Thanksgiving On The Farm

We're going to celebrate Thanksgiving with a host of relatives at my older daughter's house situated on a sixty acre portion of "the farm," the ancestral property of my late wife's family who settled on it in 1735.  Before I married into that family my life was peripatetic and rootless since my family moved when I was sixteen from what had been "our home," and emotionally remained so.  I love driving the windy roads through to the town center past the cemetery where generations of my wife's family are buried and her own ashes have been deposited.  The ancestral house  and giant barn which belong to my other daughter look onto a small pond where I have spent many summer hours with my kids splashing about.  It will be an exercise in nostalgia to be there again.  We shall have time to walk in the woods, hundreds of acres of them, bare of their leafs, me in my mink jacket for the cold, deploying a noise maker so as to ward off the drunken weekend deer hunter up from Boston illegally walking through the posted acres, who will think me a target animal.  But there will be a sad feeling mixed in with the pleasure of it all.  It was there on that farm in November of 1955 that we two young people decided definitely to get married.  I was being presented to the family, the parents, the brother, the sister, the infant nieces and nephews.  I had no family to give in return, happy to be welcomed if indeed that it the word into the somewhat reluctant and certainly restrained and cold bosom of this family.  The Admiral, my prospective father in law, looked upon me with confusion and suspicion. me a widower of only three months, proposing marriage, a male who talked in a constant flow, who waved his hands for emphasis, who was witty, used big words, so over educated, something so well, what? fruity about him.  But my fiancée and I were in love.  Big Time.  And then, of course, the years rolled by, those early days of martinis and love making, those constant walks looking a architecture in city after city, she telling me everything the learned in architecture school with such passion, I will never forget.  We decorated one habitation after another in the strict geometric principles of Bauhaus, edge of sofa lined up with edge of table across the way, chair exactly precisely across from door and so on and so forth.  I have never lost the ecstasy of precision, of compulsion.  But my flamboyance grew to grate on her, my compulsive talking; she was a quiet person, incredibly secretive.  For all her Yankee high minded moralism she was a terrific liar, a good match for my insistent fantasizing of events.  Well, it all ended in emotional death, separation and divorce.  The kids said we each were so much happier then.  Twenty years in the gulag?  No, I don't think so.  Going back to the farm reminds me of another emotion, and although I will be having a wonderful time, there will be that feeling of regret which the barren grey sky, the leaf-less trees, the winter dead grass will monumentally augment.