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.