The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 33

Why Thankful?

Teresa Murphy put down a wooden spoon, bright red on its shell end. She stepped away from the cranberry sauce simmering on the stove. At midmorning, Owen dozed in his chair. Michael and Rose were at school. Little Lucy, for the moment, played at reading her doll a book. The dust from the old '54 Diamond Reo fifth-wheel, with its wooden box and working hoist, settled with a snowflake or two on the frozen lawn outside. Alexander, by now, drove up the hill north of the creek on his way to the co-op with another load of corn.

The radio played Dvorák in low volume. Teresa liked Antonin Dvorák's music. Spillville was not that far away. She and Ruth Ann Garcia had driven up that way early last summer with the all kids. The visited the Bily Clocks Museum in the house where the composer lived in the summer of 1893, just six years before she was born.

Teresa wiped her hands on her flowered apron. She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table where she had laid her bound journal and fountain pen after breakfast.

She opened the book to the next empty right-hand page, already near the back. She creased the gutter to stretch the journal's spine. The cap on her old fountain pen always turned open easily. The pen was a gift from her husband David on their first Christmas together. She tested the nib on the back of an envelope. The indigo blue ink flowed nicely.

The woman wrote in a beautiful A. N. Palmer hand, that of a star pupil of the Palmer Method in her day:

Why Thankful?

Now that my joints stiffen before the end of each day
And ache long before I can get out of bed,
When my eyes cloud over and
My balance takes me where I don't want to go,
When most of my friends, and all my siblings are gone,
I ask you, "For what am I most thankful?"

Can it be for the sum of the love of my family?
Or for the sun spilling gold on the violet edge of night?
Is it the water that flows on green earth, clean rain from the sky?
What of the taste of my cooking (if I may myself so say)?
Or the kind greeting of an old friend at my door?
Can I count all these things, the few among so many?

Teresa felt a little hand tugging at her apron. Lucy stood beside her with arms stretched up. One hand clutched her empty spill-proof juice cup. Teresa turned to greet her just as Lucy crawled into her great-grandmother's lap for a hug. The grand dame put down her pen and folded the child into a perfect embrace. She smiled to feel the tickle of curly hair as Lucy wiped a runny nose on the apron shoulder.

In another moment the child squirmed around to face the table. Teresa pried the cup (that had missed her jaw) from the strong grip, and wrapped the little fingers around the fountain pen instead.

"Like this...," she said into Lucy's ear. Then, with a hand of ninety years around the one just two, they wrote, "L - u - c - y" in looping script beneath the verse on the page.

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Next...Chapter 34.

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 33 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

Upper Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network and The Upper Basin Chronicles © 2002 Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.

Your comments are much appreciated. Email feedback to The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 33.

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.