Tradition

We are alone once more.  My daughter and her boyfriend started their 12 hour voyage back to Virginia this morning.

It was a wonderful Thanksgiving spread over 4 days and I am wallowing in nostalgia.

It is a truism, but sometimes the simplest things are the best.

I love to cook and to try new recipes, but there are strict standards for what goes on the Thanksgiving table around here.

So instead of the lovely new appetizers I thought about we had the Helluva Good Onion dip that my son loves and the goat cheese that my daughter loves.  Somehow both manage to disappear. Then there is the Waldorf salad my daughter makes every year complete with the carved apple swan and the lovely green salad contributed by a friend. This is followed by my niece’s green bean casserole with the fried onions on top and the pureed sweet potatoes.  I snuck in brussel sprouts this year.

Thanks to friends we had heritage breed turkeys this year and a lovely chestnut stuffing.

My sister-in-laws chocolate cake and pumpkin pie were joined by my husband’s apple crisp.

So there were a few new dishes, but mostly the old favorites.

The house could have been cleaner and it would be nice if the roof had actually stopped leaking, but none of that mattered.  In the end we had four days of talk and laughter and the satisfaction of the familiar.

I leave you with a poem by Wendell Berry that my sister-in-law passed along.

I tremble with gratitude

for my children and their children

who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinner together, the dead

enter and pass among us

in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.