Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [144]
But a perfect turkey is no more important than any other part of this ritual: lighting the candles, passing the gravy, telling some of the same stories every time. Eating until you swear you are miserable, and then happily eating dessert too. In addition to the pumpkin pies, our friend Maruśa brought a strudel she had learned to make as a young girl in Slovenia. She apologized for its shape, explaining that for holidays it was supposed to be turned like a horseshoe but she didn’t have the right pan. Everyone told her, of course, that it didn’t matter, it would taste the same. But I understood her longing to re-create in every detail a comestible memory. It’s why we’d needed the cranberries for the tart, pinky tinge that oozes into the gravy and makes everything Thanksgiving. It’s why we go to the trouble to make a meal with more vegetable courses than many people consume in a week, and way more bird than anyone needs at one sitting.
Having more than enough, whether it came from the garden or the grocery, is the agenda of this holiday. In most cases it may only be a pageant, but holidays are symbolic anyway, providing the dotted lines on the social-contract treasure map we’ve drawn up for our families and nations. As pageantry goes, what could go more to the heart of things than this story of need, a dread of starvation, and salvation arriving through the unexpected blessing of harvest? Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly. Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There’s the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seeds: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time.
Oh, yes, I know the Squanto story, we replayed it to death in our primitive grade-school pageantry (“Pilgrim friends! Bury one fish beneath each corn plant!”). But that hopeful affiliation ended so badly, I hate to keep bringing it up. Bygones are what they are. In my household credo, Thanksgiving is Creation’s birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality.
Snow fell on our garden in December, leaving the dried corn stalks and withered tomato vines standing black on white like a pen-and-ink drawing titled Rest. I postponed looking at seed catalogs for awhile. Those of us who give body and soul to projects that never seem to end—child rearing, housecleaning, gardening—know the value of the occasional closed door. We need our moments of declared truce.
The farmers’ market closed for the year. We paid our last call to the vendors there, taking phone numbers and promising to keep in touch for all kinds of reasons: we would miss our regular chats; we would need advice about the Icelandic sheep we were getting in the spring; we might drive out sometimes to get winter greens from their cold frames. We stocked up on enough frozen meat to see us through winter, including a hefty leg of lamb for one of our holiday dinners.
The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our