On a Clear Night

by Marnie O. Mamminga

  Nevertheless, my mother carried on with her usual optimistic fortitude. She salt-and-peppered a roast and stuck it in the oven, rolled out the dough for her homemade rolls, and filled the Santa punch bowl with eggnog dashed with nutmeg. At least we knew that our stockings hung by the small, flickering fire would be filled by morning with oranges and hard candy.

  And so we settled in for a night of nothing. Each of us retreated to a quiet corner of the house, nursing our dashed hopes for the presents we had longed for and worrying about what we would tell our friends when they asked what we got for Christmas.

  A short while later, my father called us from our personal reveries back to the living room.

  “Nancy, Marnie, David, Tommy, and Mary, please come here,” he said quietly.

  As we filed in, we saw on the dining room table a single, small present waiting for each of us.

  My father handed them to us one by one, and we eagerly opened our gifts. I believe my brothers received silver pocket watches that had been our grandfather’s, but I’m not sure because, as a self-absorbed teenager, I was focused only on what my one present could be.

  Slowly, I opened the clumsily wrapped box. Framed against soft cotton lay a pin of two carved ivory roses on a golden stem. My sisters and mother had varying versions: one pin with three roses, one rose necklace, and one huge single rose, which we think was meant for my mother but, due to my father’s drunkenness, was given to my little sister by mistake.

  “Merry Christmas,” my father said simply.

  When I looked up, I could see the failure in his sad, green eyes.

  “I wish it could be more,” he added. “But that’s all I can do.”

  We thanked him with hugs and kisses. Although my pin wasn’t what a selfish teenage girl coveted, I could sense my father’s genuine sorrow.

  For what could be worse than coming home nearly empty-handed on Christmas Eve to a wife and five expectant children? Surely, his misery was great, enough so that a stop at the local tavern provided the numbness he needed to face us.

  Reflecting back on that Christmas Eve so long ago, I find that my experience as a parent has altered my perspective. Through the prism of time, I look up once again into my father’s gentle eyes and see something else besides the sadness. It is his hope for forgiveness.

  In these simple gifts of white roses, a flower he always loved, he longed for us to see beyond his failure, his alcoholism, his despair. Somewhere behind all the frustrated ugliness was a father full of kindness, humor, patience, and, yes, wisdom. If only we all could believe it, perhaps he could, too.

  Despite our various ages at the time, between six and sixteen, I think all five of us children sensed and felt this. It is not a Christmas Eve held in darkness, but rather one of enlightening love.

  And so I wear my Christmas rose pin not only on that eve of starlit expectation, but throughout the year as a symbol of the strength and courage it takes to overcome personal struggles. It reminds me to seek the hope, find the goodness, and look beyond the despair of those who are troubled.

  It was my father’s most precious gift to me.

  Giving Thanks

  It all starts with the cranberry sauce.

  Bubbling and popping on the stove, the round berries shoot tiny splatters of ruby fireworks, announcing with their sweet scent that it’s Thanksgiving Eve. They are the kickoff to Turkey Day, igniting an excitement for the fine food, family, and fellowship that are to follow.

  The cranberry sauce tradition began with my father, who used to stand in the kitchen with a pack of Lucky Strikes on the counter and a cigarette in hand, stirring his cranberry concoction into the late hours of the night. We five children drifted off to sleep with its bittersweet fragrance filling the air, accompanied by the clanking sound of dishes being washed, and awoke to the smoky smell of turkey in the oven.

  The role of the cranberry chef landed in my lap twenty-four years ago on a snowy Christmas Eve as I cooled a sick baby with a 104-degree temperature in a tepid bath and shouted downstairs to my sister-in-law to start mashing the potatoes.

  Later, as I waited for the doctor to call back, I stirred the gravy with one arm and rocked my fretful son with the other. Suddenly, I announced that I wasn’t hosting Christmas anymore. I said I’d take Thanksgiving, which seemed less stressful than trying to cook, wrap presents, and prepare for Santa’s arrival with excited (or sick) little ones waiting in the wings.

