Legacy. It’s the stuff families are made of, or at least the they remember. This year our story could be “The Virus Which Almost Stole Thanksgiving.”
It started last week. My husband and I were on the way home from Arizona after a visit with Grandma. The virus hit and stopped us in our tracks. My husband and I had debated which pies to take to Thanksgiving dinner. Chocolate? Vanilla cream? Blackberry? Pies were erased from our frontal lobes as we went into survival mode. Everything went by the wayside including my plans to market my new book.” Suitcases remained unpacked and dishes unwashed. Our daughter had earlier provided us with a home Covid testing kid. The positive reading promped us to go to the hospital for a more official diagnosis. The message? “You’ve got it.”
- For the next few days we monitored each other’s symptoms. One of my ones was confusion. The first night after returning home, I resembled one of the five little monkeys in the children’s story “Five Little Monkeys Jumping On the Bed” EXCEPT I wasn’t jumping on the bed. I was falling as I attempted to get into bed. So much for humility.
- The days soon bended together. Eat, sleep and text our kids. Don was the primary scribe night after night. We have some perspective now. And this year, when we seem adrift, it’s good to recall our blessings and to thank God for the people who went before us. This Thanksgiving happens to be the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims very first thanksgiving in America.
Every Thanksgiving, my husband Don, brings out the story of our Pilgrim family members. The Allertons, his ancestors, came to America on the “Mayflower.” Isaac Allerton, the family patriarch, had sought freedom of worship, leaving England for America with his wife and children.
One was a six-year-old daughter. She and the other Allertons endured hardship aboard the Mayflower. Her mother didn’t quite make it to the shore. She died in childbirth aboard the ship while.in Plymouth Harbor. The baby died as well. Isaac cared for the other children by himself until he remarried.
There are other interesting characters in the Thanksgiving story, Squanto, for one. But our grandchildren especially love to hear about the six-year-old girl. She has an unusual name: Remember. Remember Allerton.
None of us will forget her, thanks to Grandpa Don’s annual stories about Remember. Legacy lives on.
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