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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
November 25, 2007
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2007 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Mailbox, 1968
© 1968 by Bud Grossmann
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RELATIVELY SPEAKING
David C. Fischer, of Fjord, Wisconsin, wrote to his friend Maureen about his Thanksgiving Day.
Traveling the four miles from the warmth of my parents’ house at the farm to the warmth of mine in town on this snow-adorned Thanksgiving Day, my mom, age 85, and I, age 58, visited ten relatives in about half-an-hour’s time in mid-afternoon. At the farm’s mailbox, we met my cousin-in-law (Mom’s nephew-in-law), arriving to hunt deer on the sixth day of the current nine-day gun season. He had begun to enter the driveway, but he backed out onto Town Line Road to let us by. For a minute, or maybe as much as two, I idled my Subaru station wagon in the wrong lane, below the blind crest of the hill, while he idled his Ford truck on the road’s shoulder. With our windows down and no snow falling, we exchanged greetings, and discussed the elusiveness of antlered animals.
Mom and I then proceeded over the hill, crossed the big crick and the little one, and, at the south boundary of the farm, stopped beside another Ford truck, so we could say hello to another orange-clad deer hunter, the cousin-in-law’s brother-in-law. Thanksgiving dinner at his mom’s house in Fjord had just concluded, he informed us, and the Packers game was over, too. So it was time to try again for deer.
We went on into town, where we hunted for hunters on Division Street, one of them a cousin of the cousin-in-law’s brother-in-law and the other a second-cousin, a Milwaukee resident whom we seldom get to see. We found them and again were able to have a short chat without getting out of my car.
We drove to my house and parked in the garage but did not go inside the house. Instead I suggested to Mom that we walk one block to the home of the mother-in-law of my cousin-in-law. (She is the mother of the cousin-in-law’s brother-in-law and of the cousin-in-law’s brother-in-law’s three sisters. Or we could refer to her as my cousin-in-law’s brother-in-law’s aunt’s sister-in-law.) I promised Mom we would not stay long, and she agreed, reluctantly, to make the hike.
Mom gripped my left forearm with her mittened left hand, and I clutched the back of her coat as she tapped her red-tipped white cane along the sometimes uneven and icy sidewalk. I urged Mom to move briskly so we wouldn’t freeze. I was wearing socks and “flip-flops” (convenient for my parents’ home, where persons with a sense of propriety remove shoes just inside the door). I also wore jeans, a leather jacket, and my F.H.P. cap. Mom, with an F.H.P. cap of her own, tried to keep her nose warm behind the high, stiff, snapped collar of her hooded coat and complained almost every step of the way.
The lamentations generated warmth. When we were only one house from our destination, I called on my cell phone to obtain an invitation. We climbed the four steps to the porch (thirty-three percent more steps, that is, than Mom ascends at my house or at her own) and went in without knocking. We parked my flip-flops on the rag rug in the closet-like foyer, and scuffed clean the soles of Mama’s shoes. Opening the inner door, we entered my cousin-in-law’s mother-in-law’s dining room, where we received a cheerful welcome from my cousin-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband, my cousin-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband’s wife, and one of their sons. Though we still wore our coats, zippered and snapped, and though Mom bellowed “Hi-and-Bye!” as I had promised her she could, the cousin-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband’s wife insisted that Mom sit down and “stay a while.” Mom took off her cap and mittens.
Soon the cousin-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband’s wife’s sister and their mother joined us. So did the cousin-in-law’s sister-in-law’s husband’s wife’s sister’s fourteen-year-old daughter, who was holding in her arms a silky-soft, neatly trimmed Maltese.
Into Mom’s better ear I hollered descriptions of everyone, relatives and snow-bright doggie, and placed her hands on some of the people’s interesting features such as an elaborately knitted pink sweater, a head of gorgeous blonde hair, and a head of dark, shorter-than-Dave’s hair.
Ten relatives. Please correct me, Maureen, if your count differs from mine. We could have greeted more relatives if we had been ambitious or more assertive, but Mom repeated her Hi-and-Bye, we said our thank-yous, and we departed. ♦
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