Posted by Elizabeth

My mother died suddenly, without warning, on Thanksgiving Day seven years ago.  It was a strangely symbolic day for her to die, a holiday that revolves around food, one of the great loves that she and I shared.  I don’t remember the exact date, just the fact that it was Thanksgiving, the two events forever coupled in my mind.  When I think about Thanksgiving, my grief is wrapped around the pumpkin pie; the turkey is stuffed with sadness.

I want to put my heart into preparing the foods I love, that my mother loved, but it is all so complicated.  The year after she died I baked my first bird; a proud moment for most women, indicating the baton had been passed from one generation to the next.  For me, the baton hadn’t been passed so much as dropped abruptly at my feet, the resounding “thud” still echoing 12 months later.  Over the next few years I couldn’t even think about Thanksgiving, preferring to let the day slide by without notice (if that was possible).  Maikael and I went out to a restaurant one year, a very expensive and nontraditional affair, the slab of turkey on the plate the only reminder of what day it was.  Most recently I’ve purchased boxed dinners for two from Wild Oats, shoveling mashed potatoes out of plastic containers onto casual dinner plates.  I know it sounds pathetic, but I preferred it this way.  Although I tend to elevate food on a pedestal most days of the year, today – the one day on our calendar where food is placed in highest esteem – it was important to downplay its meaning.  I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge that there was anything special about the occasion, because remembering wouldn’t allow me to forget.

This year I’m finally ready for things to be different.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps enough time has passed.  Perhaps it’s because I spent last Thanksgiving holed up in a hotel in New Zealand, where I supped on an entirely too-large steak – jarring enough circumstances to conclude a seven-year cycle of wallowing.  Whatever the reason, I’m ready to move on, to pick up the tradition of Thanksgiving again. It was important to start small, to imbue just enough pomp and circumstance to help the day feel special, but not so much as to feel disappointed if things didn’t go as planned.  I invited my friend, Tim, the consummate foodie who maintains the appropriate level of reverence for good food.  We built a menu together, drawing on classics while incorporating what we hope will become new favorites.  (A nod to custom while celebrating tradition seemed fitting.)  Everyone agreed that rolls were in order, but a fierce debate broke out between homemade, tinned, or store-bought, each evoking different childhood memories.  There had to be pie, but we were divided on what kind, finally settling on pumpkin sour cream, made with real pumpkin puree.  Maikael insisted on mashed potatoes and stuffing, and we all agreed that we could do without the Jell-o salad we grew up with.

But the piece de resistance, the only thing I insisted on, was the Heritage turkey.  After reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, where she devotes an entire chapter to this bird, bred for hundreds of years in our country, I knew I had to have one.  Superior in taste and quality, I ordered my turkey from a local farm last March, giving it enough time to mature for Thanksgiving.  On Tuesday I picked up the bird from the back of a dusty white pick-up truck parked in front of a local furniture store, one of only six butchered by a lone farmer’s hand for the year.  Valerie, the farmer, had lost her husband around the holidays last year; we shared an instant kinship, participants in a club for which we maintain a reluctant membership.  She handed me the turkey, wrapped in white paper with the words, “Happy Thanksgiving, Elizabeth!” scrawled in black.  It was regal and special.  It was the kind of thing my mom and I would have spent hours talking about over the course of the year, waiting and wondering what the turkey would taste like.  It was the perfect way to move forward.

And yet, as I prepared for this modest feast, I could feel the past tugging at me.  As I flipped through my recipe file I stumbled upon the recipes for the dishes my mother had planned on preparing seven Thanksgivings ago, pages torn from Country Living and Martha Stewart and stuffed haphazardly in the front pocket.  I had found them sitting unceremoniously on the kitchen counter alongside an already-cooked turkey that day, and couldn’t bear to throw them out.  It meant too much.  There was the recipe for the Pumpkin Sage Cream Sauce to dress the pumpkin ravioli I brought from an upscale market.  And Cranberry Bean Salad with Butternut Squash and Broccoli Rabe, whose ingredients weren’t destined to come together in the dish.  Amongst the many mysteries that day held, there are certain questions I will never have the answers to.  Why had my mother ripped four pages on roasting vegetables from an obliging magazine?  Was she planning on making the roasted carrots or the roasted beets?  It wouldn’t have mattered; my mother knew I loved both.

When I thumbed through my copy of The New Vegetarian Epicure, searching for inspiration for this year’s dinner, I was stopped in my tracks, as I always am, by the recipe for the Walnut Tart.  It was my contribution that day, my mom having supplied the walnuts, which she received from an itinerant walnut farmer who stopped by her bakery every fall. Every time I see that recipe I remember insistently knocking on my mother’s apartment door for 45 minutes while, unbeknownst to the world, she lay splayed on the cheap blue carpet on the other side of the door, her heart having mysteriously stopped hours earlier, while I cradled that ridiculous walnut tart in the palm of my hand.  I brought the dessert back home at the end of the day, too distraught to eat it and too distraught to throw it away.

I am working hard to free myself of these culinary shackles; you cannot celebrate Thanksgiving without addressing food.  (I can’t help but marvel at the fact that my relationship to food is so comfortable the other 364 days of the year.)  But rather than let myself be ruled by my discomfort with food during this 24 hour period, I am reclaiming the positive connotations.  I love cooking.  My mom loved cooking.  She’d be proud to see me scurrying with authority around my own grown-up kitchen, basting my heritage turkey.  I wish she could be there to sample a slice of my homemade pie.  But when we gather around the table this evening, I know her spirit – tucked in the folds of the rolls she taught me to make, nestled in the crinkle of the pie crust she showed me how to prepare – will be with me.  My mother is always with me in the kitchen, especially on Thanksgiving.

Today begins our Holiday Season Extravaganza.  Between now and December 25, Anne and I will share what it means to celebrate the holidays – Life in Pencil style.  We’ve made a commitment to focus on simple pleasures this holiday season, and we’ll be sharing our experiences, experiments, favorite holiday memories, cherished recipes, time-honored traditions, and small ways to make the holidays more fun…or at least more bearable.  That’s right, folks:  a month of posts to make your holidays—and life – richer.