Thanksgiving surrender

This is not the year to host 18 or 20 family members for Thanksgiving Dinner. And it's the first time in more than 20 years that I have not done so. I'm hurting. I put myself in charge of that tradition and now I'm not in charge. No table to set. No gravy to excel at. No red Jello setting in Grandma Masch's glass bowl in the refrigerator. No flipping back and forth between the stained pages in the poultry, stuffing and pie and pastry sections of "The Joy of Cooking." 

On the other hand, there's no stressing out about all the things to accomplish between getting home from the 10am Thanksgiving service at church and the arrival of family at 1pm. 

Another upside of this comes directly out of a minor household crisis: my gas range seems to be leaking gas, sometimes but not all the time. Not enough to convince the technician from the gas company who came out last week that something was wrong. But enough that I pulled the range away out the wall last night and turned off the gas. The repair man is scheduled to come on Friday. He's taking care of people who need their ovens tomorrow. I can get along without this year — though this brings an additional disappointment. 

The one thing I was counting on this year was an apple pie even if (or especially if)  I would mostly eat it myself. The crust is in the refrigerator, waiting to be rolled out and filled with the cooking apples from the Farmer's Market that I've been saving since the end of October. Now, I'm delivering an unbaked pie to my sister this afternoon which she says she'll mostly have to eat herself.

I don't care all that much about the turkey or the mashed potatoes. Some years my Thanksgiving experiments with vegetable sides turn out great, some years not so much. The apple pie, however, is for me the raison d'être for Thanksgiving dinner. It's also the food of choice for breakfast on the day after. Last night, about 10pm (yeah, don't ask) when I discovered the problem with the oven, no pie-baking felt like a final blow, or one blow too many.

It's the little things.

This morning I learned from about fifteen seconds of googling that I can roast a whole chicken in my 8-quart Instant Pot--the Instant Pot that I've never been quite sure why I bought. So there will be something special for dinner tomorrow -- my daughter's favorite drumsticks and potatoes "baked" in the crock pot. Later in the day, I think we'll have a family Zoom to share pictures from childhood -- the myriad old slides that I'll continue scanning after the replacement scanner from Amazon is delivered tonight. 

"What does your family do for Thanksgiving?" is always useful small talk this time of year. What do we eat and who do we eat it with? What are we thankful for? The lists for most of us begin or end with "family and friends, of course"and that is a big part of what is missing this year. I'm sure there are inspiring essays being prepared for publication on news and other websites tomorrow, on gratitude, blessings, faith, what really counts. I'd like to deliver something of that here, but I'm tired. Tired of today's rainy weather. Tired of the pandemic. Tired of worrying about it. Tired of reflecting on grief and loss and loss of control.

So I'm surrendering, at least for a day or two. The good dishes will stay in the cupboard. No cooking with gas. No big clean-up either. But time to be. And time to be thankful for just being. 

Ties that bind

Not sure what it says that while browsing through music on Spotify I settled on Wagner's Overture to Parsifal as the thing that felt most right. Moody, mysterious music, with little strips of cool redemption flickering at the upper edges, like a scrap of cloth tied to a central air conditioning unit so that you can look out the window and see if it's on. (I am certain that this description would appall Richard Wagner. If he could understand it.)

In any other year at this point in November, I would be sizing up the cooking and cleaning tasks ahead, looking at recipes, making lists, getting ready to host Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family. I think we were eighteen last year, from baby Chloe to 87-year-old great-grandma. 

But it's not happening in 2020, the year of the covid-19 pandemic. And while I"m trying to forge ahead and make alternative plans (and also help my daughter plan one or more Zoom birthday parties for her 30th birthday in December) I fell off that slow-moving barge of making-it-work at some point. I just need to grieve a while. 

To grieve is a very non-specific verb. What do you do when you grieve? Cry? Think about the past? Worry about the future? You sit and feel sad. You tear up at all kinds of things. Yesterday my day started going south while listening to Governor Pritzker as he talked about his family during a press conference on covid precautions in Illinois. He choked up a little and my throat went there, too. Empathy. The thing that holds us all together as humans. That thing whose absence makes a wide crack where anger and cruelty grow like black mold. Something we've seen too much of lately.

