Whenever I think of the farm what I recall most warmly is the way it became a gathering place for the extended clan: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. Every significant religious holiday would find our ancient farmhouse filled to overflowing. Even as a young child, I always associated those events with family, never with religious prestige.
After Christmas, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. On Thanksgiving, we had an unusual tradition that I've never heard of any other family doing. My father would bring several bales of hay in from the fields and carefully arrange them in the same corner of the dining room that sheltered the tree at Christmas. Into the bales we would press colorful branches we'd collected from the surrounding woods: willows with their burgundy skins, the fiery foliage of maples, prickly branches of the wild rose with their bright red hips, slender stalks of wheat with neat symmetrical seed heads. Against this naturalistic backdrop we would arrange evidence of the harvest: apples, pumpkins, carrots, corn, bright red tomatoes, beans, onions, potatoes. At the base of the display, we would place bundles of straw from a loose bale and thereafter, the fun began.
Every family that came out for the weekend would bring a large bag of candy to be scattered willy-nilly over the entire display. As the adults sat at the large dining room table and discussed the woes of the world over coffee, we children would attempt to sneak past them, make our way over to the cornucopia of goodies in the corner, palm a sweet treat, and then dash back out again before we could be "caught". It wasn't until years later that I realized how this arrangement guaranteed having an indebted kid around, just when you needed one. "I saw you take that candy!" my aunt would admonish. "Go down to the basement, bring me up the roasting pan, (or the pickles, or the mixing bowl, or a handful of onions), and I'll let you keep it." We were only too grateful to comply.
That was how our holidays were spent on the farm; the adults occupying the main floor rooms of kitchen, dining, and living room; the children laying claim to the upper regions of the house where we happily invented a hundred different distractions to occupy our time. It was on an occasion much like the above that my cousin Mitch provided us all with an unforgettable memory.
We had been playing follow the leader. My younger brother, Richard, was leading, and lead he did -- through various bedrooms, behind dressers, under beds, over beds, into closets and back out again. The trouble arose when he passed his slender body through the lower rungs of an ordinary wooden chair. It was a bit of a squeeze, but he managed. Ian came right behind him, then me, and then . . . Mitch. Apparently, Mitch was bigger than we were. This was something we'd never really noticed before, it just hadn't been an important detail of our existence. Mitch had managed to get his head between the upper and lower rungs, but the shoulders simply wouldn't follow. He was quick to realize the futility of his efforts so he decided he simply wouldn't play our stupid game anymore. He tried to back up and that's when it became apparent that stuck as he was, he couldn't get unstuck either.
We tried to help him as best we could. Some of us took hold of the chair and others our cousin. We pulled with all our might in an attempt to separate the two, for the gravity of the situation was obvious to us -- a body simply couldn't go through life with a chair stuck on its head. After numerous efforts and fearful whispered consultations between the assembled cousins, we had to admit the possibility of defeat. "Someone should get a grown-up," it was suggested. But bringing an adult into the situation might mean we were all in trouble. We didn't want to be in trouble so we pulled and tugged on Mitch some more until he begged us to get help. Maureen was dispatched to summon aid and a few minutes later my mother took charge of the situation as she knelt on the floor beside Mitch. The rest of us gathered in a hushed circle around his chair-stricken body.
"Try going forward," my mother said. Mitch strained forward to no avail.
"Try going backward," she suggested. Mitch demonstrated that backward was not an option either.
My mother sighed. "Well," she said, "This just won't work. It's your ears that are the problem," she explained. "they keep getting stuck on the rungs." Then she spoke the ill-fated words, "Somebody get me my saw."
With that utterance, Mitch ceased to be a compliant patient. Instead, he squealed like a stuck pig and leapt, eyes wild with panic, straight to his feet. Bellowing and bawling, he charged through the circle of assembled cousins and made straight for the door. Whenever I need a wee laugh, I just think of my cousin that day -- his hands clasped to the sides of his head, the chair on his head bobbing to-and-fro as he rammed it wildly against the door jamb in an effort to escape, tears streaming down his face as he blubbered madly, "No, Auntie! No! Don't cut off my ears!"
With the assistance of some strong men, we were finally able to corner Mitch and hold him down long enough for someone to cut through the rungs with my mother's saw, thus freeing his head from perpetual chair enslavement. Mitch didn't have to live out the rest of his days with a chair on his head, after all. Instead, he just has to put up with his extended family laughing about that event for the rest of his days. Not such a bad trade-off.
