The Small Thanksgiving Box

All the remodeling, painting and cleaning of our house the last nine months, a proper term of time, has led to the revisiting of many a drawer and box that had been forgotten for many years. Among the hidden relics I found a small box, no bigger than the size of a small card, a rectangular orange painted paper mache box with the painting of a small girl holding a small pumpkin. She has a white bonnet on, and is holding a small wicker basket on her arm, full of tiny purple flowers, perhaps lavender, and she is walking resolutely forward, followed by a small squirrel keeping up with her. On the top of the stem of the small pumpkin she is holding, there is a tiny blue bird facing her cheerfully as she walks towards her destination. Inside the little box, I found the sturdy heavy silver Navajo bracelet I bought in Monument Valley in 1976, at the start of my journey in this country as a shy teenager all those many years ago. I polished the bracelet and have been wearing it again. On top of the bracelet was sitting a small Polaroid picture taken in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, in Bavaria, a medieval Imperial City founded in 1170, that I visited with my parents, brother and two sisters. in 1970, when I was 13. The picture is jarring to me. It shows me walking with my back towards the camera. I am carrying a small backpack, my hair is very long, I am wearing the dark blue miniskirt with the white anchors on it that my parents brought back for me on one of their trips through Germany, a skirt I was very fond of, as it had a white shirt with a sailor's collar and anchor and dark blue knee socks to match. To the left of me, several feet ahead, with his back turned to the camera as well, walks my father, holding his heavy camera bag, as he was an avid and very good amateur photographer. He is wearing one of his favorite sweaters, a grey wool mountain sweater he bought in Innsbruck on one of our family summer vacations there. To the right of me walks my brother, slightly ahead of my father. Across my brother's  shoulders you can see the red strap of the camera bag my father had bought for each of our small cameras. He is wearing shorts and a dark sweater. Closest to me is my youngest sister, eight at the time, she is walking just a step or two behind me, her shoulder length thick blond hair bopping upwards in the moment of the picture being taken, as she was walking to keep up. Like me, she is wearing a light white sweater, and the strap of her small camera bag is visible , like it is on my brother.  My mother and other sister are not in the picture, very telling as they would become central to the dissolution of our family's fabric. The picture has a chilling simplicity to it, four people, like disappearing ghosts, as everyone, with the exception of my brother in Texas and myself, are dead, including my mother and the sister who are not in the picture. I put the picture back in the small box. I touched the painted picture of the little girl walking resolutely towards Thanksgiving, with her small pumpkin, her squirrel and blue bird friends, looking, like me, on her path, to going forward, one step at a time. The picture of the little girl is on the lid, and inside, safely asleep, frozen in time, is the eery picture, of four people, with no face, no clue, of what was to come, as they were walking, that cool summer morning, around the inner walls of the enchantingly beautiful Rothenburg, with a view of one of its iconic medieval bell towers, like a picture out of a fairy tale book, just in sight. Only in this version, the spell of the evil wizard stayed firmly in place, and there was no happily ever after for our family in this lifetime.