Thanksgiving is coming and I am humming:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWe gather together to ask the Lord’s BlessingHe hastens and chastens, His will to make knownThe Wicked oppressing now cease from distressing Sing praises to His Name, He forgets not His Own.

I am forgetting not my own.

This new Cook Book is from 1950, and my Mother’s Soul is written in here

I have a particular love of Thanksgiving, because it is my Mother’s Holiday. The Feast of a gloriously basted Turkey with its crispy golden roasted wings, and its sagey cornbread stuffing was my favorite meal as a little girl, so much so that I asked for it on my Birthday as well. I loved my Mother’s stuffing, and for those who will quibble - yes, I know Dressing and Stuffing are two different things:

DRESSING: Southern, it more like a bread pudding, moist and delicious with gravy

STUFFING: Northern, it is a bread casserole, fluffy and toasty, soaked in broth then baked.

DISCLOSURE: There is no reason to fight the Civil War again over this: there was a Yankee in the family on Mother’s side, and that’s how we ended up with Stuffing.

It’s all in the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book circa 1950, that Sacred Tome of the Savoury and Sweet. Her notes are everywhere, along with grease spatters and little spots of dough, love from an oven.

Behold the glorious technicolor chicken

Now, before I go further, I should explain: as a Schroedinger’s Human, I live in the constant state of what is vs what was vs what will be. Thanks to a genetic predisposition of just up and dropping dead (thank you, EDS and your lovely COL31a gene) I am keenly aware of the fact that I have lived well past my expiration date, and am constantly reminded by janky blood pressures that I have a 50/50 chance of storming the Heavenly Gates on any given day. Rather than being depressing or frightening, it is invigorating, because it reminds me that any words might be my last - and do I really want those last words to be ‘Take out the ****ing TRASH-’?

No, no I don’t think so.

Mortality makes one mindful, and so I try to live each day as if it’s my last, even if it’s not. But I also have to live each day as if it might NOT be my last, and I have to make sure I stay up with bills, etc etc. So when I am planning this Thanksgiving Meal, will I have to actually eat it, and what will my Children and their Children remember about my feast?

The answer is, “Your MeeMee couldn’t cook.”

God bless her heart, Mama tried. It’s not like she didn’t let me in the kitchen. She genuinely worked on teaching me to cook- but as a Dirt-Floor Sharecropper’s Daughter who nearly starved to death as a child, there was an implicit fear of ruining food - because there might not be more coming.

WE didn’t have that problem; as a child, I lived like royalty compared to her cotton-picking childhood; we had running water and walls that didn’t let the snow inside on winter days. But Mother lived with that memory of hunger etched into her soul, a gnawing reminder that famine was only a plateful of food away…

and so, the cornucopia of food overflowed at our house. Every nook and cranny was filled to the brim with food, every corner stuffed with preserves and pastries and stores against the perceived apocalypse around the corner - and Mother was the Keeper of the Kitchen Flame. For my Mother, cooking wasn’t just a labour of love - it was an act of survival.

Yes, Mother did this while on 4Liter Flow of Oxygen - with help from her little Helper and my Husband.

But that meant I wasn’t yet trusted with the food. The Meal must be prepared properly if it is to be the last; if I am a Shroedinger’s Human, she was a Shroedinger’s Hunger, the duality of a plentiful present existing side by side with her impoverished past.

And so I watched as she prepared, carefully salting and cooking each meal so it wouldn’t kill us all, as food sometimes did in the days before refrigeration. She took a bite of each canned good 30 minutes before she served it to the family, on the off chance that botulism might be lurking in that innocent-looking can of Tuna. She was the tester and taster, ever living on the edge of a tomorrow that might bring the past roaring back - and I learned all about cooking without actually cooking too much.

I need to bake all of these. Now.

I would feel bad about this; I would complain to you about how my Mother’s caution stifled me, or robbed me self-determination, but the truth is, Mother saved us all from me.

I’ve eaten my cooking, and I’m here to tell you she did us all a favor. Thank God for her wisdom; I am alive because she cooked glorious meals, and my Children are alive because we lived close enough to Grandma that she made pot roast every Sunday. Other than that, it was Beanie Weenie and Pasta Bites, because at least I knew I couldn’t screw that up…

but that also means my Mother’s stuffing died with her.

