Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content.
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| Like The Queen Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content. |
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3 Comments:Glad you had a nice one! (From someone who lives in a 905 ft² house!) I like that "who wants to borrow a nightgown" idea! I loved reading about your day, as always, and knowing you is another thing I'm thankful for. It sounds like a wonderful day. Hubbo is getting a bug I think - has chills and our house now officially qualifies as a sweat-lodge I think - it is almost as hot as his moms house. Can't wait for pics of the sweater. I take it you don't have cable - I love our Internet connection thru the cable - Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom] Friday, November 24, 2006 Among many wonderful things about hosting Thanksgiving dinner is that when the meal is over and the kitchen is squared away -your house is so beautifully tidy and clean. And in my case, it feels so spacious. My house is not very big. It’s not particularly small either, unless you compare it to the super homes popping up in vinyl villages on rural lanes that used to link farm houses to main roads all across Virginia. It's maybe 1700 square feet plus a really big back porch. I’m grinning as I type this because I believe that standard these days is 2400 sq.ft. Oh well. I think girls might still like to read the Betsy-Tacy books too. I'm just an anachronism, I suppose. Anyway, what is wonderful, (as I pause to cry, “Hey! Look! A bird!”) is that my house is clean. Really tidy clean. Lawsee how I love a clean house. I didn’t really do any more than I usually do to clean the place up, but when you pull out all the leaves on the dining room table and bring in both card tables and the extra 9 chairs, this place gets mighty crowded and mighty tiny. But when you put them all away again - wow! I live in A Castle! I have that same wonderful feeling in January when all of Christmas goes back into the attic. Perspective. What a treat it is to experience perspective. We had a happy bunch for dinner yesterday. Friends from the city joined us along with BH and her girls.   I purposely didn’t do anything other than shop before hand because I wanted to savor the rainyday pleasures of Wednseday. Besides, the more I thought about Thanksgiving dinner, the more I realized that it was just another dinner like the ones I cook all the time .... only a little bigger. Stuff takes bigger pans and more hours in the oven, and we have bread on the table - and we actually sit at the table - and I can ask the little girls to make jello. It may be that I am the only person who thinks that jello is as important as turkey at Thanksgiving. But mostly Thanksgiving Dinner is just dinner blown up. And the oven does all the serious work. I just push the pans in. Oh. Yes. Because I didn’t bake any deserts. Thank you Episcopal women! We were all sorely feeling the absence of P - especially D, who got a tad bit weepy around the eyes. But we drank a toast to her speedy return to health and the east coast. And happily, she called after dinner, but before people had begun to peel off and everyone got a chance to speak to her. P - you stay there and Get Well! and then Come Home! Though it was a very wet day, and now and then actual rain fell from the sky, it wasn’t the nor’easter we had on Wednesday. One of the great traditions of our T’giving day is the walk between dinner and desert. There’s a flurry of pushing dishes into the kitchen and moving some of the card tables out of the dining room, but then we don coats and hats, or sometimes no wraps at all, for this is the south, after all, and then we move on down the lane in the orangey golden glow of sunset. The vista is majestic, as broad and encompassing as an ocean view, but more varied, since there are trees and fields and ancient crumbling house ruins that echo with the mysterious memories of times gone by - a world no longer with us - a farm hand chicken coop barn loft many children back yard with a well and a privy and a smoke house world that's becoming 100 years ago fast. Each year those ruins sink closer to the ground. One day they will become the earth and only my faded cataract filmed eyes will see them in the photo album of my mind. But for now I can offer them up to my precious friends who live in the city or in new developments where streets are smooth and the grass all came from a sod farm. One of the intermittent showers was falling as we began to have our fill of the savory dishes so we postponed our stroll and ate desert instead. The little girls were playing with a pile of hats I’d gotten from an auction. The hats are almost all too small for me - I wanted them for the hat boxes. But they fit the girls and we had quite a fashion parade upstairs. In the end I gave each girl one of the hats, but first the assembled company all needed to have a go at trying them on. By the time we’d all done or Cindy Crawford routine, the rain had stopped and we took a blustery stroll out to the mailbox and back. Jacob’s Gut was swollen to twice it’s width from all the rain, but not a dog was interested in testing the waters. Though the walk helped gravity rearrange our dinner some, I believe all of us save the children, who wisely only eat till they’re full, needed some more un-bent recreation so we sprawled on sofas or cushions on the floor. People flowed about the house talking or picking bits off the turkey or feeding snippets to the dogs until I said the fatal words. “Who wants to borrow a nightgown?” Like theater lights flickering, that seemed to remind everyone of how good pajamas and nightgowns feel after consuming a week’s worth of minimum daily requirements in a single sitting. The tenor of the conversations shifted. People began to stand - to wander towards the front door - where, what the heck, there were the coats - the car’s just outside. Lawsee my nightgown would feel sooooo good. Within 30 minutes everyone was gone. It took another hour to get the house back to that surprisingly tidy state described above. By 8:30, BD and I were in bed with books which kept me interested for about 5 minutes but I believe held his attention for the rest of the evening. Fare-the-well Thanksgiving. You get easier, but sweeter, every year. Can’t wait to see you again, next year. posted by Bess | 6:45 AM |
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