Thanksgiving

Rain running off the eaves

Nostalgia

Thanksgiving

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Let’s begin where this isn’t supposed to start … it’s raining.

            Water is running off the eaves as if it is serious. The matter is supported by the drumming on the metal roof. It could be classified as dreary, but I sense no such description. These kinds of mornings can only be described as joyful.

            I love the rain.

            I know exactly where if not when metal roofs became my preference, too. My grandparents’ place on Bell Canyon remains my claim on such matters. Sleeping out on the porch was the genesis that elevated tin roofs to importance. When just a hint of sprinkle gave way to a full blown storm, nothing can compare to those old strong barn tin roofs. The wafting of the smell of night showers with the impact of cool air across that screened porch while in that warm bed with fresh sun dried sheets was nothing short of glorious.

            Pulling the covers up to be consumed by that cavalcade of sensory explosion gave rise to why rainy mornings can be described as joyous. Maybe New Mexico has something to do with it as well. There is no place on earth that I have experienced that has offered such parallel natural exultation. Call it bias, it remains the basis to judge many things.

            Maybe it is just memories of home …

            Rain

On a grand morning not long ago we moved a pasture in the rain, and, while the folks from town that came to help lacking cowboy logic and protection suffered mightily, I savored the morning. I was warm and comfortable in my slicker and horse and I both enjoyed everything about the experience.

Exposure to real conditions is the best teacher.

Dusty and I have stripped off more than once to build a fire to dry our clothes and warm our bodies. Two most memorable times were both on the sides of mountains. Both were deer hunts.

One was on School House Mountain and that juniper fire saved the day and our spirits. The other was on the side of Granny Mountain and there was nothing on us or around us that wasn’t dripping with water.

The latter had started with a ride from Corral Canyon down into the Sapillo and on up the river to the old Heart Bar round corral across from to the mouth of Fall Canyon. We arrived in mid afternoon and had time to put the wall tent up, get our camp in order, and cut and stack firewood. We cooked a good supper and were inside the tent when the rain started. The patter on that wall tent grew to a pounding, but we remained dry and comfortable. We commented that if wanted to rain for two days, let it rain!

It let up enough to allow us to rim out onto Granny and spend the next day hunting before we got wet. We dried by the fire and came off the mountain in the dark in a high trot.

Another grand lightning display and hard rain was experienced at the Trotter Place on the Middle Fork. Hugh and I had arrived at sundown and unsaddled and fed the horses just before the storm hit. We felt our way around the inside of the cabin and got a lantern lit. We ate and decided to go to bed and listen to it rain. In the midst of the display that lit up the meadow outside the old cabin like day, I glimpsed a visitor to my bed. It was a rat sitting on my sleeping bag in upright pack rat fashion just staring at me. When the lightning lit the backdrop, I could see him silhouetted there on my midriff. I mentioned it to Hugh and he told me to shut up and go to sleep. Eventually, the rat left, and the rain continued.

Perhaps the most enduring memories, though, came from wet corrals and the smell of horses. Once, my granddad and I had come in to unsaddle at the headquarters on the Mangus only to get caught in a rain at the barn. We sat there protected and looked out into the storm through the big open door. I suspect not much was said. Grandpa was not always talkative on those occasions. When it was over, we probably went to house to get in the pickup to “go see where it rained”.

That simple thing we did with regularity. Rain was so important to our lives, and that included therapy for our souls … nostalgia.

Nostalgia

            I started this with the intention of Thanksgiving.

            The rain changed the course of events, but not the intent. In fact, the same natural inclination has everything to do with Thanksgiving. The same basis of nostalgia emerges.

With our increasingly gray heads, a different dynamic is developing. Certainly, we refer to the importance of the renewal of ties to family and friends created by Thanksgiving, but those that made it most appealing to us are now largely gone.

            Seldom is there a day that goes by that I don’t think about one of my grandmothers. Unequivocally, they were the forces that kept our families together and Thanksgiving was hugely important in that regard. Those celebrations were prompted by those who came before our grandmothers and instilled in them the same thing.

            We are now the caretakers.

            With that responsibility, what was it that created that sense of awe and excitement of this holiday? It wasn’t a Detroit Lion football game because, in the early years, none of us had a television much less interest in a Thanksgiving Day football game.

            Games were played. Rousing games of Pitch were played by the men on the card table set up in the living room. The women cooked, talked, and laughed in the kitchens. Almost universally, the kids were outside. We were on our own until Nana or Grandma called us to the meal.

            Outside, we did what we always did at the ranch on the Mangus or the farm on the Gila … depending on the grandmother’s house we had made the first stop. We had our BB guns or .22s depending on the age and the year. We caught a horse or went to the barn or the creek or river to pursue our self evolving agenda.

            Whether we knew it or not, the day was interwoven with fall and harvest and the conclusion of the yearly cycle. If it was at the Mangus, the meal was largely a function of what Grandma had ‘put up’ and retrieved from the cellar. If it was at Cliff and the Gila River, the meal was a function of canned mincemeat, ham from a butchered hog, eggs from the henhouse, or what was retrieved from the freezer and the shelves of home canned larder in the pump room. A major portion of the pending feast was raised or processed by our grandmothers’ hands. It had come from harvest of our immediate control.

            Implicit in that whole process, the ties to our surroundings were direct and the results were chained to generational connectivity. Home was sanctified and all the attachments therein defined the matter of … nostalgia.

            Thanksgiving

            I miss my grandmothers.

            I have come to recognize the immensity of their impact on me and, for that, I am eternally grateful. I also give them most of the credit for creating the backdrop of importance attached to this holiday.

            The changes that have occurred from then until now worry me. Certainly in my family there is no longer a strong connection to our surroundings. It has been a long time since the meal was fashioned largely from harvest managed from our own hands.

Football is on the television. Youthful memories are not derived from wet leaves, fresh air, creek banks, or a horse caught on which to play cowboys and Indians. The connection of harvest is at best an abstract notion, and, in that, there is danger and loss.

            It is seen in the corrupted opinions of how our lands should now be managed, the distance from things actually natural, and the plunging numbers of those who have direct connections to the past through skills and ethics of those who preceded us.

            If we are judged on the basis of maintaining what once were simple but have become esoteric traditions of value, we have failed.

            The most valued memories of this holiday and all that frames it are the most simplistic. Just like the rain that has finally stopped dripping off the eaves, memories and the security of the circumstances that emerged as representing home are the real basis for this celebration.

It has meaning to this gray headed rancher, and I pray that a semblance of it remains with those whom I actually have some … influence.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “In memory of my grandmothers …”