Giving thanks for the greatest days of our lives

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     Thanksgiving weekend we wound through towns with names from my childhood on the road to the old family cottage – Betsie, Beulah, Benzie, Mesick -- on our drive north to “the Cape Cod of the Midwest": northwest Michigan. The childhood cottage was the lake place my great grandfather and great-uncle built, of the hoity toities from Chicago, the ones with money who I was sure I should have been born among. Had there been some mistake? I was the youngest of the born-again Baptist minister’s family, all ten of us. We must have been a visual diversion when descending upon the Congregational Assembly at Crystal Lake just a mile from Lake Michigan, tumbling out of the old fifties Woody wagon, carrying brown paper bags from the trailer bursting with clothes and groceries, then changing into hand-me-down cotton bathing suits and running to the beach. How I loved the smell of fusty leaves around the white painted porch and its slamming wood screen door, then the hot asphalt road I skimmed across barefoot to the fine white sand edging the lapis blue lake, and at last digging my fingers down beneath hot sand to cool clay, clawing it into my fist, then sculpting bowls to be lined up to dry in the sun in preparation for some imagined feast.

     So when we drove up this Thanksgiving weekend to a lake inn down the road from that old glory of a place, with foot-thick birches and old wooden porches, I was five again, smelling lake water lapping the firm white beach. I was walking the lane through deep oak woods and a tunnel of white cottages to Lake Michigan where we’d watch the sun set. Back at the cottage before bed, with sore sunburned skin, I’d sit on my fifteen-year-old sister’s lap during family devotions in warm lamp light and learn to read by following her fingertip guiding my eyes over the black print on thin Bible paper in passages Dad picked. We ten sat in wicker sofas and chairs around the unlit fireplace, my long-legged sisters and brothers shifting and rearranging the cushions, while they imagined the other cottage teenagers dancing at the rec hall.

     This year’s Thanksgiving weekend was an anniversary ball to celebrate my nephew’s wedding to a brilliant woman who survived breast cancer last year. In a little black dress and heels I sat on the edge of the dance floor watching two dozen kids dance with abandon. Others joined me sitting there between dances, observing the Bacchanalia of movement, sweat and wildness of the three-to-twenty-year-olds. We reminisced back to our own quiet and sober wedding celebrations, utterly devoid of wine, song or dance in the basements of Baptist churches. How far we’ve come, we said, how free we are now, sculpting memories of dance and lining them up like clay vessels to be filled with the wine of wedding after wedding, then dashing them to pieces in the fireplace with joyful abandon, until the next wild-heart celebration.

     Just then four-year-old Greta hoofed by yelling, “This is the greatest day of my life . . .” above the speakers blaring Cake’s “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” as her cousins pulled her back into their line dance.

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