Thanksgiving morning.
I wake from my sleep to the warm aroma of roasting turkey.
It’s been cooking slow and low through the night, basting in its juices under a
tent of foil. It’s easier to get up in the morning when the alarm is aromatic.
I shuffle out to the kitchen and open the pantry door, selecting one of my aprons
to wear atop my pajamas. I step through the kitchen door to check on the fruits
of yesterday’s labors. A long folding table is set up in the garage, out there
in the chilly air we call God’s fridge. One dozen pies are placed like a dot to
dot on the plastic table top, created by a multi-generational crew of pseudo-pastry
chefs in a Pig-Pen style cloud of flour dust yesterday in my kitchen. The
crusts have relaxed sweetly around the apples and blueberries, and the trio of pumpkins
are slightly weepy, with that sweet little crack in the middle where we had
tested their readiness with a butter knife while they were still hot in the
oven. Two empty shells await Kate’s annual chocolate and banana cream fillings.
Their sweet flaky rims flutter in golden ripples around my deep hand thrown
Bennion pottery pie plates.
Back in the warm kitchen I pull a handful of eggs from the
fridge, and set the turkey neck and giblets in a pan of water on the top of the
stove. I pull the blinds up from the kitchen windows and let the day stream in.
Two hours later Kate stands at the stovetop, stirring with
the metal boinger as she slowly adds egg yolks mixed with cream to her basic
cream pie recipe. The steady scraping of the bottom of the pan sounds like a
jazz drummer on a well-worn cymbal. The crock pot exhales fragrant wisps
from beneath its plastic lid; little buttery bubbles in aromatic stuffing
releasing the scent of sage and thyme infused with turkey giblets, broken dried
bread moistened with butter and broth, gathered together with celery and water
chestnuts. Against the chopping and the stirring and the clanging is the rhythm
of a Macy’s Parade marching band playing through television speakers. The
kitchen door slaps behind a crew of grunt workers sent down from the East Wing
(aka, my sister’s house, just to the east of us.) This year we will feast in the
West Wing. The men-folk discuss table layout, counting the guest list on
multiple hands. They shift the couches and chairs and coffee tables, drag-in
other portable tables (we have a supply). One by one they fling the edges of
fabric tablecloths up to the heavens, letting them float to the tabletops, then
begin the setting process, adding a couple extra place settings in case someone
new shows up. In a few hours we will look into the faces of the people we love
most in this world. We will clasp hands and bow our heads and partake, and it
will be simply beautiful. But the joy…the truest joy, is found in the in-between; that place between waking and partaking. The motion, the conversation,
the aromas. The softness of freshly baked rolls pulled from the oven. The
laughter of little ones playing dress up or assembling toy train tracks, or
gluing together paper chains scribbled with gratitudes. The chill of late fall
sneaking in when the front door opens. The waft of warmth when the oven door is
pulled down and the foil is removed from the turkey.
Big, memorable moments have their place. We hang our pretty
photographs on our living room walls. Sweetly staged portraits, planned and
executed to preserve a moment in time. Lovely reminders. But the truest
treasures are in the snapshots, the ones we snap on a whim and save in a
drawer, or a photo album, or our computers and hand-helds.
I close my eyes and imagine
gathering all my snapshots and stacking them in a pile. I imagine pinching a
thick stack of captured moments in my left hand and placing my right thumb against the
other side, letting the photos flicker through like the little animated
booklets we got in Cracker Jacks boxes when I was little.
I’ve always been a project person. My days are patterned
around the things I have to do, the responsible things like gigs or meetings or
classes and such. Deadline driven things. And if there is no deadline, it seems
I create projects, probably as a subconscious way to avoid bigger things that
overwhelm me. Routine never did work too well for me. I swirl from one major or
semi-major task to another. But lately it has been given to me, by the Giver of
all personal revelation, that the product of my projects, while they may be
satisfying to some degree, is not where the greatest treasure lies.
Instead I find it there, in the places where we do not wear
make-up; where the windows are dusty from yesterday’s rain and the chandelier
has a few lights that need to be replaced…where the kitchen floor is a grubby
mess…or where the kids are asleep in the back seat on the long drive home…
It's there where the noise is deafening between someone screaming
that they can’t find their shoes, the dog is barking, the baby is whining that
he does NOT need a new diaper and the teenager ignores your request to change
the baby’s diaper because the earphones are stuffed in her ears…
And, too, it is there in the achy silence of an undisturbed bed pillow, where the white noise of a television will not lull you to sleep in spite of
utter exhaustion at having done nothing but grieve…where a gentle word from a
knowing friend evokes a river of tears….
There, in the beautiful swirl of nothing notable, is the stuff
of life. The stuff we will miss a thousand years from now. The place where joy
and sorrow sit hand in hand, completely at ease with one another, like old, old
friends on a familiar park bench. Beautiful, messy, divinely unremarkable
in-betweens.