This CorningWare Dish of the Sacred Stuffing is older than all y’all

It’s literally a person missing from the table; not in a chair but actually ON the table, a place where a dish of heart and heat resided, now empty. That shallow CorningWare dish with the blue flourish is bereft of what made it truly beautiful to me, not just the food it held but the hands that made it -

and that brings us back to me.

I am now the repository of my Mother’s knowledge, without the actual skill. That skill skipped me and landed on my Daughter, who knows the proper way to cook, for unto each person has been given a spiritual Gift. My Daughter has inherited the Gift of Cooking from her Grandma, and has learned to make a tasty cornbread stuffing, and it is almost but not quite Mother’s recipe. She also has inherited a huge responsibility of running the Family Ranch and the Family Business, and that means there is no time this year for her to prepare the Thanksgiving Feast.

And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is up to me.

How can this go sideways? Let me count the ways:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published1)I have a Black and Decker Toaster Oven/AirFryer2)I have a Mini Griddle3)I have an AirPopper4)I have no Skill

I am not complaining here, I am just stating facts. I live off randomly distributed bags of Takis and Farm Fresh Eggs griddled up by my Husband, because he loves to cook and I am thankful for that every day - in fact, he cooks up a banger Thanksgiving from time to time. But that Kitchen now reside with Boy, Bride and Baby - and I will not saddle my precious Daughter in Law with having to make a a gargantuan Family Thanksgiving meal. So I volunteered myself to be the One.

The Problem? We now live in the WunderBunker, and the kitchen is teeny weeny; there is no place to cook a large meal. This means I must rely on the kindness of HEB and the Tamale Lady.

In Texas, Thanksgiving and Christmas Tamales are a thang. Do not question the Tamales; they will be made by one who has been given the GIft of Tamale-Making. The Tamale Lady - known only as La Doña del Tamales- is blessed with the arcane knowledge of masa-to-meat ratios, and she will be rewarded handsomely with cash by all who seek her virtues.

HEB, on the other hand, carries a fully cooked Turkey Breast, and I have chosen to serve it sliced up with Tortillas from the store, as Turkey Fajitas, with Pico De Gallo and Guacamole, made by HEB fresh daily in little plastic tubs.

Only two side dishes will be made by me: one being a Three Sisters Sidedish of Corn, Beans and Squash, specifically Hominy, Black Beans and one of Mr. Pruitt’s still-fresh Church Pumpkins, and the other being Sweet Potato Fries in the Air Fryer, which will be sliced then fried. That’s it. That’s the whole sum of my ability, and GodSpeed to me, I am praying I don’t burn them…

This Thanksgiving will be very delicious, and also very humbling, for I feel as if I have failed my Ancestors.

I remember the labour my Mother put into the Feast, the hands that held the pies, the casseroles, the endless baking and knowledge of eons; and it has come to this? Me parting out my wealth to strangers, so they may feed my family, so I may stare at the Sacred Turkey Platter with the knowledge that they look down from Heaven in disdain at the Absurdity of Modernity?

This is the way it is SUPPOSED to be done

Then Pilgrim Priscilla Mullins elbows her way to the front of the crowd.

Yes, that Priscilla Mullins. She is my Ancestress, she of of the Standish-Alden Love Triangle Fame and Pilgrim Perserverance, who at 19 was orphaned in a Wilderness as norovirus decimated the new Colony. I cannot hear her, but I can distinctly feel her, wagging her ethereal finger at me in gentle pilgrim chiding:

how thankful I should be, as the Keeper of Memory, to live in this time of food and plenty; how the famished dreams of the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock could only imagine such a world, overflowing with the wealth of food and light and heated houses and clean water that didn’t need to be hauled from the stream…

I feel their hunger running through my veins, the memory of starvation and need, the ache for a single scrap of food ingrained in our collective consciousness like threads in my tapestry; poverty made virtue by those who lived it and loved through it to be washed away by the wave of time. They are in me, alive in me, the Generations of Thousands, born into a single me -

No, I was not given the Gift of Cooking. But I was given the Gift of StoryTelling, and tomorrow, I will share their stories around the Thanksgiving Table. The Tamales will steam with the joy of the present, and the Three Sisters with share their savoury tales of the ancestors of this native soil. The sweet potatoes will sing the Southern song of poverty and plenty, and I will recount the Memory of Millenia, in stuffing, dressing and the remembrace of wings past -

the Mirror of my Mother, my Feast of Thanksgiving.