Wilmore

 O it shall be a most happy time

All my loved ones to find

Set the finest China for the day

For the honored Lord make way.

It was the Thanksgiving from Wilmore, Kentucky, around the year of sixty six, that Normal Rockwell came to paint our picture. In earlier years the day was memorable as well, like the one in Sopchoppy when my dad and I went out early in the morning, and with the old Parker double barrel 12 gauge shot a gobbler in Bert Roddenberry’s woods for dinner that day. I’m not even sure Langston carried turkeys in the IGA then. And there was the latter times, like down in Gulf Hammock in Levy County, when most of Williston and the county would gather in the Fugates Camp C for a community feast followed by a hymn fest sing down at the Smith camp. And then there were the Old Homewood years in Wakulla County in Crawfordville and later Williston when my dad and I and many helping would grind the sugar cane and boil it into syrup, bottled by lunch time by the sugar shack where tables were set up under the pear trees. 

But the one in sixty six, with my favorite Uncles William and Billy, my dads brothers from Mississippi living with us in college at Asbury, with Wayne Tarpley, without family invited over, with the Fitches IGA turkey, in the duplex apartment beside Mr Beardsley and family, me in my best paisley shirt, even had Monnie, mamma’s mother living with us, sleeping on my bottom bunk bed, that ranks right up there with them all. Good job Norman, good job.,