  My angelic sister-in-law rose to the occasion and magnanimously offered to take over the hosting duties for Christmas. And so, twenty-four years later, I have a fine collection of pilgrims, turkeys, and corn decorations, and she has a myriad of pine-patterned plates and Santa Clauses. We are set for life.

  Over the years our family has developed a host of Thanksgiving traditions that would be harder to change than the position of the North Star.

  My brother always brings his original recipe for stuffed mushrooms, our mother’s famous appetizer loaf that we call Cheese Whiz, and our grandmother’s 1920s recipe for creamed onions. My brother-in-law arrives carrying homemade pecan, pumpkin, and cherry pies with fluted crusts still warm from the oven. An adopted “uncle” bustles in with his signature sweet potatoes swimming in an ocean of brown sugar and butter. These men can cook.

  Each year, I serve the pièce de résistance: my mother’s overnight yeast-rising dinner rolls. With all the time, energy, and flying flour involved, they are an act of love. Throw in the stuffed turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and a vegetable (for appearances), and we are as content as a family of partridges in a pear tree.

  Our Thanksgiving feast begins as we join hands in prayer around the table and say in turn what we are especially grateful for this year. Sometimes the blessings are simple, as when my then ten-year-old son gave sincere thanks for pumpkin pie. Sometimes they are emotional thanks for good health or the joy of having a new bride at our table. Always they are poignant and from the heart.

  After dinner and dishes, my husband starts playing Christmas carols on the piano, which is our cue to gather in the living room, grab a song sheet, and kick off the season with carols.

  Our show-stopping favorite is “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” where we all vie to sing one of the days as a solo (or duet, depending on voice confidence). For years, my brother-in-law laid claim to the fifth day of Christmas and the five golden rings, which he dished up in a variety of melodious interpretations on each round, sending us into peals of laughter and applause. Lately, however, he has bowed out of this role and younger voices are testing it out.

  Our Thanksgiving Day activities are so traditional they run like a script.

  “It’s always the same,” one of my three sons laughingly said last year. “Nothing ever changes.”

  “Oh, but it will,” I answered with a smile. “And then one day you’ll say ‘Remember when . . .’ ”

  For our sons are starting to marry and other families and places will beckon. Old traditions will fade away, some may stay, and new ones will surely be added. It is all good.

  Twenty-nine years ago, my father was battling acute leukemia. In anticipation of another round of chemotherapy treatments in a Chicago hospital, he prepared his cranberry sauce a week ahead of time, simmering it on the stove until it was just the right thickness and then freezing it with the hope that he would join us for the festivities.

  When Thanksgiving Day arrived with its sunny promise of bringing everyone together, my father decided his treatment wasn’t progressing quickly enough for his “escape” from the hospital. So, unbeknownst to his nurses, he took matters into his own hands and sped things up by making the chemo drip faster. Back home, we gladly held off on our feast, hour by hour, as we eagerly waited for news of his release.

  It wasn’t until the golden-red glow of a prairie sunset filled the little living room of our first home that he and my mother, who had driven the hour into Chicago and the hour back to pick him up, finally arrived. Pale and weak, he walked through our front do
or with the biggest grin on his face and the cranberry sauce in hand. No gift could have been finer.

  Gathering around the table in the soft glow of candlelight, we held hands as I read an ancient Native American prayer that ends with these lines:

  All is more beautiful,

  All is more beautiful,

  And life is thankfulness.

  These guests of mine

  Make my house grand.

  We all sensed that it would be my father’s last Thanksgiving, and it was. In that moment of tender grace, there seemed no better prayer.

  My Father’s Thanksgiving Eve Cranberry Sauce

  5 cups fresh cranberries

  1 cup sugar

  1 cup water

  Mix all ingredients together in a saucepan and bring to a slow boil over low heat. Continue to simmer for one and a half or two hours, stirring occasionally as needed until sauce has thickened to desired consistency. Sprinkle with a dash of cinnamon or nutmeg. Savor the scents. Cool and place in refrigerator overnight. Serve with turkey and all the trimmings the next day. Enjoy!

