Thanksgiving

This is the Thanksgiving weekend in Canada and it’s not hard to be thankful! As I see and hear news from around the world, I am so grateful for the blessing of having been born in this beautiful, peaceful country. Yes, we have our problems, about which we do our share of complaining. But when it comes down to basic attitudes, it’s hard not to be filled with gratitude.

My poem reflection today hearkens back to Thanksgiving on the prairies. The ladies in our little agrarian community Mennonite church collected produce, canning, wheat sheaves, and flowers to decorate the stage on the Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend (reflected in my little bit of art).

After the Sunday service, we went downstairs for lunch–and what a lunch it was!

Thanksgiving Lunch at the Mennonite Church

We’ve been smelling coffee for a while now
as the sermon drones on and on but finally
it’s benediction time and “Thanks
for the food we are about to partake. Amen.”
Old and young crowd down the stairs
to the warm, fragrant basement
claim chairs at the long tables
where we usually have Sunday School.
The food committee hovers in the kitchen
as we start filling plates with salad—potato and jelly,
zwieback and butter, sliced tomatoes, cheese
homemade dills, cold pink ham
roast beef, plump fried chicken.
Soon they come with steaming kettles: “Coffee? Tea?”
then serve plates of pie—apple, cherry, chocolate
lemon meringue, peach, rhubarb, raisin.

Chairs push back. Farmers swap stories
of combine breakdowns and how many
bushels of oats and wheat to the acre.
Women tell of covering the tomatoes
before last Tuesday’s frost, how Suzy’s not liking school
and did you know Adilman’s has a sale on winter coats?
Kids play tag, hide-and-seek
dash between legs back to the table to snitch
sugar cubes, pickles, pieces of cheese
while the food crew clears the end of the table
nearest the kitchen, gathers up
their twelve basketfuls of leftovers
and lingers over their Thanksgiving lunch.

• Violet Nesdoly
  (Published in the Fraser Valley Poets Society Canada Anthology © 2017)