Thanksgiving at Lee’s

    I was at my brother’s home in Virginia for Thanksgiving. We were eighteen around the table: My brother, Lee; his wife, Linda; their three daughters with their (1) husband, (2) boy friend, (3) best friend. My two sisters and their husbands. (Another sister was absent, too ill to participate.) A Coogle-by-marriage cousin, her mother, and her two daughters. Linda’s mother. Me.

    Here’s what we had for fun:

   A hovercraft – an air cushion vehicle that Lee built a few years ago, devilishly difficult to steer because when you turn the rudder, it responds with a slow drift or a 180º circle – but that’s the fun. It flew over the grass – danger! low-flying vehicle! – at 30 miles an hour.

    Swings. The most challenging was a swing Lee built with bars instead of ropes, that you stand on instead of sitting on, and that goes in a circle up and over, if you’re good enough to make it do that. The most relaxing was a small rubber seat on a 75-foot cable that provides the longest glide imaginable, from up one hill over the bottomland to the tops of the trees. I want one.

    Zip line. Lee’s is 200 feet long. You climb an enormously tall ladder onto a platform in a tree, where Lee tightens you into the harness.

Then you put your gloved hands over the cable, drop off the platform, and whiz through the trees then high over the meadow to the disembarking platform, 

 

where, fortunately, someone is yelling, “Brake! Brake!” because if you brake too soon, you’ll end up pulling yourself hand over hand along the cable to get to the platform, and if you brake too late, you’ll crash into the wall of the platform. It’s a glorious ride.

    Games. Speed Pictionary, played with teams and lots of dashing back and forth and lots of laughter. Somehow “hovercraft” needed only a horizontal line and another above it for my team to guess, but when it came to Elmo, how was televisionless I supposed to know what Elmo looked like? Bocce on the lawn on a lovely autumn afternoon. Balderdash, a competitive definitions game. I didn’t win, but I did get the biggest laugh for my definition of a law that, I said, forbade walking with an unaccompanied woman.

    A 1000-piece puzzle. At any stray moment, any particular person would wander into the living room and work 20 or 30 minutes with whoever was there doing the same thing, so there was a constant interplay of different people. After two days of struggling with a diabolically difficult puzzle, we threw it in the garbage. It seemed cruel to give it to anyone we knew. With everyone’s help we brought the second 1000-piece puzzle to a full finish the day before I left.

    Beautiful walks in the Virginia hills: one on a trail up to Monticello with just about the whole party, another around a lake with only my brother and me.

    Wine on a hillside winery, the weather beautiful and the Virginia hills spread before us, dotted here and there with large white plantation-style homes.

    Movie and dinner in Charlottesville. "Spotlight." Burgers. Both good.

    Gifts. Lee gave each of his siblings an iPhone speaker he made from walnut from our father’s shop. I gave each of my siblings and nieces a hat I had knitted the week before

and everyone else rum balls I had made. One sister gave me a scarf she had woven. Another, who is a yoga teacher, gave me a book to improve my health and private yoga instruction every morning.

    Thanksgiving dinner. Everything was as Thanksgiving dinner should be with the added bonus that Linda is the most organized person in the world, so it looked as though the whole turkey-dressing-potatoes-cranberry-sauce-pies meal miraculously appeared on the table. The kitchen stayed miraculously pristine, and I’m not sure who cleaned up, but it seemed as miraculously easy as the rest of it.

    It was a wonderful time at the Coogle Fun Farm. I love my family.