GRACE OF THANKSGIVING IN THE BUCKET

  THE  GRACE THAT MADE OUR  THANKSGIVING POSSIBLE WAS A PERSON
MY AUNT GRACE JENCKES

Two days before Thanksgiving she would arrive.  Coming up the front stairs to our second floor tenement. I watched and was overcome with happiness. She brought bag after bag of groceries  into the  house and piled them on the table.  In the last bag was a large turkey. 

It was overwhelming going through the bags after she left. Aunt  Grace would hurry away as if she were a little embarrassed to see our need so clearly. My mother would acclaim each item as I took it from the bags or boxes. There would be  bags of apples and oranges and bags of potatoes and onions and carrots and celery and  turnip and squash. Enough for many meals. 

Some food items that we never saw except for the two holidays of THANKSGIVING and CHRISTMAS. Things like grapes and walnuts in the shell and dates.  Clearly Aunt Grace wanted us to enjoy a feast,  She saved the best for last-- a box with two pies that she had made for us and two bottles --wine for the table and Cream sherry for after dinner.

I find it very difficult to write about this scene. I realize that in all the years I have been recalling my childhood I never went near this event. WHY?  Because I have never in my life experienced a  soaring joy accompanied by a sense of scalding shame. I always wept when Grace started to come in with this parade of wonders.  My sisters Janie and Sheila would be shouting with excitement and they were sort of wild running in circles.  
I wept with joy and with shame--I m not sure which -- both--they were so combined. It was all very DICKENSIAN. 

AUNT GRACE did the same thing at Christmas, but  for some reason that felt  different. She would come with her husband Charlie Hartley to help carry, and my father would also go down to help bring the makings of a feast. Grace also brought  bags of  wrapped gifts.  But this time it felt  better because we had gifts wrapped to give back to her.
 She did not rush off, and she usually sat in the front parlor with the decorated tree and  had some eggnog with us all. It became a lovely social visit and  not just a one-sided amazing giving from Grace to us.
I understood later my Aunt Grace's insistence on sharing THANKSGIVING, when I heard a story from her childhood. Grace's young life was blighted when she was a child.  Within one week after Xmas in 1919  my Aunt Grace lost both her mother Ida Mowry and her grandmother whom they lived with, Polly Brown to the Flu epidemic that swept the globe.
She was  nine  years old and her brothers were younger when that tragedy struck them and altered their young lives. My young Aunt Grace was able to stay with her mother's family but very soon  her two brothers who were with their father Oscar Jenckes  were placed in  state care. The story goes that Little  Grace was aware of a neighbor girl whose family would have no THANKSGIVING feast. 
My Aunt Grace began her  GREAT REFUSAL. She would not eat a bit of her  food until all the  cooked food was divided and half of it was taken over to the family of her girlfriend.  She was so stubborn that her  family conceded and took food to the  other house and they shared all they had. 

That was the shaping of Aunt  Grace -- she was a woman who could not be thankful until she created a feast for others to be THANKFUL TOO.