Wishbones and Scars

By Anne-Marie Oomen
Sun contributor
We couldn’t afford icicles for the Christmas tree so my mother saved coffee can ribbons, the metal strip you peeled off with a key when you opened the can. On Thanksgiving Day, to divert and appease us, and to satisfy our wish that Christmas (in our minds the real holiday) would come sooner, my mother gave us these flat spools of tin from the cans and told us to pull them into curly metal ribbons which would serve as icicles for the tree. My sister and I were so charmed and enthused about the project that we both cut ourselves on the sharp edges. To this day, one of our Thanksgiving traditions is to look for the scars. If we look closely, we believe we find tiny lines where the metal tore our palms. My sister says it’s good luck to have these scars and after years of watching her make happiness from unexpected materials, I believe her and often make wishes on those tiny lines.

For me, the whole month of November is like that family story, full of contrasts and unexpected composition, like a good black and white photograph. I love November’s freshly skeletal trees against soft smoke from first fires, its lonely early snows against Thanksgiving’s warm homecoming, harvest’s final throes against the approaching Advent, hunting season against Christmas’ anticipation, heavy sweaters and hot cider, cold nights and spiced wine, long walks, warm talks.

Now, I often anticipate Thanksgiving more than Christmas because, though we lace Thanksgiving with tradition, it often produces what we least expect—like a blessing from a scar or bone.

Like most families, just to be together, we drive long hours to one of our homes. Ironically, once we’ve arrived, there are so many of us with so many children, we rarely get a chance to talk deeply. But over the years, just from rubbing against each others’ lives for so long, we have composed rituals both more ordinary and special than conversation. For example, the smells of our thanksgivings have familiar peculiarities. Rather than traditional sage dressing, we stir in apples from the back yard tree, the one Dad says has been there since God, a tree so old he doesn’t know its name, just that it’s a cooking apple which farm wives cherished but no longer grow. Nothing smells like that dressing—sweet old apples and sharp onion.

My sister and I, helping our proud mother as much as she will let us, cook giblets separately and before dinner, we pull out brothy pieces as a kind of appetizer. Slicing the heart, we peak through the chamber holes as though they were windows into each other’s or our own hearts before dripping the thin salty slices onto our tongues. We giggle and tell each other lucky stories.

At dinner our family sits down in disorder, no Norman Rockwell image of quiet charm and quaint affection with our Thanksgiving. Not serenity but liveliness and noise dominate our dinners, primarily because a dozen grandchildren under 12 vie for space and food. But as this harvest rich meal ends in disarray, one tradition holds. The family who hosted the previous year’s dinner brings the wishbone from last year’s turkey, wrapped in an old linen napkin. Then the hosts for the current year’s dinner unwrap it, make a wish, and break the bone.

This year it is my parents’ turn to make the wish. My mother picks up the bone as children swarm around her.

“Grandma, Grandma, what’s your wish?” they beg to know. She closes her eyes. For a moment it is as though she holds her life in her hands.

“I can’t tell,” she says. I am surprised. Often this wish has been an opportunity to congratulate or give thanks for a recent birth, a new job, an impending or better marriage.

“It won’t come true if we tell,” Dad agrees. The little ones turn silent, puzzling over this idea.

Then my parents’ old fingers, swollen but firm, grasp each tine of the wishbone. They know to put their thumbs up, knuckles together, and to make sure they twist their wrists just so. Each aged hand pulls gently away from the other. The kids watch, the bone spreads, and finally, with a quick crack, it shatters. But this time, in a wild wish of its own, both prongs of the bone break, and the paddle bone flips through air, flying across plate and table, banging against the window as though it still wanted to be a bird, not a wish.

The children are awed. “How did you do that?”

“Do it again.”

Like a startled flock of birds, our laughter comes up. My father chuckles, picks his teeth with his bone. With a sadder smile, my mother fondles the part she has in her fingertips. A grandchild comes to her knees, and asks plaintively, “Does it still happen?”

“What, child?” My mother, caught in her own thoughts, doesn’t know what the little one means.

“The wish. Does the wish still come true?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I hope so.” She answers softly. The child wanders away. My sister goes to the windowsill, rummages among the African violets and comes up with the errant piece. She turns it in her hands, against the place where the coffee can cut her palm.

“Here’s the wish,” she says and she walks across the room. I think for a moment she will give the little coin-shaped bone to one of my parents and it crosses my mind that I wouldn’t know which one to choose, if I could give one of them their wish. But she brings the bone to me, looks me straight in the eye, and drops it into my hand, my own nest of scars.

“Make a wish,” she says, smiling.

And I do, for all of us, for the paradox of trial and joy that is a family growing older, for this Michigan winter to be easy on us, especially for the love of sisters—for all the contrasts and compositions and stories never to end. Outside, like a curtain coming down on this bittersweet month, a new snow bleeds.