Thanksgiving

“Thanksgiving is really over,” my friend Patti wrote yesterday.  “All that’s left are yams.”  I know what she means.  In our house, it’s a Tupperware container a third full of broth-less turkey soup, which no one really wants to face again.

When I was growing up, my parents put on Thanksgiving dinner for the whole extended family.  My mother would pull out her spiral-bound Thanksgiving notebook a week in advance, and begin making lists and trying to pin down numbers.  Thanksgiving for thirty was a week-long enterprise that involved moving the furniture around, sliding leaves into tables, ironing tablecloths, grocery shopping with two carts, staying up late the night before, peeling potatoes and butternut squash.  By ten in the morning the relatives would begin to arrive, bearing home-baked pies and braided loaves and tins of homemade fudge.

My grandma Kenison always brought apple pie and a loaf of her airy white bread, perfect for sandwiches the next day.  If the forecast promised clear skies, her brother, Great-Uncle Woodrow, would come too, and could be counted on for his famous raspberry pie, made with berries he’d picked in July and frozen heaped into a pie plate for this very occasion.  My dad churned two kinds of ice cream in the garage and roasted a huge turkey on the Weber, while my mom tended a second bird in the oven. It was my job to wash the grapes, make the clam dip, stuff celery, arrange olives and sweet gherkin pickles on the lazy susan.  The aunts and grandmothers chatted in the kitchen; the men would retreat, beers in hand, to the den and football on the TV; eventually my brother and I would be shooed outside with all the cousins for “fresh air before dinner.”

The meal was on the table, without fail, between one pm and two. Heads would bow, while a grandparent said the grace, remembering those who had died, giving thanks for the health of those gathered round, blessing the food, the family, the day.  The menu never varied: turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and baked sweet potatoes, gravy and cranberry sauce, creamed onions and boiled peas, squash, sliced bread, marshmallow salad.  Four kinds of pie.  Every year was the best year ever, every dish the best it had ever been — even the year a wild windstorm blew the power out and my parents managed to cook the entire meal in the fireplace and on the grill.  Always, someone would say that we’d eaten too fast. Always, someone who claimed to be too full to swallow one more bite would agree to seconds anyway, just to make it last.  And then, just as the rest of us were slowing down, loosening belts or unbuttoning pants, Uncles Roger and Chet, who saw each other but once a year, for the Thanksgiving feast, would, by some unspoken signal, face off.  The bowls of mashed potatoes and stuffing would be passed down the table, the plates filled again, and the two of them would set to work, this annual competition for the greatest stomach capacity as much a ritual part of our day as the Macy’s parade or the fruitcake that no one ever ate, but that everyone insisted my mom had to make anyway, for breakfast the morning after.

Somehow, by the time the last car pulled out of the driveway and disappeared into the night, the kitchen would be restored to order, the dishes done, the turkey carcass encased in foil and tucked into the fridge, surrounded by precarious stacks of leftovers.  My parents made the whole thing look easy.  And as a result, although I am now a middle-aged mother of two nearly grown children and fancy myself a good cook, I have never cooked a turkey in my life.

Last week, my mom and dad produced their forty-eighth Thanksgiving dinner.  It’s been a long time since we hosted the whole clan.  Death and circumstance and the passage of time have separated us.  And this year, with Henry in Minnesota, and my brother at his wife’s family’s house, there were just five of us at the table, as small a Thanksgiving as we’ve ever had in our family.  We edited a little: no fruitcake, no creamed onions or clam dip or home-made ice cream.  But otherwise, the meal was the one I’ve eaten all my life.  Jack and Steve and I held hands with my mom and dad, said grace together, and then we each spoke in turn about what we’re grateful for.  My dad had tears in his eyes as he said, “I’m just glad that we can still do this.”

Earlier in the day, I’d taken a walk and passed a house where a dozen or more family members were engaged in a rag-tag football game out on the lawn.  For an instant then, I found myself feeling sad, yearning for the good old days, the gaggle of aunts and uncles and cousins, the holiday as production.  But it really was just for an instant.  We’ve had that, I reminded myself.  We’ve lived it, loved it, and come now to a different part of life’s journey.  And back at the house, at that very moment, my parents were putting the finishing touches Thanksgiving dinner, as they have for as long as I’ve been on the planet.

The five of us lingered at the table for a long time, enjoying one another’s company as well as the meal.  We raised a glass to the missing ones and the departed ones, and we savored what was ours to savor in the moment.  And then, in no time at all,  Steve and Jack and I had the dishes done.  We whiled away the afternoon, talked to the relatives on the phone, played Scrabble and Bananagrams, nicked away at the pie.

In the morning, my mom and I divvied up the remains of the bird. By evening, we three were home again, stock simmering on our own stove, Thanksgiving abundance carrying us right through the weekend.  Today Jack went back to school, Steve took one last biscuit and bowl of soup to work for his lunch, and another Thanksgiving holiday came to an end.  Someday, I know, I’ll be the one following my mom’s old recipes, and Steve will be trying to recreate my dad’s special nest of charcoal on the grill.  But right now, I’m grateful, above all, for this: the fact that I’m still somebody’s daughter.