A Thanksgiving Letter, by Zee Zahava

Thanksgiving Day, 9 a.m.

Dear Ava,

I’ve been up since six, bet you were too, and I wish I could have come over but Daddy says it’s slutty the way I run over to your house all the time and I told him it’s not slutty when it’s two girls but he said he’s speaking metaphorically and anyway this is Thanksgiving (like I didn’t know that) and it’s meant for families to be with families, which is just plain stupid, but anyway that’s why I’m writing to you and not talking to you in person and as soon as I can get out the front door without being caught I’ll run this over and put it in your mailbox. I hope you look there. Try to read my mind this second: M-A-I-L  B-O-X. 

Do you like this paper? It’s not really purple. I know it looks purple but it’s called mauve and no I didn’t spell it wrong, my grandma sent it with a note telling me the color because she’s always trying to improve my mind, so get used to this mauve, you’ll be seeing a lot of it, who else would I write to?

She also sent me a book, "A Child’s Garden of Verses," she is so two centuries ago, but I don’t want to be mad at her because the reason she’s sending me this stuff instead of waiting until Hanukkah is she thinks she might be dead by then which is really sad. But on the other hand it’s not sad because there’s nothing wrong with her, she just gets seasonal dread she calls it, but if she’s still alive on New Year’s Day then I’m really going to be mad at her for being so negative about life.

There was a lot of activity in the kitchen this morning, Dad and his new live-in girlfriend playing around with the turkey, giggle, giggle, giggle. I stayed up in my room because watching them make out over a naked animal would turn my stomach, but now they’ve gone back to bed and it’s quiet as the grave though any second I expect to hear her panting and oh-my-god-ing and I'm sure this is not good for me, mental health-wise, but Dad, being a psychologist, would probably say “Facts of life, Dorrie, get used to it.” 

So I'm just wondering about something: “quiet as the grave,” what do you think? Is it quiet in the grave? I doubt it. Gross. Hold on a sec, I’m going to change the channel in my mind. Okay, I’m back.

My ex-step-mother and her two gnomes will be here at one. Is this the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard of? My father is like one of those men with a harem, he gets his ex and his current to come and fuss over him with their cranberry sauces and we’re all supposed to act like it’s normal. He says “We make the rules, not society” but by "we" he means "he" because if I made the rules I’d be at your house right now and we’d have mac-and-cheese from the microwave and we'd play with the Ouija board until our finger tips fell off.

One of the things I’d really like to know is how a woman who is old enough to drive still can’t figure out the meaning of the word vegetarian. When Dad’s live-in realizes I’m not going to eat a single ounce of that 300 pound turkey there’s going to be World War 4 in the dining room. My ex-step-mother might even start crying. She’ll be sad because now that she’s a guest in the house she won’t get to call me names and throw fits. But you never know, anything can happen, I’m sort of hoping for a food fight with the two gnomes, for old time’s sake. 

So now it is so much later, how did this happen? 

You might have noticed I still haven’t managed to get this letter into your mailbox,  hope you haven’t been waiting there, that is if you read my mind in the first place. Did you? 

There’s something of a scene going on downstairs, I’ll tell you every single detail when I see you tomorrow, but for now just try to picture this: After the so-called feast my ex-step-mother stood up and recited a poem she wrote especially for the occasion. I thought she would have outgrown that sensitive phase of hers, but apparently not. It was a very long poem, seemed like 3 hours, and I didn’t understand all of it, but I think it was supposed to be erotic, and it kind of upset the live-in who might be living out soon. Hallelujah.

This is the last letter you’ll get from me on this mauve paper. You remember Jeffrey, one of my former step-gnomes, well he was hanging out in my room — don’t ask me how he got through the barricade — and it turns out mauve is his favorite color, which was something of a shocker but not in a totally bad way, so he’s taking the whole box of stationery off my hands except for one sheet which I’ll use to write a thank you note to my grandmother. I couldn’t get him to take "A Child’s Garden of Verses," though. What did I expect? It’s only Thanksgiving. They don’t promise you miracles on Thanksgiving. 

Look for me early in the morning, I’ll be right there on your doorstep. You'll know it's me because in spite of everything that happened today I still look the same. On the outside.

Love, Dorrie

Milkweed Grey, by Peggy Adams

Camille, my painting teacher, says, “Never use black — you can get a much livelier color by mixing French Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna.”  She’s right — I drip water from my brush onto the dark blue watercolor pan to moisten it, then dab the thick dark mix into one of the little hollows in my white palette — I am painting dried milkweed pods, I need a lot of gray, so I wet and dab the blue, five or six good brush loads.  Then I dip the brush in water to clean it, and add more water to the blue until it livens up and shimmers. 

Rinse my brush again and dab it into Burnt Sienna.  I love Burnt Sienna.  When I was six, I called it “squirrel brown” — that reddy-brown, more the color of illustrations of squirrels in books, not the actual color of my Ohio squirrels, drab tipped with silver.

Maybe in third grade Burnt Sienna showed up in the crayon box, maybe that year we had twenty-four crayons in our boxes, three tiers of eight.  By then I had heard of St. Catherine of Sienna, who was supposed to be a saint with a sense of humor — I knew Sienna was a town somewhere, I saw it made of clay houses rising in tiers like the crayons in the box, layers of browny-red or reddy-brown houses, St. Catherine laughing — a good color, Burnt Sienna.

I load my wet brush with paint, and dabble the reddy-brown onto the rim of the hollow where my French Ultramarine swims — it could be the sea, maybe if I were a seagull riding the air, looking down on the sea off Marseilles, off the Cote d’Azur — ultramarine, the most sea-ish of the blues.

