Source: marthastewart.com via Jessica on Pinterest

My turkey bowl. It’s made of white milk glass—a Martha Stewart creation. It’s shaped as a turkey. The head comes off and in goes the homemade cranberry sauce.

I bought it when times were good. I had a home I loved, and a family I nurtured. Keeping house and family was my passion, and my job.

Every November first, I pulled the turkey bowl from the pantry and placed it in the middle of our dining room table. There it sat until Thanksgiving.

This November first, it did not make it to the table. In fact, I completely forgot about it until I saw it in the pantry. I then picked it up and wrapped it in paper.

In a couple of weeks we are moving—again. I pack my turkey not knowing where it will be next year. Will it be in a California storage unit while I’m (still) in the basement of my father’s home? Will it grace a new table in a new house next year? Will it sit on our old table in an old house? Or maybe I’ll never see it again. 

Why all the uncertainty, you might be asking? It seems to be my new normal. It’s a side effect of leaving comfort zones and going after dreams, and watching those dreams become nightmares. I’ve experienced things in the past years, since leaving that house I loved, I never thought I would. I didn’t experience other things I thought for sure I would. I’ve been uprooted more times than this homebody thought she could ever stand.

All this to tell me I know nothing about the future.

What I do know is what my small, glass turkey has come to mean—home. Family. Sustenance. Better days. A Thanksgiving meal around the table during a time where there is enough inner space and outer comfort to put whole cranberries in a copper pot, and watch them boil into homemade cranberry sauce. A time when I not only remember to take the turkey bowl from hiding—out of the pantry and onto my table, but enjoy feeling its solid, glass body in my hands, dusting it off and placing it where it belongs.

Will I experience this moment again? As I ask this I hear these words from Andy Dufresne in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption: “Whatever mistakes I made, I paid for and than some. That hotel and that boat—I don’t think that it’s too much to ask.”

I don’t think unwrapping my bowl in a new home within a new life—my family surrounding me next Thanksgiving is too much to ask. And as Andy says to his friend, Red, in a letter: “Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things—and no good thing ever dies.”

I hope. 

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families.  

~

Ed: Brianna B.

 

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