Grandma Henke

They were the good old days. We would load everyone into the old Studebaker and make the 20 mile trip to Salt Lake City (that in those days took close to an hour) to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving.    We put on our warmest clothes, our warm coats, and gathered blankets to wrap around us in the car, that didn’t have a heater.    Was this also the car that we could see the road speeding by beneath the floorboards?    Inside that car we could see our breath from November to March or April.     It’s a good thing the car was small and there were seven of us because we kept each other warm as we sang and laughed under the comfortable protection of those blankets.

Grandpa made a huge dining table out of sawhorses and planks of wood and we all ate together in Grandma’s living room.    And oh did we eat!    Grandma’s kitchen was lined with pans and dishes full of dressing, potato’s, gravy, salads, hot rolls, turkey, cranberry sauce, Jello’s, yams, and corn.  My mouth still waters when I think of it.    Along the top of the counter tops were cookies and pies and cakes.   You wouldn’t believe the variety of delicious desserts Grandma and the mothers prepared; raisin filled cookies, chocolate marshmallow cookies, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, carrot cake, carrot pudding, fudge cake, pumpkin pies, apple pies, mincemeat pies, banana cream, coconut cream, chocolate pie.  

After dinner the women retreated to the kitchen to do the stacks of dishes … no paper plates for us!    They laughed and talked as they worked and as I look back I think that was another part of the tradition they actually enjoyed.     Doing the dishes used to be social hour.   They would be washed, rinsed, dried, and put away, the floor swept and wiped clean with a damp mop.    

Later in the afternoon, when our food had barely begun to settle, we hugged and kissed Grandma and Grandpa Babcock and all the aunts and uncles before we left to go around the block to Grandpa and Grandma Matheson’s, where we played with another set of cousins and often sat down to another big Thanksgiving feast.     By the time we left for Draper, way after dark, we were as stuffed as the turkeys.  Before we were two miles down the road we kids would start to fall asleep, one by one, snuggling into each other’s shoulders or laps.    Many times we would have an extra cousin or two with us under our blankets.

There really is something magical about childhood memories.    Even now I can close my eyes and go there … over the river and through the woods … smell the smells, hear the laughter, and feel the happiness.