I let the Burnt Sienna sit there on the rim, and dip some water into it.  The browny-red loosens up — as the color diffuses, I see again the delicate transparency of watercolor. 

I begin to dribble the light red-brown into the darker blue. 

The colors blend.  Black forms, then softens, its intensity relaxes —the separate colors lose their distinction.  I know my thick creamy watercolor paper will take this new color and play with it, and I will see gradations of grey, some parts bluer, some parts browner.

I look at the back of the milkweed pod with its hundreds of shades of grey, its subtle striations.  The pod is dark beneath the least bit of silvery silky furriness.  It is curved like a whale, tapered like an elf’s cap, warty as an old tree trunk.  Its seams have the slightest borders, rims of darker brown.  Each bump, each curve, has its contrasting darks and lights.

I have fallen in love with the milkweed pod, and my grey is lively and waiting. 

Reflections on Gray/Grey, by Natalie Detert, Perri McGowan, Molly Sutton

Drifting in Grey

Tarnished silver never bothered me

Nor the soot from the chimney sweep

Or the dust storm behind the couch

But the thought that I may never again

See dirty snow dripping from your boots

On the mat inside the front door

Left me dreaming in a sea of loneliness

Just before waking

—Natalie Detert

Gray dead branch, sticking into bare pink skin, leaves

Scarlet bloody mark leaves

Rusty scab and yellow bruise leaves

Purple shiny scar.

So much color from gray.

—Perri McGowan

Tibetan icicles will be forming soon 

in Dharamsala 

and I won't be there to acknowledge them. 

Have the thunderstorms arrived in full force? 

Can you see them gathering 

above the mountains in the distance, 

just waiting to flood the streets? 

Are the waters drenching your socks 

as they drenched mine? 

Is there a taxi waiting to take you home?

… … ...

People always talk about snowflakes floating lazily through the air and I have to wonder . . . maybe they're just tired. 

—Molly Sutton

Her Legacy, by Barbara Cartwright

65 pairs of shoes, 9 never worn.

33 clocks, all with different times.

16 coffee makers, and 5 more in the basement.

22 jars of raspberry jam, dated 1972.

8 cats and 1 dog. At one time.

Cat hair everywhere, strands too numerous to count.

354 balls of wool.

3 pairs of nylon stockings, all with runs.

1 padded chair with a remote to help her get in and out of it, elevate her swollen legs and recline into a more comfortable sleeping position.

106 quarters which become 26 dollars and 50 cents after she passes.

5 tapestry wall hangings, reproductions of the 18^th century French painter Watteau.

Under one, an upright piano she has owned and played for 58 years.

33 sheets of paper covered with musical notations of songs she arranged or composed.

24 poems I cannot bear to read because they are filled with lies. Yet written with excruciatingly true feelings.

1 old British Pathé movie clip I play on my Ipad. She is 17, singing with her two younger brothers. It is 1937. Dead now 7 years, there she is, swaying to the music. And though we haven’t met yet, she reminds me of someone.

1 husband, mine for almost 28 years, who says I should stop writing about my mother.

When I Sleep, by Sara Robbins

When I sleep I dream.

It happens a lot.

My brain sings to me during the night.

Dead people visit and make me cry,

or teach me a lesson.

Mean people make me angry and

I fly from them — 

swimming through

the sky, escaping.

Sometimes I have naked-in-public dreams,

or no-shoes-in-the-snow dreams.

But I always find a way out:

wrap myself in curtains or toilet paper

or wear boxes on my feet.

Or at the very least

awaken

to find myself

in my own bed,

heart racing,

and safe.

+++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++ +++

I opened the box and out came an envelope.

I opened the envelope and out came a photo.

I opened my eyes and out came my tears.

My Father's Hands, by Susan Lesser

My father had aged visibly and his insistent allegiance to his own independence was pulling him toward isolation. He no longer drove at night, so outings to parties and meetings were curtailed. There were no opportunities for casual handshaking, a pat on the back, or a simple hug from a long-time friend. His grandsons, my sons, were too old now to climb on his lap for a reading of “Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel.” They no longer walked on either side of their grandfather, each holding his hand as the went to explore the Planets exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre. My mother was in her own sphere of privacy. Maybe she hugged him in the morning and shared a goodnight kiss, but I never saw it. As near as I could tell, no one ever touched my father anymore.

So, I thought, this needs to change somehow.

Dinner was in the small breakfast room off the kitchen. It was easier there and cozier. I sat to my father’s left. At some point in the conversation, lively as always, there was a pause in my father’s tale about trying to convince a horse hitched to a farm cart to back up. He put his hand on the table, just alongside his plate. I put mine gently, but noticeably, on his. “So what did you do?” I asked. He pulled his hand out from mine as he might have from a hot oven and shot me a glance that might have been a glare. He continued his story.

At 85 years of age, my father’s hands looked well-used, like the hands of an intrepid gardener should look. He had short fingernails and long elegant fingers with joints often swollen by arthritis. The blue veins on the back of his hands were prominent pathways and the skin was an uneven color. None of this was unlovely to me. I like the way hands age, reflecting a life of useful activity. 

The conversation moved on to other tales of derring-do. I noticed my father’s hand was back on the table, resting immobile, precisely where it had been when I dared to touch him. We were on to politics. "So, what do you think the Liberals in Quebec will do now?" I inquired, and again, I put my hand on his, only this time he didn’t move. He began his response, whatever it was, and I gave his hand a gentle pat as I withdrew into my own space. My father looked at me and smiled.