I don't need to chase out the spiderwebs from the legs of the drop leaf table which in other years handles the overflow seating on Thanksgiving Day. And I don't need to put the leaves in the dining room table either, which frankly is not easy. No need to figure out which white wine to serve -- the ubiquitous and safe chardonnay we fill our glasses with as the meal begins, the sauvignon blanc that I and my older niece like, the sweet stuff brought by the youngest of the nieces. Or maybe a nice rose? Instead I'm going to roast a chicken on Thanksgiving Day, because I do not wish to eat turkey for weeks on end. I'll do it in a 400-degree oven, so there's a good chance I may still have to wave a dish towel under the smoke alarm at some point before dinner. And I may bake more of the usual pies so I can share them.

Something I read yesterday morning pointed out that Thanksgiving is the only major holiday where the traditions are shared by all Americans, regardless of religion. ( I wish I could remember where I read that so I could link to it). On this Holiday, people all across the land worry about the white meat drying out before the dark meat is cooked, and everyone has an opinion about what should and should not be on the menu. At my house there are mashed potatoes that I don't really care about but everyone else does, cranberries that almost no one eats, over-sweetened sweet potatoes, and cornbread baked in Aunt Clara's cast iron molds. (Someone will request the plastic bottle of pancake syrup.) 

But that Thanksgiving is more or less cancelled this year. And the many layers of meaning I attach to it will have to be settled back into place to wait for next year. Like the cobwebs behind the chairs in the living room. 

Gratitude, of course, remains, and is a proven strategy for coping day-by-day. So what am I grateful for today? Sadness shared -- that catch in the throat. 

We share our mutual woes,

our mutual burdens bear,

and often for each other flows

the sympathizing tear.

"Blest be the tie that binds" stanza 3

 

Knit from stash

This morning's Gospel lesson was from Matthew 25:14-30, a parable about three servants given money by their master. Two invested what they were given, got good returns, and turned it into more. One buried the money, afraid to lose any of it. 

I listened to the sermon, which began with a little story of a child who couldn't bear to give things away but instead kept them under the bed. My mind jumped to what's under my bed, and in the cedar chest, and in baskets in the living room, and pretty soon I'd found the meaning of the parable for me today: knit from your stash.

Stash is a confessional theme in the world of fiber hobbyists. We invest in yarn, or in fabric, in beads, floss, patterns and project kits. And the investing, at least for some of us, runs ahead of the making. If I were to finish two projects for every one that I bought yarn for, I'd start to clear things up in a decade or two. But the satisfaction of finishing something, along with the temptations from yarn stores that fill my email inbox, means the buying runs slightly ahead of the finishing six months out of the year. The other six months I put myself on a yarn diet. It works like most diets -- you can stick to it for a while, but when you go off the diet, you do so in a big way. 

But back to the Bible, or rather, back to considering the "knit from stash" mantra. 

Often it's the especially beautiful skein that lingers in the stash, or the really gorgeous piece of fabric. The one you didn't buy with a specific purpose in mind, you bought it just because you loved it. Because you were at an outdoor yarn festival and the August sun made the reds and oranges so warm and festive. Or because you picked it up and carried it around the yarn shop and it was made of alpaca and felt heavenly. Or because the bright floral print on the quilting fabric lifted your heart on a grey day. Or because you truly want to make something lovely for someone you love -- like hand knit Christmas stockings or a new pink quilt for a young woman's bed.

But once the fabric is cut, it's cut, and it can't be anything else. Once the yarn is knit and you've put all the time into it but don't like how it's turning out -- well, it's a lot of work to unravel it and use the yarn again. Sometimes you start something and you just can't get it to work the way you want it to and it gets shoved into a bag and then into a corner. (If it's blog post, it stays on your dashboard with a red DRAFT label on it, until without even reading it again, you click the garbage can.)

It's better to be knitting than not knitting. It's better to be sewing pieces of fabric together than just admiring the folded yardage on the shelf. It's better to start the project and give it, if not your best effort, a good effort, and to learn something from the doing. I just finished knitting a hat, for which I chose the colors and the patterns. It's pretty and bright, and much smaller than I intended. I'll take what I learned and start another one soon. 

The servant who buries his talent in the parable is cast out by the master. Focusing on fear and anxiety, or rather, on these things above all, do not advance the kingdom. Hiding the stash away, or feeling guilty about having it do not lead to happiness or creativity or warm quilts and sweaters. 

Make something out of what you're given, or of the things you've collected -- thread, fiber, experience, stories. Knit from stash and carry on.