The Thanksgiving Treasure Read Free

town,” said Grandma. “And stay off the highway. You remember what your dad told you.”
    â€œYes, Grandma.” I had heard it all before, and knew it by heart.
    â€œAnd don’t get into any poison ivy or poison sumac,” she said.
    â€œYes, Grandma.”
    â€œAnd be sure and stay bundled up good.”
    â€œYes, Grandma.”
    I knew very well I wasn’t supposed to ride too far out of town, but Carla Mae and I always did it anyway when there was something really important at stake, and our fall bouquets were really important. This was an annual adventure for us, and we would bring back cattails, milkweed pods, bittersweet, thistles and red and gold leaves to make our special artistic arrangements. The most artistic bouquet would go to our sixth grade teacher, Miss Thompson, and the other two we would keep—one for my grandmother and one for Carla Mae’s mother.
    We took one last look at page 253 in our Girl Scout handbooks to make sure we could spot poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac, and we were ready.
    We pulled on our wool gloves, buttoned up our jackets, wrapped our mufflers around our faces and mumbled unintelligible good-byes to Grandma. I pulled a wool stocking cap down over my pigtails, made sure my glasses were on snugly, and we were off, clattering down the road toward the edge of town on our bicycles.
    Carla Mae had been given a new bike the previous Christmas. Since she was the oldest, it would later be handed down to each of her six brothers and sisters in turn. Her bike was shiny green and had a headlight as well as a basket. We both had colored plastic streamers on our handlebars and planned to get fancy mud flaps as soon as we could save enough money. We already had them picked out and circled in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue. They were “fabulous white,” with red reflectors. The crowning glory on both our bikes, though, was the raccoon tail we each had flying from our rear fender. We had saved for weeks to buy them and took extra good care of them, even brushing and combing them now and then.
    But I was ashamed of my bike. I had wanted a bike for a long time, but my father didn’t believe in just handing out that kind of money to people for no reason, so he advised me to save my allowance if I wanted one. I figured at that rate I would be thirty-five before I had a bike.
    Meanwhile, my uncle in Omaha took pity on me and gave me an old bike that had been sitting in his garage. It hadn’t been used for about fifteen years, but it worked very well. I was ashamed of it because it had skinny tires. Nobody had heard of “English” bikes or racing bikes in Clear River, Nebraska, in 1947, and everyone made fun of my weird bike. I had always noticed that it went faster than anyone else’s with the same amount of effort, but that did not make up for the fact that it had embarrassing skinny tires. Besides, it was an ugly, dusty maroon color which Carla Mae and I called “icky brick.” I hated it.
    We set off in a northwest direction. Clear River was so small, a town of just 1500 people, that we only had to ride three blocks in any direction to get out of town. We soon came to the forbidden highway and wheeled out onto it without a second thought. If we were ever caught riding out here, we’d be in trouble at home, but we did it all the time anyway. We knew perfectly well how to ride on the left and watch for traffic, and there were certain times when we just knew that we were old enough and smart enough to go ahead and do things that our parents thought we shouldn’t do.
    Nebraska was probably one of the best places in the world to ride a bike. It was absolutely flat. That always irritated us in the winter when we wanted to go sledding—there was hardly even a slope around Clear River, let alone a hill, and the only shot you had on a sled was to run like crazy and belly-flop down on it. That hurt your stomach, and you