Thanksgiving Day has come and gone. And while the holiday recedes into the past, I will take time now to recollect the happy moments that will warm my chestnuts in the following years.
We had a small celebration that was marked by a lot of arduous kitchen prep work. Not since I worked for minimum wage in a restaurant as a dishwasher and prep-guy have I worked so hard in a kitchen. My mother-in-law came down form Vermont so that she and my wife could cook a Thanksgiving Day dinner together. It was fun, and it was nice that mother and daughter could spend that time together. I peeled potatoes.
The holidays have really changed for me in the past several years. My mother and sister died two years ago and there is a real “homemaking” gap in the lives of us surviving family members.
All this has reminded me of Clearances, one of many magnificent poems by Seamus Heaney. In the poem, Heaney is at his mother’s death-bed and remembers how they never were so close as when they used to peel potatoes together in the kitchen.
We all have so much to be thankful for.
Copyright 2012 Magnus Incognito