Homewood

In the good old days before the dreaded black Fridays, before the shopping frenzy dominated our psyche, there was the occasional Thanksgiving I could spend at Homewood, not having to return until the following Monday. Rare, but I think it possibly occurred once or twice in my retail career.
More often than not, we would only have Thursday to spend Thanksgiving at Homewood and we made the two and a half hour drive usually in the late evening after the store closed today.
We would arrive at my fathers old home place after dark to see the smoke rising from the chimney, knowing he had a fire going in the wood stove in the front room. Landon and Jordon were small and usually sleeping when we arrived. We would carry them in to the front room and put them in the bed with the homemade quilts.
We had to tip toe about for all the furniture in the old house with the wooden floors would rattle the dishes in the cabinets when we went up and down the dog trot hallway. We would stay up a bit catching up on plans for Thursday, then off to bed as my father was always in bed by eight or nine PM.
We would wake early on Thanksgiving to the smell of bacon frying with my father making pancakes, usually with the help of my sisters girls, Allison and Jessica. We all crowded around the little table in the kitchen off the back of the house, added years after Mrs Towles originally built the house around 1900.
My father and I would eat first then go out to the syrup shed to begin the cooking process. My father, when I was working, would already have completed all the difficult tasks of preparing the cane by cutting and stripping it, carrying it and stacking it, getting everything prepared. All I had to do was help with the skimming and cooking down of the sixty gallons of cane juice.
Other family helpers would arrive and by noon, the full family and friends would have gathered around the Sugar Shack as we called it, helping grind down the cane and prepare the Thanksgiving dinner.
My father would take a break to bless the meal and we would continue with the cooking while everyone ate. We would finally decide when it was time to pull the syrup and bottle it. With all the amber bottles with our own labels sitting on the shelf, we would then enjoy our Thanksgiving meal.
It was always sad for me to have to leave that evening and return for the early,early opening the following morning.
To this day, though the retail industry did their dead level best to ruin my favorite time of year and holiday, I am now especially thankful for the time I did have to spend with family if only for a day at Homewood in Crawfordville, Florida.