No Turkey on the Beach This Year

Yesterday the first wave of my Thanksgiving holidays began with the arrival of my cousin Sandy from California. She and her sister Alice live in Thousand Oaks and San Clemente, respectively. Each sister has three kids, two scattered to the winds and one married, fabulously successful, and living right in the same town. These two women are grandmas from heaven. Alice spoils her eight-year-old triplets rotten; Sandy recently treated her grandkids to a cruise and a trip to China. Ryan's a 6'2" teen who still looks forward to frequent sleepovers at Sandy's pad so he can play poker with her.

This carefree branch of the Adamcheck clan usually celebrates Thanksgiving on the beach at Shannon's waterfront home. The Thousand Oaks bunch descend on San Clemente, staying over for the weekend. They don't bother to cook--just have the whole turkey bit catered so there's more time for volleyball.

At Christmas, the wave is reversed. Alice and her bunch migrate up to Thousand Oaks. A young friend of Sandy's, a hotshot chef who just happened to have trained with Wolfgang Puck before opening his own restaurant, cooks the whole gang a holiday meal every year out of gratitude for the moral support Sandy's given him over the years.

Except this year, Shannon and his wife decided to go on a cruise for Thanksgiving. So Laurie and her husband thought they'd visit his family in Puerto Rico for a change. Sandy and Alice aren't the type to sit home and pout. Or sit home and cook. We offered; they accepted.

Meanwhile, in Wickenburg, Arizona, old traditions were similarly dying. My sister, Leslie, had recently tried a vegan diet for her diabetes and had startling success with it. Her husband, on a similar diet, had seen his lifelong allergy symptoms disappear. That was the good news. The bad news was that there would be no Butterballs on Agua Drive this year.

I saw my opportunity, and jumped at it--invited the two of them to join the fun. I've been cooking turkeyless Thanksgiving feasts for years, so maybe that was part of the draw. Plus the chance for a family reunion, of course. They accepted, and now...

...it's happening. Let the vegetarian games begin.

Emory House B & B

I have lived in the Pascal Emory House for nearly three years. It's a hulking three-story Victorian, a.k.a. white elephant. Many are surprised to learn that it is not broken up into apartments, as are many similar homes in my neighborhood. "Why don't you rent out part of it?" they want to know. "What do you mean, you're using the whole thing!?"

Not too long after I moved in, I had a visit from the assessor. "Seven bedrooms?" was one of the questions he asked me. Four, actually, I replied. It seems that the last owner, who had done some remodeling, had not gotten any permits for the work, and the City was unaware of improvements. What must have been at least two bedrooms had been turned into a loft over the kitchen, and at least one more lost when a front-to-back living room/kitchen had been created on the third floor. The first floor is a very spacious front parlor, dining room, den, and living room. The second floor is three bedrooms, plus loft. The third floor is a kind of mother-in-law apartment, with plenty of privacy, but no separate entrance.

I gave my youngest child the entire third floor. "YES!!!" he said when I made the offer. "Finally I've got something that Cordelia and Ali never had!" I took the middle bedroom on the second floor, because with the loft it formed a kind of suite. Ali ended up with the front bedroom, large and sunny, with four windows, a fireplace, and a marble sink in a small alcove. He called it "the douchebag room." Boo-hoo, no kitchen or attached loft. Poor kid.

The remaining bedroom was originally occupied by six ferrets. I made it into a giant weasel playroom, complete with mulitlevel pens, toys, hammocks, and hidey-holes. Three of the ferrets went home to Worcester when friend Richard got back from Cancún, two eventually died, and Zuzu is still with me, but she's been downsized to a spacious cage. The ferret hostelry became the catchall room, the room with the always-shut door. The room which is never included in the tour.

Fast-forward to summer, 2006. The West Coast branch of the fam all decide to go forty years and 3000 miles back in time, back to Springfield, Massachusetts, for a traditional New England Thanksgiving. Cicily rashly starts inviting them all to stay in her huge house. Some of them accept. Suddenly it's November and beds have to be found. Cicily realizes she's never had to provide a bed, let alone a room, for a guest during her entire tenure at the Emory House.

At the eleventh hour, ladders and boxes went down into the cellar, and featherbeds, lace curtains, a needlepointed Victorian rocking chair, a Persian rug, and an old trunk came up from it. Cutwork pillows, embroidered runners, and antimacassars got pulled from drawers. Pictures were hung. A selection of interesting books from my collection were transported to the bookshelves. A cheval mirror migrated across the hall from my bedroom.

The Emory House B & B was open for business. I thought it looked quite charming, knowing what it had been a mere twelve hours earlier. It was an equally pleasant shock for my visiting cousin, coming from southern California, land of breezy patios and Mexican tiles. Can you say "quaint?"