Dear Madge,

My Thanksgiving dinner was two days late this year. I got a virus a week before Thanksgiving and was not well enough to shop and do food prep. My neighbor Eileen, who lives just around the corner, suggested that she could take me to Grocery Outlet on Wednesday morning and we could have dinner on Saturday, so that’s what we did.

Prices have gone up. The “free” turkey that you get with purchases required $125.00 of spending at Grocery Outlet and $150.00 at Safeway. And some things on my list were not on the shelves at all — maple syrup, for instance.

Friday morning I was standing in the kitchen, noticing how well the fast burner on my stove browned onions. I knew you would be pleased. I actually had to turn off the heat for awhile while I chopped celery and grated carrots.

I learned a new trick for roasting chestnuts: after you cut the cross in the shell, you soak them in water for an hour before roasting them. Oh. You and I didn’t know that. It worked like a charm.

What I really miss, Mom, is your kitchen: the zinc-lined bread drawer, the bread boards, the double ovens, the cooler, all of those big low cabinets and drawers. You and Stan the carpenter did a great job of designing a practical working space.

It’s all gone now. The people Bryan sold the house to took out many desirable things, converted closets to bathrooms, ruined the bay window in the breakfast room to make a deck (handy for the chilly Kensington summers). We were fortunate to live in that well-designed house for so long.

I was tired on Saturday morning because your cat Onyx jumped over my head at 2:45 AM. She came here to live with me this month. Surprisingly, at fifteen and a half she still goes up and down the stairs — I feed her in my bedroom, but she likes to supervise the opening of the can, which happens in the kitchen. When she woke me, I realized that I was hot and that the hallway outside my door was hot.

I had tried out the heat in the kitchen and adjoining dining room for the first time on Friday, anticipating dinner guests who would expect me to heat my house. I knew I had turned the heat off, but it was clear that it had been blasting away. Basically, the control knob malfunctioned: it turned, but it didn’t make contact with the mechanism that controls the temperature. I wrenched it off again, hoping that I had been successful (The vent was so hot that I couldn’t tell if it was still on).

I went back to bed after 3:00 AM, but could not get back to sleep. I forced myself down to the kitchen at 8:15 AM where it was still warm enough to go barefoot. Usually it is about 45 degrees in there this time of year, good for rolling out pastry.

Then I just worked: I stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven, pulled the neck out and started a stock pot with vegetable scraps. I made Grandma’s roll dough and your pie crust, pumpkin pie filling, cranberries. I trimmed and poked yams. I trimmed Brussels sprouts and cut crosses in the bottom.

My neighbor Eileen arrived when I had reached the point of utter exhaustion and was functioning on determination and willpower. She had a workman in tow (Her husband begged off because he is currently subject to coughing fits). Dave the workman brought the glass top from the old breakfast room table up from the garage, unwrapped it, cleaned it up, and set it on its pedestal. I had dragged up the pedestal and chairs on Thursday.

I don’t love it in my dining room — it’s too big for the space, especially the chairs — but I had to have a table in place for holiday entertaining so it will stay there at least until January 6th. Kelly, my friend and former landlady, is coming for pie and coffee in the next few days and she will appreciate having a chair at a table. I eat in my bedroom and on the front porch a lot.

Anyway, the food was delicious — all the things we usually made, except salad: working alone I can’t make a salad on Thanksgiving Day. I had thought to make a kale salad with lemon-tahini dressing because it improves as it sits, but I didn’t have the energy to make it on Friday, or the time to make it on Saturday. I asked Eileen to carve the turkey and to mash and season the potatoes because I was decanting dressing, making gravy, shaping rolls. I had her make after dinner coffee, too, while I whipped the cream.

Thank you for teaching me to cook this good, basic Midwestern food. I still enjoy cooking it and eating it and sharing it with others. Eileen pitched in to do a lot of the clean-up — she’s much more careful about wrapping food than I am. I sent her home with food for her husband, packed into my cake pans and then I had a hot soaking bath.

Onyx is enjoying a small dish of turkey scraps every day. She would like a bigger dish of them, or perhaps for me to serve them more frequently, but i don’t want her to develop digestive problems. She is much more vocal than she used to be: she runs through her repertory of yowls and howls and complaints every morning when she wants to be served breakfast earlier than I wish to get up, but she’s basically a good kitty and has largely adapted to life in this house. She hides in the bedroom closet if she hears a stranger on the stairs. She still roly-polys occasionally and I sing her little Onyx songs (“If i Were an Onyx,” “Rock-a-bye, Onyx,” and “Roly Poly, Onyx little cat girl”). She is definitely a survivor cat.

I don’t know what else to say. I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you and all of those holiday dinners we made together and thinking of your mother’s eagle eye when I was peeling and de-eying potatoes. Today I enjoyed a breakfast of pie, coffee and rolls and started listening to Christmas music. My house has wide window sills so I will scavenge greenery and put up birds and ornaments.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Love,

Sharyn