WIDE MEADOWS: A CONTINUING SERIES; LIGHTS FOR THANKSGIVING: THE NEIGHBORS ARRIVE FOR A MEAL

Editor's note: This is an installment from a chapter of Jean Bell Mosley's book "Wide Meadows" that was first published in 1960.

Last week: After buying the lights, they were returned to pay for other purchases.

Mom and Grandma were silent about the lighting system, which made it look more than ever like they didn't expect anything Dad planned to come about. I wanted to say, "Well, he did get it almost got home with it, but-but-" My upholding of Dad's actions seemed to sway in the middle like the conveyor belt.

Everyone carefully avoided looking at the hole in the ceiling for the next several days. Once Grandma, after having swept, stuck the broom handle up through it and said maybe we could use it for a broom holder if we moved the table. It looked ridiculous hanging down over the table. I jerked it down and put it where it belonged and Grandma told Mom she believed I needed a round of sulfur and molasses.

"Guess the neighbors won't be coming for Thanksgiving," Dad told Mama and Grandma when preparations for the meal were getting underway. He didn't say why and they didn't ask, not even about the fat steer and the wagonload of corn that had disappeared.

Lou and I were proud of our new dresses as we stood up to say our Thanksgiving pieces. Everything Mama did, she did well. It was artistic, neat, finished, and workable.

The pies she made Thanksgiving morning were brown and flaky. The turkey was roasted to golden perfection. The potatoes were light a puffy. It wasn't her fault that there wasn't enough to go around for Dad had said the neighbors weren't coming. But they did. All of them.

"I know it weren't right of us to come on you at the last minute, Myrtle," Mrs. Stacey said, handing Mom two loaves of freshly baked bread, "But after Jack came home, surprisin' us like he did, we couldn't keep from comin'. And don't ask like you don't know where his ticket came from." She pushed Mama gently on the shoulder and winked secretly.

Lonnie Britt set down a jar of preserves and hugged Mama, saying that a more neighborly thing could never have been down than what we had down about the taxes. And as soon as they got on their feet again they'd pay them back.

Mama sat down weakly. She glanced at Dad and I saw him nod his head the least little bit of a nod. And Mama suddenly smiled at him. A symbolic smile, I guess you could say, like Dad's cricket and the cornucopia. It said, I love you, and I think what you've done is wonderful.

Grandma opened some more cans of beans and peaches and preserves and cut all the pieces of pie in two again. We brought in the library table and the bedside tables and all the boxes and benches we could find, and had a wonderful meal.

"Now, Wilson," Paul Britt said, when everyone was finished, "tell us what your surprise is."

Dad looked stunned. I guess he'd forgotten he'd promised a surprise.

"You mean you ain't seen it yet?" Grandma said, pointing ruthlessly to the hole in the ceiling.

I watched nineteen pairs of eyes turn toward the hole in the ceiling, then toward each other and finally toward Dad. I felt so sorry for him I couldn't stand it. I pretended to drop something on the floor and got down to hunt for it so I wouldn't have to watch these people laughing at him, destroying his dignity.

"It's a symbolic hole," I heard someone say, and I got up off the floor hurriedly to see who else understood this kind of stuff. It was Grandma.

"It stands for light that Wilson, here, has brought into our lives. All of us have holes in our lives, don't we?" She looked around at the folks slowly. "Holes where something isn't that we had planned to be," Grandma continued in a very practical voice. "And we have to fill them up with something else until the right things come along."

A queer feeling took hold of me, hearing Grandma, the Archpractical, talking like this. A good, light, floating feeling. I looked at the hole in the ceiling again and thought of how it was filled up with Jack Stacey's railroad ticket home and Paul Britt's three years of taxes, and a barrel of fruit rather than with the carbide light fixture for which Dad had made it.

"And," I heard Archpractical going on, warming to her explanation, "sometimes the things we fill holes with turn out to be better than the thing we had intended for them."

Dad was glowing like a pumpkin in the autumn sun. Mrs. Stacey and Mrs. Britt had caught on and were using their napkins as handkerchiefs. Sad-happy they were. I'd felt like that before, too. Mr. Britt, looking thoughtful, had thrown back his shoulders like he had found a startin' point at last.

"You mean you bored that hole there a-purpose for this lesson?" Mr. McDowell demanded, skeptically, ready to laugh at the joke that must be here somewhere.

"We're using it for that until something better comes along," I said.

Everything got so quiet.

Dad scraped back his chair and went over to open the door. "Needs airin' out in here a little, don't you think?" he asked everyone, but Archpractical especially.

November sun flooded in, laying a golden floor mat before the door, but it did not match the illumination that came to everyone, especially to us, through the hole to the attic.

Next week: Pork roast and snipe.