We are all comatose by the hot fire after a wonderful Thanksgiving feast that we did all on our own. The feast took place in my 200-year-old farmhouse on the shores of Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy. It was Thanksgiving, 1971, just after we graduated from college. This passage is from our book, A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes.
As fall came and strong winds continued to blow off the never very warm Bay of Fundy, it became clear that we needed more heat than the electric baseboard variety. I hired someone to build us a brick chimney with a stone fireplace. It was not exactly the best idea for heat, but the only wood stoves available in Nova Scotia those days were cookstoves. The fireplace added a lot of charm, and in a pinch, it could keep us warm if the power went out.
Eventually, the electric stove, refrigerator, and freezer got installed. We had decided on pine paneling for walls. The pine went up easily but as it dried, cracks showed between each board, so we took it down to be stored until it finished drying. There were major victories along the way, like having leak-free copper plumbing and actually being able to take a hot shower.
There were plenty of setbacks as we learned the hard lessons of independence. Sometimes just finding the right materials or pieces required a trip all the way down the Valley to Kentville. It was a forty-five-mile-long trip from Bridgetown on a winding two-lane highway through the small towns of the Annapolis Valley. It often took more than an hour each way.
That first year we were focused on Thanksgiving as a time to have the place relatively livable. We had college friends making the trek to Nova Scotia to see what the crazy guys who had gone back to the land were doing. Progress was made, but when the holiday rolled around, our kitchen cabinets were still wooden egg crates and we continued to drink out of recycled mayonnaise jars.
We worried little about bedrooms since in those days all we needed was a spot on a floor. An air mattress or some padding was as good as being in the Ritz for college students in the late sixties and early seventies.
Thanksgiving of 1971 became the first Thanksgiving that many of us had spent outside of a home without parents as lifelines. We had to figure out how to cook a turkey. Deciding what ingredients went into the stuffing was a lesson in diplomacy. Yet we managed to do it, and it seemed like getting our Thanksgiving dinner to the table was as important as graduating from college. Negotiating the celery content of dressing should be a college course.
Sally, Susan, Richard, Nancy, Gene, and David made the trip north. They needed to know of this place where the land had taken hold of their classmates. That first Thanksgiving there were long walks in the snow with old college friends and talk of what we were all going to do. Then Thanksgiving and the friends were gone.
Sobotta, David. A Taste for the Wild, Canada's Maritimes (p. 13). Kindle Edition.
Fifty-one years later, after three children and seven homes in two provinces and three states have brightened our lives. We are now in Davie County, North Carolina, about thirty minutes from where I grew up. We now warm our turkeys up instead of cooking them. Some of the college friends who visited are long gone and few more have vanished into the ether. The relatively simple life of fifty years ago has vanished also and we are left to figure how to survive in an increasingly complex world.
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