Thankfully, it's 2012

My daughter, who is in her first year of college in Salem, Oregon, is having Thanksgiving with lovely relatives on her father's side in Portland. She called a while ago and sounded like she was having a sweet time. One of the little girls in the family she's staying with was hanging around her while she was talking on the phone with me, and the piping background voice of little girl fascinated by grownup girl quite melted my heart.

My daughter and I had a decent run of Thanksgivings together. According to our parenting agreement, her father and I were supposed to swap her back and forth on alternating years, but the arrangement didn't stick. This was a strange, hard emblem of discord. I wanted my daughter to be loved and wanted by her father and his new wife, but I also wanted her with me over Thanksgiving. It's a sweet holiday - there aren't many rules, it's kind of slow-moving, a time out of time. The first year it was announced that Laura would be staying home with me for Thanksgiving, I was very dismayed, but I also was thankful.

We were on our own for that holiday - we had invitations to go to several friends' family celebrations, but Laura had been developing a fascination with cooking, via the Food Network, and she voted that we would stay home so she could cook. Hers was the only vote. She researched recipes and we made a shopping list. We tried things I would never have considered - such as our main dish, Cornish hens. I remember a long day of working through unfamiliar recipes. Laura was the rookie chef and I was the coach. At one point we thought dinner was ready, but then we had to put the birds back in the oven for a while. In the end, we had a tasty meal, if unevenly cooked and (re)heated.

That day was a learning experience we both remember - we have talked about it quite a few times over the years. We never did Thanksgiving all by ourselves again, so it stands out in memory.

Other Thanksgivings stand out as well, none so much as the first holiday after my mother died. My mother roasted a turkey every Thanksgiving of my childhood that I can recall. My lifetime favorite food, still to this day, is bread sage stuffing roasted inside the bird. My mom never did anything very fancy to make this rapturously delicious food. She stockpiled stale bread in the freezer and thawed it out the day before. She tore up the bread and left it to dry out on top of the frig all night in a big pan where the dog and cat couldn't get to it. In the morning, she made stock by boiling the neck and gizzards from the turkey, and she sauteed onions in margarine. (Butter was too expensive.) She moistened the stale bread with the stock and onions and more melted margarine, adding salt and pepper and lots of sage. Then she packed the bird with every scrap she could fit inside. Nothing in the entire world tastes better than this kind of stuffing. (Feel free to use butter, and you have my blessing if you like a little celery - saute it along with the onion.) By the way, I can't call it "dressing" - it's stuffing. Stuff the bird. That's the whole point.

My mom died in 1988, when I was in my late 20s, so I had had ten years or so since childhood to experience and experiment with other ideas about Thanksgiving - in the coops at Oberlin, where nobody went home for Thanksgiving (we had classes on Friday), and with friends and then with the family of my first husband and future father of Laura. His sister, Emily, is my friend from college, and we have done lots of Thanksgivings in different configurations. Rolling up her sleeves after dinner, Emily always says, "Many hands make light work," and she is the kind of person who has the turkey carcass boiling in the stock pot even as she's masterminding the cleanup. If I got to choose someone to do the dishes with on any given day, I'd choose Emily every time.

The year my mom died, Emily and my mother-in-law came to our rescue at Thanksgiving. I was grief stricken - I could barely imagine getting through the holidays without losing my mind. My husband was doing a wonderful job of hanging in there with me, but I was a mess. We had to go back to Knoxville for Thanksgiving, to the house where I grew up, where my mother lived until her death. My brother Mark still lived there. We were going. Somehow, and this was a wonderful distraction, we came up with the idea of surprising my mother-in-law by making the type of turkey stuffing that was her specialty, with matzoh meal and slivered almonds. (My brother Mark, who had to do all the shopping for this, had quite a time finding matzoh meal in Knoxville. One store tried to sell him Malt-O-Meal.)

The stuffing turned out well, and I remember how we enjoyed the look on my mother-in-law's face when she took a bite and realized what we had done, but what I remember most is the gratitude I felt, that I still feel, for those who helped me get through that time - my husband and Emily and their mother, and many others.

This year at Thanksgiving, I feel the ghosts of the harder years at my shoulder. I am grateful to be in an easier time in my own life, able to repay some of the gifts of love that brought me through.