Thanksgiving is a Spiritual holiday

Many people think of Thanksgiving as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. However, for me Thanksgiving is a spiritual holiday. The older I get the more I realize this. The more tests I encounter in my life, the more I realize this.

This year, Thanksgiving is especially stressful. This Thanksgiving I am especially thankful. The doctory diagnosed my mother with Alzheimer's last Friday. She began taking a new medication on Monday (the pharmacy was out of the tablets when the doctor faxed prescription on Friday). It takes four to six weeks for the medication to show an effect.

Mom is still capable of taking care of herself under most conditions. I do have to remind her about certain things. I have to help her find items that she "lost" because she can't remember where she put them.

Mom enjoys going out, so tomorrow we will go out. I think we'll do laundry or perhaps just drive around. I don't know for sure what we will do yet, but we will do something that Mom enjoys. I know one thing I am going to do, that is ask Mom to recount her memories about my grandparents and growing up on a farm. I have a chance to write down some of her memories and I'm going to write them down.

Writing Memories: Just an ordinary pair of shoes

Daily writing practice prompt for Sunday, June 21, 2009 is “Write about a pair of shoes.”

They were just an ordinary old pair of shoes my grandfather's clodhoppers. However, for me at the age of five or six, they were magical. They were my grandfather's work shoes and he wore them five days a week. He put them on each weekday morning and took them off eight hours later when he got off work.

Grandpa Newland worked at a zinc smelter in Blackwell, Oklahoma. Every morning he would get up, make a pot of coffee, get ready for work, and eat breakfast. Grandma always packed him a lunch and put it in a metal lunch box. Every morning Grandpa would put on his clodhoppers and go to work.

Every afternoon he would come home and remove his clodhoppers. He placed them just inside the kitchen door and put on another pair of shoes, which he wore around the house. Grandpa only had three pairs of shoes. He had a Sunday pair of shoes, which he wore to church and on other social occasions. He had the clodhoppers, which he wore to work, and the pair he wore around the house.

Morning is Laundry Time

Morning is time to do laundry for the day. I can remember my grandmother doing laundry once a week; her laundry day was on Thursday, Friday or Saturday. The day of the week she did laundry depended on what the weekend plans. If the following weekend was a three-day weekend, like Labor Day, then she did laundry on Thursday. That way she had the dirty cloths washed, dried and put away before we left for "The Lake" on Friday evening.

If grandpa planned an ordinary weekend trip to "The Lake", she did laundry or as she called it "The Washing" on Friday. If there were no weekend plans then Saturday was laundry day. The interesting thing is that grandma did laundry once a week for six or seven people. There are only two people in my household and we do laundry every day.

I have written several laundry rants, so I am not going to do that this morning. This morning I am attempting to brainstorm concerning memories of my grandmother doing laundry. I am going to write about laundry day memories. I have several poems about my grandparents and I thought it would be nice to put them all in a chapbook and give copies to my brothers and sister. A chapbook of family poems and memories would make a good gift birthday or anniversary gift.

Anyway, I have several poems about grandma and grandpa, but not enough to make up a chapbook. I need to write a few more, so I thought something about laundry day. I could also ask my sibling and my mother what memories they have concerning my grandparents and include them. The good thing about being a writer is that you do not have to spend a lot of money on gifts for family when you have pleasant memories that you can put down on paper.