Thanksgiving memories

It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving is almost here. I have written before that it is my favorite holiday. This year the holiday coincides with our wedding anniversary.

I've written about our small but happy wedding celebration in an earlier post. We never had a real honeymoon. We had a weekend away from graduate studies and then went back to work. We were dedicated, in love, and poor back then.

At that time we lived in a little concrete block house that we rented. We could not get the furnace to work properly so we froze during those cold Virginia winters. We used to warm the house with the oven. When not at the laboratory, we spent a lot of time under the covers.

For our first anniversary I gave C. a dark blue tablecloth. She gave me a nice flannel shirt. We cooked a special dinner together along with a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris. C. drank the entire pitcher.

After having the nice dinner, she went into the bathroom and threw it up. After that I helped her to bed. That's when the fun really started. As I came around to my side of the bed, I saw a face pressed against the window glass. I yelled out and ran out the front door into the snow in my underwear.

I chased the fellow but without shoes my feet were nearly frozen. So I came back in and called the sheriff. The peeping Tom turned out to be a neighbor's teenage son who had been caught before peeping in windows.

My yelling at seeing the peeper scared C. In her cups, she thought I was yelling at her! It was not the way I thought our first anniversary would be. Those expectations got me even back then.

We finished graduate school, moved out of the little house, packed up and moved to another state. It seems like a lifetime ago now. We have had good and bad times and have had life get in the way of so many things.

But I remain filled with love for her. I feel a lot of comfort now. It may not be the giddy excitement of being newly wed, but it is a good feeling. And I don't think that there will be any daiquiris or peepers (except maybe the squirrels) this year. But every year we set the table with the old blue tablecloth and often fix the same meal that we had all those years ago. It just seems like a memory worth smiling about.