I'm writing with Thanksgiving on my mind.
How, when I was a child, we'd drive two hours east to spend the holiday with my mother's parents, Mimi and Poppy.
Pop served in the second World War and taught me how to tackle: "Get 'em low around the ankles and roll like a gator!" Mimi was an artist. Made decorative frogs out of clay and painted them in her laundry room. Pop's office was across the hall, filled with knickknacks from his past — a Jack Daniels poker set, an original Bowie knife, a pair of antique revolvers — all of which reside in my office now.
When I was in junior high, I wrote an essay I titled, "Coffee in the "Morn'." I'm not sure why I shortened that last word, but I remember really liking what I'd written. It was mostly about my grandparents' kitchen, the space between the laundry room and Pop's office, and how we'd gathered there when I was a "boy."
Despite a few sprigs of armpit hair and a constantly-cracking voice, I was still a boy back in junior high, but Mimi and Poppy were already gone by then, their big old house sold, its contents distributed evenly between my mother and her sisters.
We still went to Forrest City for Thanksgivings, Christmases too, but things were different. I couldn't smell Pop's coffee anymore, or sit in his lap and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while the rest of the family lounged around the kitchen table. In the years to come, we'd move from kitchen to kitchen, table to table, but none of the new gathering places lasted long.
By the time I went off to college, mom's sisters had their own grandchildren and our family had split into thirds. Seeing as I'm an only child, Mom's third was the smallest. It was just the three of us for a while. Mom tried to make up for it by working double time in the kitchen, each dish a testament to Thanksgivings gone past.
Eventually, though, our little family of three turned into four.
I met a girl, got a haircut, and got a real job, as the George Thorogood song goes. That girl had a family too. A big one. So large she has trouble remembering the names of all the people who gather at her Memaw's house each year.
Memaw lives in a house on a hill in Gum Log. They used to raise chickens out there and hunt foxes. They sold the chicken farm years ago, but those long, sheet-metal buildings remain. The fox pen is still there too, a tall fence with a curved top outlying the edges of the property.
Families are like that old chicken farm. Although locations and traditions may change with each new generation, the ones who came before us are never forgotten.
Granted, my children can't recall my grandfather's name; Pop passed long before I went on my first date with their mother. But William Faulkner once said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and I agree. Pop is still with us. All the old timers are, their ghosts dancing in the coffee pot's steam as the family gathers again for Thanksgiving.
Eli Cranor is an Arkansas author whose debut novel, "Don't Know Tough," is available wherever books are sold. He can be reached using the "Contact" page at elicranor.com and found on Twitter @elicranor.