Thanks Giving

It is grey and dank this morning. But the furnace works, and I can pay the natural gas bill, and our house is sound and tight. I have covered the windows that let in cold air with heavy plastic that I get free at work (it lines boxes of cardboard tubes we use in packaging). I have food enough to eat and tea enough to drink, and I bought a pumpkin pie that was made at our church by women who have a talent for baking. It helps raise money for the church and it provides my daughter and me with an incredible large pumpkin pie decorated with pie crust cut out in leaf shapes. Very lovely! I plan to eat a piece for breakfast, holding it in my hand, no plate, no fork. My Grandma made incredible pies, and every incredible pie I encounter on my walk through life brings me back to her.

Thanksgiving at her house is a memory of scents and tastes and colors. And of warmth. Walking out of the cold into the back door after the long car ride, I was always greeted by the scent of the pine wood walls and of her homemade yeast rolls. She would roll the raised dough into balls and put 3 of them into the spaces of a muffin tin and bake them. She would buy brilliantly green baby sweet gherkins, just for me, and she would make vibrant cranberry orange relish, fresh, just for me. Such colors, and so shiny! There would be scalloped oysters topped with crackers for my Grandpa and scalloped corn for my mother. And lemon meringue pie for my Aunt.

To make the relish, she would clamp the heavy metal food grinder to the wooden counter curving out just above her radio, always playing WGY. She would fit it with the right sized plate, grind the cranberries, and then the oranges, and then sweeten it all with sugar. I loved to push the fruit down into the grinder as she turned the crank (the cranberries would go Pop!), and to watch the ground fruit pour out into the bowl set beneath the grinder. A kid easily amused, I guess.

She would also make a small mincemeat pie just for her and the man in the wheelchair. It even had beef in it, hence the name, mince meat. (One of our pie baking church ladies made mince pie for our annual Harvest Supper, and she made hers from green tomatoes. Who knew the many manifestations of mince pie? Not me, I won't touch the stuff.) Along with the mince and the lemon meringue, she would bake apple and pumpkin pies. She had been baking pies since she was 12, and she did not even need to measure out the ingredients for the crust, just did it all by hand, the day before, from memory.

The metal grinder would be washed and dried and used again to grind up the turkey giblets to be put into the gravy. I loved that job. I would strip the meat from the turkey neck (eating the choicest strips), I would shove in the gizzard and the liver and the heart and the neck meat into the grinder and watch in fascination as it came out, transformed!, from the opening in the grinder. I loved that giblet meat. Loved it. So did my Grandpa, and he and I had worked out a deal to share the gizzards. When I was very small, and did not know--yet--it disgusted people so, I would eat every single inch of the drumstick, save the bone itself. I even cracked out the marrow and ate that. All I can say is, I guess it is the Indian in me that had to eat like that. A throwback, my mother called me then, and calls me yet. (They had their own myths and legends of Indian blood, this Dutch-German clan, ever since my Grandpa's aunt had begun researching a family tree and then abruptly stopped her research, not liking what she had found, apparently, but never telling anyone why. And so the speculation of Indian blood began. My mother had her own version of that, however. She insisted we were part African-American. In fact, she and the man in the wheelchair told me my own creation myth: That they had found me in a greasy bag in the garbage in the Bronx, and that when I turned 10, I would turn into a black person. When I replied that we were not black people, my mother flattened her nose with her index finger, as if she looked black African then, and said, 'See?")

Today my daughter and I will be walking down the hill to share Thanksgiving dinner with friends. My friend grew up in a big family on a Michigan orchard, and her husband grew up in a big missionary family in Hong Kong. Her 2 sons--the younger a young man with developmental disabilities, and the older a sweet and earnest idealist currently living in Brooklyn--will be there, along with the older son's girlfriend. She is Swiss/Czech, but raised in the US, and she teaches ESL to immigrant children in Brooklyn. She and I often have friendly arguments over whether Jamaican children should be in her class (I say yes and she says no). Also invited is a young man from our community who lived all his life in Las Vegas and ended up here because of an internet romance, but once he arrived, the lady in question took one look at him and said, No way. (He doesn't always brush his teeth and a stroke has made it so he walks funny.) She promptly fixed him up with an abused, mentally ill woman, but he and she have since divorced. A combination of her incestuous relationship with her uncle and her need to walk into the river fully dressed at 3 AM drove him out of that relationship. He is sweet and polite and smart. He has very strong faith in God and that helps him survive. We have that in common! Anyway, of such sad and colorful truths are real life composed.

My contribution to the feast will be cranberries served in a beautiful clear glass dish that belonged to my Grandma's mother and cooked in a way my daughter loves them. She has always loved cranberries since she was very small. I would keep the unused portion of a bag of raw berries in the freezer, and she would toddle over asking for a 'cranbear'. ( What is it with kids and sour things? Sometimes they just love them!) A creative culinary challenge faces me in this year's cooking of the cranberries. I usually cook the whole berries in apple juice and honey until they pop, but I forgot to buy the juice yesterday (too busy buying Newcastle Brown Ale, but that is another story). So, my sweetening options are these: honey, brown sugar, grape jelly, orange juice. I am leaning towards a combination of honey, orange juice and a bit of grape jelly. We shall see.

I also prepared a feast for my bird friends, laying out for them in 3 feeders a repast of their favorite black oil sunflower seeds. I have added 2 feeders this year. Along with the usual one out on the back porch, tucked in amidst angel's trumpet and woody nightshade vines, (that's the one I can see from my dining room table), I hung one out in the sumac. I told the sumac that since it is a persistent yet uninvited resident of my bit of earth here, defying all attempts of mine to mow it and hack it away, it might as well be useful. Hence, a feeder now hangs there. I also have a small feeder on the front porch made by a Jamaican man from a coconut. It has 2 parrot type birds rising up on either side of it, and an opening carved out that creates a kind of coconut cave where I put the seed. Even if the birds don't visit the feeders today, they have an open invitation to feast here. I am thankful for those birds, for their cheerful little lives, chirping and sticking together even when the coldest wind blows drifts of snow and the world is half-mad with darkness. I am thankful for all the plants and other critters who inhabit my world and make it a place full of spontaneity and life. As I am thankful for the many friends who love me despite my cranky, grouchy ways, and solitary eccentricities.

But now I need to go cook those berries.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai