of the smell.  Pro tip: if this ever happens to you, just dip into your travel kit of essential oils and sprinkle some peppermint into your air vents.

Then came the question of clothing. Abby took this one for the team, giving Michelle the leggings off her body, and wrapping Matt's puffy coat around her waist like a skirt. Michelle flashed a handful of drivers on the interstate putting on the pants. We had reached rock bottom.

Or so we thought.  Baby Lynnie finally got wise to what was going on around her, and also gave back everything she had eaten in the past ten hours. Poor kid. We blamed the smell.

With two puking passengers and our peppermint oil hack doing the trick, we stuffed ourselves back in the car and finished the final 45 minutes home drama-free. The tray of dehydrated fruit and nuts stayed behind.

Because I was apparently the only one in the car that had not succumbed to this holiday malady, I felt like a ticking time bomb. 48 hours later, I think I'm in the clear. I think I dodged that bullet.

I'm glad everyone seems to be feeling better, and I hope everyone who got the peep show Friday night appreciates the humor of the situation as much as we did.

Heaping helping of THANKS to Michelle for suggesting that this adventure become a blog post! I love you!

Fear Through My Inner Child's Eye

I dream a lot about the back gate in the yard of the house I grew up in. It was wooden, painted white with a black latch that had to be pad locked because it opened onto an alley that ran behind our property. People who didn't live in our neighborhood would use it as a cut-through, kicking over trash cans, throwing rocks over our fence and taunting the dogs. Bored and up to no good, every one of them a threat to our safety. Best to batten down the hatches.

The alley behind the house on Wilkinson Street

On the other side of that door, our back yard was a vast space to a small child. An expanse of red brick pavers with jagged, jutting borders, slick with the black moss that grows under the shade of live oak trees met green grass that was not mowed as often as it should have been.

In the center, a koi pond, de rigueur of the 1980s, overgrown with lily pads just this side of dying. Before the fish were put in my older brother and I would try to swim in the murky water. That was a no-no.

There was also the fort that my brother built alongside my father and grandfather. A 20-foot high bonding project that likely led to more headaches than hours of playtime. I was always afraid to climb up, never trusting the architectural skills of the men in my family.

Because of my trepidation, I was afforded my own sanctuary in the yard: a playhouse with actual electricity. I would spend hours during hot summer days cooking fake foods for imaginary guests, running back and forth to the fresh water spigot at the pond for the water necessary for my feast. A little plug in fan stirred the stagnant air.

But even with the fluorescent light inside that little house and the high walls separating me from the rest of the world, I never dared go outside at night.

After the sun went down every shadow was suspect, a place for the boogie man to hide. Too many dark corners and places for danger to lurk. Behind bushes, up tree houses, around corners, peeking through the lattice that kept raccoons and opossums from creeping under the house.

Often, I dream that I'm in the back yard alone at night and someone is trying to come through the gate. I can hear the wood and metal latch rattling and my fear is palpable. My blood runs cold and I am unable to flee the impending danger, my feet rooted where I stand. I see myself in the body of a child, but my mind is grown, screaming, "run!"

I wake in a sweat.

Sometimes I dream that the gate is not secure and my dog is threatening to run away, which makes me incredibly nervous because she is not a dog that likes other people. They are scared of her breed: half German Shepherd, half Catahoula Cur with a bullet in one paw from her days on the streets. One blue eye, one brown. Genetics. She does not like strangers. Again, with the life experiences of an adult, I am petrified in the knowledge that I am about to face this problem with the uncertain feet of an eight-year-old.

I wake out of breath, panting.

Sometimes I dream that it's nighttime and someone has already come through the gate. My dog is not there to protect me. Once I break free from the panic that has rendered me immobile, my leaden feet can't seem to close the distance between me and the safety of the back porch.

I wake scared, heart pounding.

Each dream is always filled with a nauseating dread. I am uncomfortable. I am not safe. The yard is not safe. Something bad will happen to me here. Someone or something will hurt me.

I never make it to the porch, but when I escape the nightmare, I am acutely aware that the dreams are a mirror of the apprehension I felt about home life as a little girl.

There was so much space outside and inside the walls of our three-story century home. So many creaky floors and dark rooms at night, each with its own cobwebs clinging to the past. There was too much to break, too many things to upset, alarms to trip, toes to step on, sleep to disturb, loud noises to muffle. So many ghosts hiding.

