Three's Company

I woke up very early this morning (for me), about 5:30 or so. Lay in bed for a while and then got up to start cooking.

First, pie crust. Then coffee, bacon, and eggs as my parents got up, to have with our breakfast pastries. After we finished the dishes, my mom mixed up her legendary stuffing (the stuffing adopted by my roommates and best friends), and I prepped the turkey: butter up under the skin and all over the outside, salt on the inside, and celery, onion, carrot, and apple in the cavity. Salt & pepper all over, then set it a-roasting.

Next, cleaning the fresh green beans for the casserole, and mixing up the mushroom sauce for it. Chopping up the ingredients for broccoli-cheese soup. Thawing the corn that my dad grew and my mom froze, and they brought from NJ. Skinning and slicing the sweet potatoes for a new casserole recipe while my mom chopped up white potatoes and set them in salted water to be cooked and mashed later. Filling my grandmother's Depression-era carnival glass dishes with cole slaw, pineapple slices, and cranberry sauce.

Somewhere in there, a phone call to Julie, who was generally cheerful but momentarily dismayed as it was still unclear whether she was going to have 3 or 10 for dinner that night. I knew I was having three--my parents and me. This is the first Thanksgiving I've cooked in the new house, so it felt festive, helped along by the rare and abundant sunshine we've been enjoying here for the past few days.

While my mom and I were in the kitchen, my dad was bustling around, dismantling a large scaffolding he had built for the back of his truck to bring out an extension ladder so that we (i.e., he) can reach my attic to add more insulation. He then fixed a gutter that I had made a couple of hapless attempts at and removed the air conditioner that also requires dismantling the 6'x8' L-shaped desk he built for me when I started grad school, which blocks the window. Then, finally, with no more jobs he could do without going to H0me Dep0t, he settled in to drink a beer in his undershirt and watch football (I took a picture--the American Male Enjoys a Traditional Thanksgiving).

Suddenly, the turkey was done, and there was a bustle of mashing potatoes, whisking up gravy, and carving the bird, and then a meal in which the three of us ate probably something less than 1/4 of the food.

Afterward, I took my parents up to the church so they could meet Jodi and Lori, who were leading a meeting of the recovery ministry (I had expressed my surprise that they were planning to meet when I knew that Jodi had a crowd coming to her house for dinner, and she had said, almost meekly, "But it's Thursday, and what if somebody needs a meeting?" So there they were, so kind, so faithful.). So two of the people I'm always most grateful for got to meet two of the newest additions to that list.

It was our smallest Thanksgiving--we missed my sister, out in Colorado, and my grandmother who died last year, and my other grandparents who were at home in New Jersey--but somehow it was an enormously satisfying and happy one.