How to Transport a Thanksgiving Turkey

Preface

[In 1956, my family moved from Hastings, Michigan, my mom’s hometown and where my grandmother lived to Southfield, a suburb of Detroit. The move made it possible for my dad to realize his dream of owning a Ben Franklin store, but it pretty much broke my mother’s heart and depressed the heck out of my sister, brother, and me. For all the years after that, until everyone left home, my mother cooked a turkey in Southfield, and we drove three hours to Grandma’s house with the roasted bird in the trunk. This is how it all went down. If my mother was still on this earth, she wouldn’t disagree with a single sentence of my description. I nailed it.]

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How to Transport a Thanksgiving Turkey

Start by buying a bigger bird than you think you need. It will be frozen solid so don’t wait until the last minute like last year. On Thanksgiving Day, get up at 4:00 a.m. In a dark house with a single kitchen light burning, make stuffing by tearing two loaves of Wonder Bread into little pieces. Add onions and a lot of sage. 

Wash the bird and study the skin for pinfeathers. Pull them out with a paring knife until you can run your hands over the bird’s skin and not feel a single feather. Pack the turkey with stuffing and put it in the oven. Turn off the kitchen light and go back to bed. At 9:00 a.m., when everyone is awake and dressed for Thanksgiving, take the midnight blue roasting pan with the nearly done turkey out of the oven and set it on top of the stove. Put the lid on the roasting pan. Wrap the lidded roasting pan in a dozen layers of the Detroit Free Press and tie with twine. Call one of your children to put their finger on the knots so they are tied nice and tight. Place the wrapped roasting pan on more layers of newspaper in the trunk of the car.

Ride three hours in the blue and white Chevrolet your husband is driving. Listen to your kids in the backseat counting telephone poles and reading Burma-Shave signs. Worry a little that you didn’t buy a big enough bird. Doze off with the smell of roasted turkey heating the car and wake up in your mother’s driveway. See that your brothers are already there and know they are having cocktails and joking in the kitchen. Put the turkey in your mother’s oven and then look for the yellow baster you left in the drawer last year.

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Originally published 11-17-2017 on Dead Housekeeping