Crystal-Clear

“Use the crystal goblets, Lois.” My mother called out from the kitchen.

“I know, from your wedding. I like them.” I didn’t quite understand since our family relatives, weekly, saw a beautifully set table, but a holiday meal was made different by the amethyst stemware. My mother prepared and cooked for hours. Did aunts and uncles notice?

“Lois, would you like to use the linen napkins you recently embroidered?” Wiping her hands on her homemade linen dishtowel, she stood at the entrance to the dining room.

I was so proud of the sewing and handwork skills my mother was teaching me I sent her brothers written wartime V-mails telling them about such.

I quickly took the stairs to my room to bring down the napkins with cross-stitching; I’d a matching tablecloth but not dining table size.

My dad, on his way downstairs, kissed my head and we both smiled. I’d overheard him telling my mom that the gas rationing card was going to be enough to get some family back to The Bronx from our Flushing house, and to get Grandpa to Brooklyn but the 1941 Buick wouldn’t be able to then be used until the next allotment. The family was important.

My embroidered napkins looked wonderful. I went into the kitchen and was handed a bowl of green beans to remove strings. A huge uncooked turkey was ready to have my mother clean everything out of it, use tweezers to pluck off feathers. Almost every Sunday meal took half a day to prepare but Thanksgiving was extra-long as she pulled Mason jars of her home-canning fruits, cooked-then-mashed yams, and saved prized ration coupons for sweets to get some marshmallows to dot the hot yam casserole. As tedious as it was, my mother always made it seem easy, effortless.  I noticed.

When everyone would mention what each is thankful for, I wouldn’t be embarrassed to say my white leather ice skates; I’d strung bells through the laces. Best thing about 1944, for me! Of course, my uncles are alive in Belgium, Japan, and places like that, and they’d sent me actual picture-postcards and not V-mail. But I didn’t understand war or even people not being alive, so I daydream while others speak of their thanks.

Clean-up might last much of the night because after dinner my mother played her 1939 Baby Grand piano, and we all sang. Then my dad would make the car trip to The Bronx and to Brooklyn and get in very, very late. After I was in bed, I’d call out to my older sister, “Gobble Gobble,” and giggle; my mother washed/dried piles of dishes, and, whenever my dad got back, the short-wave radio in the living room was turned on with news of the war.      

I decided next year the dining room cloth would be one hand-embroidered by me, and I’d use amethyst-color thread!  

Ten years later, there was the Korean War but the World one had been over, and my uncles were home, I was in college, my younger sister turned age 16, older sister married, but my 45-year-old father was lying in a cemetery on Long Island.

Thanksgiving. A gas stove didn’t need a match to light, television was in its babyhood and fascinated. (Dishwashers for households didn’t really come about until the 1970s, and many were portable.) the speed limit on the Southern State Parkway was 35 mph. My mother kept pain and suffering to herself for the 32 years she lived alone and, by choice, never dated another man. 

Thanksgiving, for a while longer, she still had relatives come, trying to keep a sense of sameness in her daughters’ lives, and I no longer was thankful for tangible items like my 1944 ice skates but understood that life is precious, health can’t be taken for granted, and loved ones are more important than friends who move in and out of our lives. 

I’m still thankful in 2024 that my mother quietly showed me that family is special and to use the ‘good China and such’ on them; if pieces break, they’ll break being used by loved ones.

I only buy frozen string beans but almost feel the fresh one in my fingers needing stringing. Marshmallows topping mashed yams evoke memories of ration books, what that meant, and sacrifice. I learned to love, not waste, not judge, contribute, speak thoughts even of simple thanks and not get ridiculed for being too young to understand that a pair of skates and having a soldier return home safely were really different.