A stuffed T-Day

I'm happy to report that the family survived another Thanksgiving. This year, we set out to the booming metropolis of Nordheim to spend the holiday at my paternal grandmother's. To the best of my recollection, I hadn't been there in 20 years, although there's a slight possibility I visited once while I was in college. Memories fade over time, I've learned. But once we reached the old farm house (the roads and terrain had changed over the years, but the old farm hadn't) lots of memories came flooding back. I got to see aunts and uncles again, not to mention my cousins, all of whom I'd seen rarely over the years until a family gathering at Fuddruckers in Katy last month. After eating entirely too much turkey and assorted foods, I took the girls to explore the brown, mesquite-and-cactus filled pastures. They chased cows. They got tractor rides. They tried to catch cats in the hay barn, just like I did decades ago. Aside from a missing tree here and a rebuilt workshop there, things really hadn't changed much at all. And Calista and Keela got to visit with both of their great-grandmothers:



They're really lucky, in that their great-grandmothers are in good enough health to get to know them. Counting Wanda Baugh, my birth-grandmother, they've got three great-grandmothers they've gotten to know well. When I was a child, my only surviving great-grandmother was Bruncie Majefski, on my mother's side. But she was sick and frail, and the fact that we visited her so often in the hospital or rest home scared me. I never got to know her. But the girls, they think it's great having all these extended grandparents.



Afterwards, on the way home, we stopped off at the Yorktown city park, which is wonderfully, delightfully and gloriously behind the times. All across Texas, from Columbus to Temple to New Braunfels, public playgrounds are scarred with eroded rings where generations of children's feet pounded circles in the ground while playing on merry-go-rounds. But these days, all the merry-go-rounds have been removed. "Too dangerous" is what they say. "Liability," they say. Saints preserve us from those who would bubble-wrap our children and stick them in a padded room for their own good. But in good old Yorktown, this enlightened 21st century thinking hasn't taken root. The parks has not one merry-go-round, but three. Not only that, but it has an honset-to-goodness jungle gym that's about 12 feet high. And if that wasn't enough, feast your eyes on this bit of wonder:



No, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you--it's a manually-operated ferris wheel! It's around 60 years old or so, because my mother rode on it when she was a child--she remembers long lines of kids waiting their turn on Saturday afternoons. It was packed away in storage for a long time, but when I was 10 or so--around 1980 maybe--it was refurbished and returned to the park, and I remember riding on it as a kid with my brothers. And speaking of my brothers, Chris isn't as light as he used to be:



Once we finished defying death and personal injury lawsuits at the park, we made one more stop, and my other grandmother's farm outside of Cuero, to feed her cows and donkeys, and to check up on my sister's horse. There's an Osage orange tree right outside our subdivision in New Braunfels, and we had gathered a bunch of the fallen horse apples for the family equine. Some horses supposedly turn their noses up at the odd green fruit, but that wasn't the case this time:



Even the donkeys wanted in on the action, helping themselves to some of the smaller ones that rolled off to the side. The citrus-melon scent of the fruit filled the air. My stomach started grumbling--it'd been almost five hours since lunch. I looked at the horse apples and though, "What the heck?"



Yum. Them's good eating!

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