The downstairs hall, side door (left) and entry hall (right)

From an early age, grown-up problems were mine to solve, and secrets were meant to be guarded with lies. What happened in our home was no one else's business, and it was a sin to even hint.

I used to worry that some bandit would break into our home, that someone would breach the walls and invade our space. I was afraid they would do it through the French doors downstairs, or maybe the glass-paneled kitchen door that wouldn't stay closed unless the deadbolt was engaged. Or maybe the creeper would climb up the twisting old oak tree to the ledge below the attic windows and smash his way inside. I was sure no one would hear the glass breaking. There seemed to be countless potential points of entry and my imagination found them all insecure.

Every time I have these nightmares, then and now, I wake up unnerved. Disturbed.

There never seemed to be any sanctuary from the pending doom that threatened to make its way into my home once the sun went down. Even in my youth when the world was meant to be exciting, a place to be explored, I was the "old soul" concerned about what was pacing the attic crawl spaces above my head. As the family informer it fell to me to patrol the borders.

I was afraid someone would bust through the gate, smash a window, creep out of the shadows and speak our secrets out loud, exposing us.

A mother struggling with inner demons, a father working night and day to hold us together, a big brother who delighted in big brother torments, typical trials of childhood. And me. The quiet one. Pensive even then.

Little did I know, most people already knew.

Doing The Zoo

There was almost a real zoo in my hometown. In early 1987, city leaders launched a campaign to build one with the slogan "Do The Zoo!" It seemed like a good idea to a ten-year-old: animals, and... animals. I didn't know where the menagerie would come from, but I was okay with putting them all in pens and going to visit them on occasion.

I don't know what else was going on in Shreveport in 1987, but this zoo business was huge. It was going to be big on somebody's ballot, and in Louisiana every year is an election year. There were posters, bumper stickers, and buttons. My entire fourth grade class had green T-shirts with yellow lettering proclaiming we were all in favor of "doing the zoo," as if twenty-something ten-year-olds were going to be the swing votes on the issue. We all wore them on the same day once, a show of solidarity. There was likely a group photo. We were all educated on how great a zoo would be for our local economy. It was a solid platform. We were sold!

The real mystery was how and where I actually acquired that shirt. I have no memory of going home to my parents and explaining to them the fiscal importance of bringing grizzly bears to the sweltering north Louisiana heat and putting them behind bars, though I assume it was my duty to share the message, having been brought to the front lines in the fight, dressed for zoo success.

My parents had taken us to the zoo in San Antonio a few years before the great campaign of 1987. We spend a long time laughing at a baby rhinoceros and later, my brother and I rode an elephant. Beyond that, we were not a "do stuff together" kind of family but I was smart enough to know that "doing the zoo" meant we might have the chance.

By May of 1987, school was out, my wearable propaganda was probably at the bottom of the laundry pile (where it likely had been for weeks), and voters had decided not to do the zoo. And it's a safe bet that I came to my senses about the whole spending time together plan. My brother and I would likely have ended up in a wolf enclosure, our parents so utterly exhausted by our bickering that they would have left us there to either become dinner or assimilate (the latter more likely as my brother and I were often uncivilized children).

No longer behaving like I was raised in a wolf pack, I'm a huge fan of zoos. I especially love when children get to "do the zoo," their eyes wide when they are truly amazed by magnificent creatures and nature's awesomeness. You just know they're not faking those "wow" moments when they come face to face with a giant hippo, only glass standing between them.

And I love the peaceful parts. Wandering through the Memphis Zoo today, there were many of those moments among the crowds, when I focused on the sounds of the singing birds, the gentle nudge of a giraffe reaching for the lettuce in my hand, the slippery skin of a stingray as it swims in a circle, and the smells of funnel cake and sugary snow cones.

I wonder if anyone brought up that stuff in 1987.

The Taste of Comfort

Mamaw and me (1980)

The holidays from my childhood were all the autumn colors of yellow, orange, brick red, green and brown. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas smelled like musty boxes from the attic, pine cones that had been doused in some sort of cinnamon oil years earlier, rogue glitter and a little bit of plastic.

The transition between pine needle-filled scarecrows and cotton-stuffed santas always felt epic.

But the taste of the holidays. Oh, how everything tasted!