Thanksgiving morning, 1959

Before dawn, Dad and I sat in the kitchen, dressed in our warmest hunting clothes. The coffee pot was burping on the stove and we ate breakfast in a hurry. We wanted to be in the woods at first light.

In the woods near our house was a large sawdust pile, surrounded by stacks of rotting slab-wood. It was a good place to hunt and after breakfast we set off in the cold morning air together. I was twelve years old, and happy to have Dad all to myself for a few hours.

We split up when we got to the sawdust pile. I found a spot on a slight rise and sat down to wait for daybreak. The cold air settled around me. I could hear Dad moving on the other side of the sawdust pile.

It was going to be a good Thanksgiving. My grandmother was staying with us for a few weeks. When I was a small child, I called her Dash. Nobody knows where that name came  from, but it stuck. After my grandfather died, Dash moved around, staying with family members, making on and off attempts at housekeeping and being always unsettled. I loved Dash with all my heart and was overjoyed when she came to stay with us. Our small kitchen never seemed as cozy and happy as when I would come home from school and find Dash helping mother prepare supper.

The sky behind the trees on the ridge was getting light.  I sat and watched the sun struggle to shine through a thin layer of gray clouds. It always seems coldest right at daybreak. The Tastykake jingle kept going through my head. My mind was not on the hunt, but on our Thanksgiving dinner. My anticipation was heightened by the cold morning air.

Later that morning, I heard Dad coming through the woods. I could see his red and black flannel hunting cap.  The ear-flaps were down.  I walked around the end of a slab pile and met him under a large beech tree that had been left by the loggers. The squirrels had been cutting beech nuts and the ground was littered with their feast.

    "Did you see anything?" Dad asked.
     "No, sir."
     "Me either. Cold?"
     "I'm OK." I thought about Mom at home in the warm kitchen preparing our Thanksgiving dinner. I wondered if Dash was in the living room watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV.
     "Well, I'm about to freeze to death." Dad said.
     "Me too."
    Dad jacked the shells out of his unfired shotgun. "Come on," he said. "Let's go home."