It ’s nearly Thanksgiving and I’ve been walking. The house smells of Chicken Pot Pie and Molasses Cookies and I want to go home but I can’t leave this year. It’s been a common theme throughout my life and I miss home. Anthony Bourdain said “"Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go."
Every morning at The Buzz I made bread and every single day I saw my mother’s hands as I kneaded dough. Every day I heard her voice telling me to watch for smoothness, “no rough patches” on the dough and every day as I kneaded the dough, it was my time to be quiet and meditate. Making bread was praying for me.
My father taught me to break the rules. Oh, not in the way it sounds but in learning to cook. He added all kinds of things to make something familiar, delicious and different. He cooked and quilted, sewed and farmed. Whenever I think of Fall, I think of Dad. He was always in the kitchen, peeling the pears, or bottling fruit and making jam. He taught me to garden and to use a hoe to weed. He taught me to use what we had and to hold something back for the next planting, so we preserved and stored our food for winter.
Every Thanksgiving as a kid meant that the kitchen would be filled with people, peeling, cooking and baking. The tables would be set with our best china. Grandma would send food over with Mary or Nancy as she fixed and baked pies and sweet potato dishes and then everyone would gather together, say grace and dig in to the loads of food prepared for us.
In recent times, it is Mom attempting to direct all of us into some semblance of order, but inevitably Dad, Ryon and I along with the rest of my siblings and others are standing side by side at the stove, putting dinners together like a well run restaurant.
I am grateful for my family. They are the best people in the world and I’m grateful that my mother brings her flour and yeast on vacation so that we can make bread. I think she knows more than she lets on…..
Deb