This week the Lilburn Wallaces will gather around our dining room table for a feast of turkey, dressing and all the fixins.
I have committed to enjoying this day fully because I don’t know if 2023 will be the last time we enjoy our Thanksgiving this way. Traditions have a way of ending unintentionally or before you even know it.
My parents’ Thanksgiving tradition changed in 1991, during my senior year of college. I was in Washington, D.C., working a journalism internship and could not get home to Lake Wales, Fla., for the Thanksgiving holiday. I’m sure they were not thinking about Thanksgiving 1990 as the last one with all of their boys around the table. I did make it home a few more times after that, but it was not a guarantee.
When Carla and I married in 1997, we celebrated Thanksgiving with her extended family. We feasted together in Sandersville at her parents’ home, at her Aunt Edna’s and Uncle Steve’s in East Dublin and at her cousins’ homes in Sandersville with both Amy and Emily hosting the family on different years.
Loading up the boys and heading “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house” was literally our Thanksgiving tradition. In 2011 that tradition was unexpectedly interrupted by my mother-in-law’s stay in the hospital in Augusta. We ended up having our Thanksgiving meal at the Cracker Barrel on I-20 at the Madison exit. That was not a tradition I wanted to repeat, and I’m sure Cynthia didn’t either.
Our world was completely upended in 2013 when my father-in-law, Lanny, passed away on Thanksgiving. He had been severely injured in a car accident on Nov. 1 of that year and had been in the ICU and then long-term acute care for four weeks before he died. There was nothing remotely traditional about that year, and our Thanksgiving has not been the same since.
My parents joined us along with Carla’s mom in 2015, and we have been hosting the feast ever since.
But this year feels momentous to me. I sense change coming. With Barron scheduled to graduate from UGA in May and Harris now off at Mercer and already planning study abroad experiences, internships and jobs, it feels like this year could be it for a while.
My parents won’t be joining us because of my dad’s recent heart procedure, so it will be just Carla and me, the boys and Cynthia, like it has been the last few years.
Hosting means meal preparation, which is a ton of work, but I enjoy being Carlton’s sous chef while he directs the making of apple, pumpkin and pecan pies. Carla’s mom makes the cornbread dressing and giblet gravy because no one can do that as well as she does. Carla does everything else, including the turkey when she won’t let me break out the smoker.
Is it too meta to say I’m thankful for Thanksgiving? Having family around the table makes me keenly aware of how good my life is, and even when circumstances conspire to rob us of joy on occasion, overall, our family life grounds me in gratitude.
So this year I won’t let the thought that it might be our last with all the boys around the table intrude on our celebration. I will savor what we have. Besides, who is to say future family celebrations will be worse? They will just be different. And they may even be better if our table expands to include new faces.
If we’ve learned anything from the 10 years since losing Lanny, it’s that happiness will return even if it has to coexist with grief. Our boys help bring the happiness.
May you have the blessings of loved ones at your table this Thanksgiving.
New South Essays 