Adapting tradition for a new age...

I’m not sure how it happened, or when, but Thanksgiving has definitely become my holiday. I faintly recall motivation on my part, probably around 1991, to host both sides of our family at my place. My thinking went like this: cooking a large feast for twenty or more people had to be less hassle than traveling across several counties with rambunctious twin sons.

I was right. Since then, I perfected the turkey, streamlined the menu, timed appetizers and dessert around backyard football and, hopefully, gave all my guests a holiday gathering they would want to participate in again and again. Through the years, the dishes have changed, new faces have emerged, some we have lost, but always we gather around turkey and stuffing and wine and pie – together – and we are nourished simply because we are together. This is why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

This year, our tradition is being rewritten. First, our twenty-plus crowd has dwindled to ten this year as the cousins are grown and off to places east, like Madison and Michigan and Virginia and China. (Any further east and they’d be west!). We also have changed kitchens this year, requiring our guests to put in a bit of travel time to reach our table. We’re grateful they accepted.

Finally, and most drastically, I’m turning over control of the meal to our budding chef. I have every confidence that he’ll cook magnificently for us; he’s already shared with me his plans to braise the turkey rather than roast it. He explained it all to me in great detail and his description simply made me hungry. I’ll be on hand in the kitchen to observe, of course. It’s not often this old dog gets a front row seat to new cooking techniques. Parents are supposed to stay involved in their children’s education!

But I admit this change of kitchen control, this passing of the baton — or, more appropriately — the baster, will be hard for me. It’s not that I want to be top chef forever, mind you. It’s just that we have house rules that dictate the cook never has to wash the dishes. It always seemed like a good rule, as long as I was the one who was cooking.

So inspiring, so fleeting...

During November, here in the north country, the sun simply gives up on us and leaves, often in exasperation. She doesn't call; she doesn't write. She leaves nothing and so we settle for our memories of her, which we bask in to fend off the depression we feel over what lies in her wake: gray skies and startlingly cold wind.

The obvious consequence to sun's departure is barrenness. The fields are clear, the trees are skeletal, the landscape devoid of mammalian activity. And so we hunker down, hiding from the darkness that barely gives way during the coming days. We keep our heads down to ride it out, as if we're buffering against a bitter wind. Which we are.

And then, late one afternoon, if we're lucky enough to lift our noses from the work that isn't inspiring us anyway, we might catch out the window a color, the likes of which we haven't seen since a June morning when we awoke before the world. It's the color purple and it fills one half of our horizon. It's purple!

And if we're smart, we run from the work that isn't inspiring us anyway and we grab a coat and a hat and gloves and the dog, and we grab the camera running outside to bask in the purple light because we know how quickly purple fades. Like the summer had. And like our lives are. We run and we put our heads down to block out the wind and we find the edge of the purple where we can, for a second or two, see that our sun, our lover, hasn't abandoned us totally. She is there, our heart tells us. She is there our eyes tell us. And for the briefest of moments, purple inspires us.