It’s Not Your Turkey

The only color in the landscape that even approaches vivid is the dark emerald of the evergreens on the hillside. Gone are the bright yellows and ready rusts of fall, replaced by muddy browns that fill the spaces between the trail where I stand and the rising ridge in the distance, giving the landscape a somber feeling. Walking on the dirt path, we are surprised to hear the strained garble of sandhill cranes. We see their immense forms fly overhead and then land in a field a half mile away. 

The birds are magnificent, like flying dinosaurs. According to Colorado Outdoors magazine they are about as close as it gets because they are one of the oldest bird species, with a fossil record going back about 9 million years. The article’s author John Livingston writes that the Rocky Mountain dwelling cranes live in the mountains in the summer and migrate south each fall, some all the way to Mexico. During this migration, Colorado hosts three historic staging areas where the once-endangered cranes can be seen in groups of more than 20,000, but none of these is close to where we are today. About 30 miles northeast, though, is a large reservoir that is a popular crane stopover on their migration route. Livingston adds that, for the last dozen years or so, a small group of cranes have been discovered wintering in the nearby Escalante Wildlife Area instead of flying south to historic winter ranges. I wonder which birds we are seeing today. 

We have the time for a walk before Thanksgiving dinner because I am not cooking the turkey this year, which I have done in part or in whole for the last 14 years. When my in-laws moved to Colorado, we started having Thanksgiving at their house. In the early years when the kids were little, the traditional meal was a joint effort, and we soon fell into our roles. I made the pies and, since I get up early and have the favorite recipe, I also made the stuffing. When my father-in-law was alive, he cooked the turkey that I stuffed, but since his death three years ago, I have been fully in charge of the bird. I love this job as the turkey is the cornerstone of the meal. It cooks the stuffing with added richness, creates the drippings for the gravy, and makes the house smell like Thanksgiving.  

A few weeks before Thanksgiving Day–then and now–we go through a ritual of talking it out as if it will be new, even though the meal is simple and the recipes mostly unchanged from year to year. When the day arrives, it unfolds in the same unplanned way every year. My mother-in-law, a New Englander and a parade lover, turns on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. There is a puzzle underway on the card table, Black Friday flyers and a deck of cards on the table, pets that need to be fed and walked. Everyone gets up when they get up and we eat when the food is done. 

When I first found out that my mother-in-law’s boyfriend was cooking the turkey this year it threw me. But I checked myself because our family is changing. Both my mother-in-law and daughter now have boyfriends, and my other daughter is a vegetarian. The patterns that have held for years are giving way to new dynamics. In truth, I am ready for the chapter that is coming as my children near the end of their teens. Maybe I even embrace it. At the same time, I catch myself gripping tightly to some of these traditions, maybe seeking something steady to hold until there is a new equilibrium.

I look down at the small flock of cranes on the field and think about the first rebels who decided not to fly south with the other birds, the ones who broke from ancient migration patterns and just stayed where they were, risking the unknown. Such a brave act of civil disobedience within the larger society. What fear they must have felt that first year as they faced mortal consequences for breaking with what was known. 

Just before Thanksgiving, I was at a friend’s house for dinner when she asked if I had heard about the movement to revisit Thanksgiving. I had not specifically, but it’s not like I didn’t see that coming. Even as a kid, who learned the old school version of the first Thanksgiving—the Native Americans shared their food to keep the newly immigrated pilgrims from starving–and then shortly after learned how we destroyed those same people and took their land, I could see that Thanksgiving had sown within it the seeds of its own demise. 

As often happens when we try to whitewash the past, eventually the whole story comes out and the silenced voices are heard. While we eat a feast based on the food shared with the pilgrims, other Americans honor a National Day of Mourning, fasting from sundown on Wednesday to sundown on Thursday, to remember the genocide of their ancestors, a dark lineage that grew out of that common ancestral meal. Can those be combined, I wonder? At the same meal could we both honor what the Native Americans did for my European ancestors and remember what those immigrants, in turn, did to them? Could we change the way we celebrate that holiday by fasting to recognize the loss and pain and then feasting to celebrate our shared occupancy of this land? As I age, I find that I am increasingly comfortable with holding two things at once that dim each other’s light. Just as this year I miss cooking the turkey with my father-in-law and mourn his loss, I am also happy my mother-in-law has someone to spend time with and isn’t alone so much. 

I don’t know if my nation can create a new and improved Thanksgiving that honors both grief and gratitude, but for my family, the meal stands apart from its history. We are not the people who go around the table and say what we are thankful for or pray before our meal. If everything comes out cooked and somewhat hot at the same time, we are thankful for that, and we sit down and simply eat. We are, however, the people who spend days together watching hockey games, playing cards, doing puzzles, taking walks, and enjoying the companionship so much that it is hard to leave when the time comes. 

I am also lucky that my family doesn’t infuse Thanksgiving with stress—of a picture perfect meal, of pretending we are who we are not, of avoiding topics of conversation—which is why it is one of my favorite holidays. For us, it is only about being with each other, sharing food and enjoying a pause in the perpetual forward motion of modern life.  

I realize that I am the one adding stress this year, though, because I have gotten used to my role cooking the turkey and taken ownership of something that was not mine and never important. While I feel sad that things are not like they used to be, there is another voice inside that offers wisdom to me: change is part of life, like it or not, so why not embrace it? Each person at our table has experienced change in recent years, wanted and unwanted, and yet here we are, smiling and happy as we are comforted by the pleasure of being together, sharing food, taking a walk, seeing the cranes. Maybe our new normals will lead to something better like it did for those members of the flock who, more than a decade ago, found they could survive a winter without flying hundreds of miles.

The day after Thanksgiving, we walk the same path again. The golden hue of sunset bathes the brown field in a warm, buttery light, but there is no sign of the cranes today. They have moved on. A flock of geese flies overhead in a perfect V heading south, same as it ever was, unless one group decides, “You know, it’s not as cold as it used to be. Maybe this year we will stay.”