Thanksgiving An Off Campus Diary by Hannah Nielsen-Jones Every year it's the same. I start by peeling the apples, just the way my best friend's grandmother taught me-she lived through the Depression so she knew how to get every last molecule of fruit off the peel, no waste-and then slice them, not too thick, not too thin. The faint scent of apples, tart and green and irrevocably tied to the smell of wet bark, reaches my nose. It's a fall smell. Over the years my task evolved from making the relish with my dad, grinding up the cranberries and the oranges, to helping my mother bake brownies, to the point where this cranberry-and-apple cake is now completely mine to make. The apples are done. I measure the dry ingredients and sift them together, noticing again how nutmeg brings up the strangest memories. I'm not really sure if they belong to me or if I appropriated them from some dusty book about the so-called "exotic Orient." I remember that the recipe is always doubled: one to take to Long Island, to celebrate with; one to leave at home for after we return. Going back through my day, I think about the homeless man I met on the street, outside the CVS where I suddenly found people I hadn't seen in months. Everyone was huddled together for warmth and sharing the quick updates-"oh I love your haircut, it's so cute" and "how are your classes" and "I haven't heard from her, do you know what's going on" -when a man came up and asked us for change. We all fumbled in our pockets, our cracks about being poor college students confronted with real poverty; our moment of joy at randomly finding each other tinged with a sad reality check. Then, all of a sudden there was a tiny moment of clarity: the man asked for spare change and he wa gracious, is matter-of-fact. A window opened in the usual interaction, put things in a different perspective. Everyone's feelings of guilt and anger and fear disappeared. He asked for our help and we gave it, without ulterior motive or doubt. He said, "Happy Thanksgiving" and we all said it back, realizing how incredibly lucky we were, to be born where, when, and to whom we were. That moment of double-time, of grace, is too precious to let go of. I hold the feeling of it close to me now, as the white cloud of flour descends into the bowl, because it is rare that I find myself in that state and can recognize and appreciate it. That is something to be thankful for. Now is the time to add the fruit: apples and jewel-bright cranberries. My best friend in seventh grade liked to eat cranberries raw, an incredible feat of bad-ass-ness that I always tried to replicate, with no success. Now she's in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin, where she can smell the cows from her dorm room, majoring in psychology. The similarities between her present life and my mother's young life, at the same school, with the same major, have become almost eerie. She jokes that she'll grow up and move back to our hometown and give her children my name. The joke is a good one, but still far enough away to be comfortable, as painful as the distance-emotional and physical-between us has become. My friend is spending Thanksgiving with her family, in my hometown; my family is making the trek to Long Island, as we have done for years. My mother has always felt out of place with my father's family, through circumstances, unintentional and intentional accidents, miscommunications and just plain differences. Which is not to say that she and my aunt don't have a wonderful, mutually-nurturing connection or that our twice-yearly game of charades with my uncle's family doesn't send her into gales of laughter. It's just that, with some of them, she acts self-conscious, never really feels comfortable. But every year she makes chicken a la king and mince pie for my grandfather, knowing full well that it doesn't matter to my father whether or not she does, knowing that my grandfather will vehemently protest as she puts it into his freezer, knowing that it's as important for her to make it as it is for him to pretend that she shouldn't have gone to the trouble. She knows it's important. The surfaces, the outward actions and comments, matter less, perhaps, than sitcom families would have us believe. I pour the batter into the cake pans, set the timer, and slide the pans into the warmed oven. I cast about the kitchen for the remaining tasks and think about this trip and about all the trips my family has made and will make over the years. My parents, each the furthest child away from their parents, have taught me this about love: that making the trek, however many hours in the minivan it takes, is important. Emotional pain will probably be a part of every trip, even if for no more reason than that each of my surviving grandparents on either side keeps becoming older and frailer. It's depressing, but at the same time a powerful reason to continue, to forge ahead, to maintain the connection. My mother loves my father and my father loves my mother. That in itself is something to be thankful for. They have stayed married to each other, in the face of conflicts that I know little about; and part of their union is this Thanksgiving trip. It has taken me my entire life to understand this, and while I'm confused that it took me so long, I'm glad that I figured it out with enough time left to appreciate how much my parents have let love inform and guide their lives. And I'm glad that they've made sure that both sides of my past are important to me, that distance is hard but not impassable. That lesson is something to be thankful for. There won't be as many faces around the table at this year's feast. For reasons too odd, complicated, political, and emotionally difficult to deal with, my aunts and their assorted families are having their own Thanksgiving in Queens. That leaves my parents and me, my grandfather, my aunt and uncle and their two sons. My cousins are fifteen and twelve; I love them both so much it hurts. Every time I see them it's been far too long since the last time-we've become older and older in each other's eyes. I dread our impending separations into the pre-defined categories of sulky teenager and tense young adults. I hope that we'll somehow escape them and always be able to talk to each other. Each time we visit, they have acquired another cute, random characteristic. This year, the older one listens to ska, at top volume, and the younger one wears bigger pants than I do. Somehow each trait makes them even dearer. When we first get out of the car, the older one bounds up to us, takes off his headphones, and hugs me; he's become taller than I am in the months since I last saw him. The younger one picks up his hems and reaches out his arms and I hug him. Then I hug my aunt, and she starts to cry, and I start to cry. It's wonderful to be together again, to finally have made it after so much preparation, and at the same time so very sad because the house used to have every single one of us in it and this year we're split in half. Then my mom starts to cry. So we're standing there in the driveway, three tall women crying. My cousins and my father and my uncle kind of stand around, not quite knowing what to do, but happy to be together, waiting for the moment to pass. Later, listening to my retired Presbyterian grandfather say grace over the table, my eyes fill with tears again. It's the simple relief of being with family, and of not eating Mocon food, and of seeing friends, and one million and one very-impossible-to-quantify things. It strikes me that this is such a dear time, a fleeting moment. Very quickly my friends will become either better or less known. My grandparents will grow older and die. My cousins will grow up even more, my parents will stop sending me cookies in the mail, and I'll begin to have more than a vague idea about what I want to do with my life. But now is a shadow-time, a time between childhood and adulthood, between responsibility and authority, between knowledge of just myself and knowledge of the world. And I'm lucky that this time is full of grace, that I have people to love and to listen to and to rebel against, that I have moments where the obvious outside becomes the internal monologue, the inside observation. It is a very real Thanksgiving. I smile through my tears.