Storm Bert is butting his head against our back fence, tossing the lid of our compost bin, and rattling our slender cherry sapling to its gauzy roots, while I’m clicking through the New York Times pie recipes to assess which one to bake for Thanksgiving. Being a Brit, all I know about Thanksgiving comes from Wednesday Addams. What a gal. Coincidentally, when I met Ronny’s charming cousin Jimmy he was pleased to tell me and his new bride, Donna, also a Berkshire-born Englishwoman, that I was now a member of the Addam’s Family. I raised my hands to shoulder height and did the finger clicks.
Of course we don’t have the Thanksgiving holiday over here, just like we don’t consult dermatologists or eat candy corn in this country. Ronny isn’t very wedded to it as a holiday because of its murkiness as far as human rights go, but he welcomes an opportunity to eat hot cornbread. I welcome the opportunity to cook the unfamiliar, so I’m making plans for butterscotch and banana pie, or maybe banana lemon pie. There will be cornbread, as well as that soft, crunchy mess of good stuff that Americans call dressing, a sweet potato soufflé that is as close as I can get to the airy, brown sugar-laced confection we ate at Fred’s when we stayed with Phil and Judy in Wesley Chapel. I will probably make green bean casserole, too. In England the word casserole describes a melange of cubed meat and winter vegetables cooked slowly and for hours in dark brown gravy. There might be small, cloudy dumplings on top. Discovering that the word casserole, to an American from the southern states, is simply an excuse to smother any soft slick of puréed vegetables with a fine grit of buttered cracker crumbs, pecans, and cheese has been as exciting to me as finding out that Snoopy is still so embedded in American culture that his giant marshmallow-like effigy is paraded to Herald Square every year at about this time. It makes me think of those weird parades you stumble across in Southern Italian villages, where a Popeye-armed butcher shuts up shop for the afternoon to hoist a garish, melodramatic Madonna through a noisy crowd. There’s nothing spookier.
I mention the Macy’s Parade as if I know what it is. I have seen it in movies so I understand it in the way that a handful of Americans might know of Chas and Dave. Its nuances are impossible to grasp across the gulf of an ocean and the layered subtleties of culture.
If my understanding of Thanksgiving is superficial, my thankfulness is not.
These past few weeks my terror of the Government - the British one, not the US one - has been blooming like frogspawn in a spring pond. The backroom deals to sell our national security to the highest bidder, and the breezy haste to kill off the sick and the old has shaken me. I have never been scared of a government before. Is there safety in living out in the sticks on one of the remotest edges of the country? Is there safety in keeping fit, staying away from the NHS as much as possible? I hope so.
With Grace, near Galway. Photo by Maria Colfer.
As it is, several times a week, Ronny and me both comment upon our incredible good luck. We live in the friendliest little village-that-time-forgot. There appears to be two dogs for every human. There is a tiny old theatre a short bus ride away, where the curtains smell of mildew and there is always a full house. There are alpacas, kestrels and goldfinches in the field across the way, as well as rare bugs that entomologists get worked up about. I live with the most peaceful, deep-thinking sweetheart in the world and he’s nothing compared to Vera. Happy Thanksgiving. Hold onto the good stuff for as long as you can.
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