  Swinging along the Open Road

  I’m the driver. My eighty-year-old mother sits in the passenger seat of her aging compact car. The trunk is crammed, and the back seat is piled high with assorted bags, boxes, and luggage for an extended summer stay in Wisconsin’s Northwoods.

  This is the first time in the sixty-two years that my mother has been going up to our family’s 1929 log cabin that she has asked for assistance with the 450-mile drive from Illinois. She has already driven the equivalent distance from Ohio by herself to get to this point.

  “It’s the beginning of a new era,” she says as we pull out of my driveway into the early morning sunlight.

  She should know. She has lived through a lot of eras in the years she has spent on our cabin’s lovely wooded hilltop.

  There was the courting era with my father, when his family asked my mother and her parents and sister to spend a month with them on the lake in the summer of 1938. There was their era as newlyweds, when my father and mother drove up with another couple in the fall of 1946 after my father’s return from World War II, seeking the beauty and peacefulness of the forest.

  There was the era of the children, all five of us growing up in raucous splendor on the water’s edge. This was followed by the era of grown children and learning to live alone as a widow. Finally, the era of laughing, romping grandchildren arrived. Now they too are grown, and that era has come to an end as well.

  As we begin our day’s journey, my mother turns to me with her ever-optimistic approach to change and says, “The one thing about a long car ride is it gives you a chance for a good visit.”

  And so that is exactly what we do. Over the course of our eight-hour drive, we discuss family, friends, health, and the lake adventures we’ll share upon arrival.

  Of course, there was no time for a good visit when my mother drove the five of us kids Up North. Because my father often had to work, she was the sole driver. Packed in a 1959 station wagon with a canoe strapped on top and the back end piled to the roof with luggage, we rode three to the second seat, three to the front. Hot wind blew through the rolled-down windows and across our sweaty faces.

  We made frequent roadside stops, either to use the old enamel car potty or to accommodate a carsick sibling who had to upchuck. When it was time to stop for gas, it took ten minutes for us to find and unscramble the shoes and socks we had kicked off. We were always hungry, so our mother appeased us with green grapes and chunks of cheddar cheese. And, of course, with five kids on such a long car ride, we fought.

  “Stop leaning on me!”

  “You smell!”

  “Who stole my gum?”

  A whiff of Juicy Fruit breath would soon divulge the culprit.

  To combat these periods of crabbiness, my mother demanded we sing. It is not easy to get five feisty kids to burst into song, and yet she insisted.

  So, sing we did. Old hymns, scout songs, campfire favorites, whatever each of us knew. “Swinging along the Open Road” was a scout song I loved and one that we sang often. When we descended into the epic hilarity of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” or “Found a Peanut, Found a Peanut . . . ,” my mother commanded a halt and moved us on to the license plate game.

  Inevitably on our Northwoods journey, car trouble struck. Sooner or later the engine overheated or the sudden rumble of a wobbly wheel signaled a flat tire. Once again, we would pull over into the waving wildflowers of the roadside.

  In order for the engine to be examined or the spare tire to be retrieved, the canoe had to be taken off the top of the car and the entire luggage unpacked from the backseat. This took quite a while as my father always tied masterful, complicated scout knots to keep the canoe from sliding off, and somehow the five of us kids always managed to stuff enough junk into the back end that the roadside eventually looked like a spontaneous garage sale.

  Help came in a variety of forms. Sometimes a farmer in the fields ambled over and helped change a tire. Occasionally, patrons of a quirky, nearby Northwoods bar took a look under the hood as we waited inside the tavern, intrigued by the mingled scents of smoke and beer. Once, a dear friend drove one hundred miles round trip in the middle of the night to fetch us.

  A few times, the trouble was severe enough that we had to spend the night in the nearest lodging. This usually turned out to be a rundown motel where the bathroom was down the hall and the bedbugs were holding a convention.

