Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Monday, December 1, 2008

When cousin Thurman and his wife Ameliann invited me to Asheville this year to celebrate Thanksgiving with their family, it didn’t take long for me to accept. After decades of spending Thanksgiving with Frank (even after our divorce), the time seemed right to branch out, to find a new tradition.

This year, you couldn’t have scripted a more splendid feast or a more idyllic long-weekend interlude. My amazingly gracious cousins opened their arms not only to me, my son and elderly mother, but to others in transition or without family close by. This year, we enjoyed a multi-generational, multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-family Thanksgiving.

At our table on Thursday were Anna, a Swedish-born trauma unit nurse who had hospital duty on Thanksgiving Day while her own family was at the beach, and Travis, an enterprising young high school student with a large appetite and positive spirit, whose own home life doesn’t include such amenities. Thurman and Ameliann’s precocious pigtailed seven-year-old and his engaging widowed stepmother Jane rounded out the party.

Over turkey and stuffing, Travis began plotting his future career… in real estate development.

“Green building,” I told him, remembering the famous moment in “The Graduate” when a middle-aged family friend steers young Dustin Hoffman toward a career in “plastics.”

In fact, the entire scene was so picture-perfect, it should have been filmed. Ameliann stayed busy in her tv host kitchen whipping up stuffing, a delectable cabbage dish, fresh cranberries, and breads, while her culinarily inclined spouse handled the bird outside, frying it whole in a large vat of oil. Did I mention their new yellow lab Lucky rounded out the picture with his puppy antics — stealing shoes, a watch and well… making the kids frolic?

Instead of eating and running, we stayed three nights, enjoying long walks in the neighborhood, indulging Henry’s passion for treasure hunting at antique emporiums and used book stores. (I even had the chance to make a foray into town to check out an amazing green rehab, a place called Mica Village, which is a national model brownfield residential rehab project.) When we weren’t chomping on turkey sandwiches and downing Jane’s famous chili, we packed in pound cake, pumpkin pie and cheese straws which were served along with a bottomless supply of coffee and decaf. We played board games and talked and talked and looked at old pictures and talked. We talked about the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, a society hitting the skids, about how cute Thurman’s toddler father looked in the 1920s family photograph mother presented to him. We talked about low moments in our lives and how essential it is to keep the basics in mind when troubles come. They will pass, and if they don’t, you will cope. Life will go on.

Mother fulfilled her desire to pay a visit to the homeplace of one of the favorite writers of her youth, Thomas Wolfe. The family’s boarding house, Old Kentucky Home, is now a fully restored Victorian visitor center in the heart of Asheville with an admission of $1 for adults, 50 cents for children — recession-proof prices if there ever were any. The visit allowed Mother to reminisce about our family visit in 1969 when we met Thomas’s real-life brother, Fred Wolfe, who took a personal interest in our micro-family and kept up a correspondence for years.

“Thank you kindly for your hospitality,” Mama told Thurman as we packed up the car to return to reality and home.

Instead of appearing to be imposed upon by ministering to my slow-moving mother, Thurman seemed delighted to host her. Mother, he told me, was a dead ringer for his late paternal grandmother, Frances Williams — Mother’s late aunt — with whom he grew up in a multi-generational household in Fayetteville, NC. Having my Mother with him was like bringing back his own “Nana,” gone now more than twenty years.

“You know, once you come for Thanksgiving,” he said, “it’s a regular kind of thing. You’re on the list now.”