My Thanksgiving Day journey began Nov. 26 in the frozenness of Minneapolis. The drive does not really get interesting until south of Rochester, Minn., when I leave behind the patchwork of suburbs and small towns with strip clubs.
Most of my journey is made in the dark, but I don’t want to occupy myself with introspective thoughts. I leave the stresses of my college life behind, concentrating instead on the land along Highway 52.
Night is falling as I pass through Chatfield, Minn., but even in the dusk I can see their green signs, proudly proclaiming the town as the “home of” everything from pioneer days to 4-H. When I reach Harmony, Minn., I know I’m halfway home and that the Iowa border isn’t far away. In the countryside, I see the lights of farm equipment moving in the darkened fields of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa as the farmers struggle to harvest their crops.
In Iowa I take the shortcut from Decorah to Postville that runs through Frankville. The county road is also their main street, and at night I must detour from it for a few blocks because the silos that line the route are being loaded with grain. I return to Highway 52. Approaching Guttenberg, Iowa, the highway breaks away from the plateau to cling to the bluff’s face as it heads down to the flood plain before returning to the high ground on the southern side of Guttenberg.
Only an hour of my drive home is left now. The road becomes an endless series of twists and turns conforming to the ridge-top along the Mississippi. The highway plunges down to the flood plain for a final time and I know I’ve reached the outskirts of Dubuque, Iowa. Highway 52 becomes Central Avenue, which runs through what was once the German part of town. At the downtown’s edge, I turn away from the highway to take the steep streets up the bluffs’ face. A little more than five hours after leaving Minneapolis, I reach my parents’ house in an old neighborhood on top of the bluffs.
Thanksgiving Day means more travel, this time to Wisconsin, where my mom is from. We go to my uncle’s ex-wife’s new house in Barneveld, an hour’s drive from Dubuque, for the main meal of the day. Even in Barneveld, fields are being replaced with subdivisions.
Though the journey to Barneveld is much shorter than my travel to Dubuque, thoughts of land highlight the complications of this journey. Love and land are bound together in my mother’s family. After my grandparents’ death, my oldest uncle bought the farm from the rest of the family in twice-yearly payments. Like so many farmers, he declared bankruptcy after a few years.
Some family members blamed my ex-aunt for settling the debt by selling off most of the farm. Prior to Thanksgiving, I had not seen my ex-aunt since she left my uncle. I remembered her horses and her paintings more than I remembered her. Now that the man she left my uncle for has left her, my ex-aunt and uncle are friends again. My mother lets me decide how to respond to her Thanksgiving dinner invitation. She yields to my curiosity even though she knows we cannot tell my aunt-in-law that we have been to my ex-aunt’s.
Love – whether it is romantic, friendly or familial – will not last without forgiveness, but I don’t know if anyone can judge if another has learned from his or her mistakes and is therefore worthy of forgiveness.
My mother has seven siblings, five of whom are divorced. As I study my parents and my mom’s siblings, I try to figure out why my parents’ marriage has lasted while so many others have failed. I think marriage and love are helixes – as much of a cycle as they are a path forward.
Maybe the key to all journeys, whether they are from city to city or person to person, is to appreciate what you are passing through along the way.
R.R.S. Stewart is a columnist. She welcomes comments at [email protected]