  Yet my tireless mother remained undaunted throughout this odyssey. When we finally arrived at the cabin, it was often past midnight. She still had the job of unpacking and making beds. Although we older kids could help, the overall responsibility was hers. Some would never have attempted this road trip alone, yet she seemed to thrive on the adventure of it all.

  And so, on this sunny summer morning, another era begins. We are reversing roles. My mother and I assume our new roles without complaint. I am the official “cab driver,” happy to have the opportunity to provide a lift. She is the passenger, a little more tired, a little less steady on her feet, accepting the ride with grace. She looks on the bright side. It is a new adventure.

  As she predicted, we do have a good visit. We eat green grapes and cheddar cheese. We do not have car trouble. We sing.

  Dancing with Vera

  The woods and water beckon. Even though the two ladies are in their late eighties, summer in Wisconsin’s Northwoods calls to them like the Siren songs of ancient mythology.

  The urge to go is strong. And so we do.

  I am their chauffeur.

  One of them is my mother, Woody, who has traveled to this same northern lake for over sixty-eight years. The other is her dear friend, Vera, who has made the identical journey for fifty-eight years. Rarely has either missed a summer.

  The two women met as newly married brides in the early days of World War II and have been friends ever since—their lives intertwined by business, church, children, and, of course, the lake.

  Now both are widowed and, due to various physical ailments, including failing eyesight, they are no longer able to make the nearly 450-mile trip alone. When I made a spontaneous offer to be the designated driver, as I’d been for my mother several summers earlier, they gratefully accepted.

  We’re taking off on an early midsummer morning in the midst of a downpour. As I load the car with my mother’s walker, thunder and lightning boom and flash around us.

  “It only adds to our adventure!” says Vera, who still plays golf and frequently whistles a merry tune.

  My ladies are happy, happy. They chatter the entire eight hours that it takes to get us Up North. There is much reminiscing, especially since both families now have fifth generations coming up to the lake this summer.

  They remember when the cabins were lit only by kerosene lamps; the wooden fishing boats ran on three-and-a-half horsepower motors; the drive took two days on gravel roads; and skunks, porcupines, and bears were common sigh
tings.

  But mostly they remember the traditions, funny moments, and special times shared with many friends and family members over six decades on the lake.

  “Do you want to stay on the interstate or take the old way?” I ask.

  “Oh, the old way!” exclaims Vera. “It’s much more woodsy and beautiful.”

  I turn off the interstate onto a two-lane highway that weaves through familiar rural towns, fields studded with rolls of harvested golden wheat, faded red barns, and cheery gardens. Woody and Vera gaze out the window, savoring every mile as the trees multiply to become forests and flashes of bright blue lakes sparkle in welcome.

  As we near my family’s log cabin in the woods, an almost palpable sense of anticipation fills the car. The winding curves of the road and the leafy green tunnels of the arching trees begin to take on a heartwarming familiarity. Even though my mother’s eyesight is greatly diminished, she recognizes that we are almost there.

  “Isn’t this exciting, Vera?” she asks.

  “I’m just taking in all the old sights,” Vera replies with a sigh.

  Finally, we’re there. Woody and Vera are giddy as we open the door to each little room of the cabin and finally enter the cherished porch overlooking the lake. And then the fun begins.

  There is no sitting around in rocking chairs for these ladies. Word soon spreads around the lake that returning royalty has arrived, and they’re off, a pair of social butterflies with me along for the ride.

  If you have never ridden to a Friday night fish fry with five octogenarians in a 1987 Oldsmobile station wagon, you’ve missed a joyride that could rival any teenagers’. The laughter and chatter never stop.

  And that’s just the start. No effort is too great. Woody and Vera snatch up every opportunity afforded them.

  They make it down the many steps to the dock, attend the little white church in the vale, picnic on the patio, organize an afternoon bridge game, and dine on scrumptious grilled salmon at a dear friend’s cabin, all in one day.