November 21, 2007
Wednesday

I knew when I accepted the invitation from Jentel that I would be sharing a house for a month with five women I had never met. I knew that we were expected to buy and store our own food, and that we were free to make communal or individual arrangements for meal preparation and eating. I also knew that I would be in Wyoming, 1800 miles from my home and my family, on Thanksgiving.

The group has been together a week now. Like many artists, we are independent and individualistic. We maintain separate time schedules, rising and eating and disappearing into our private work spaces and emerging again and retiring as each feels her own need. I am the oldest in the group, and probably the most diffident (from shyness, not disdain) when it comes to building relationships and forming attachments. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my studio, determined to make the most of this opportunity, and I am probably the least connected to any of the others.

We have been preparing our meals separately. I usually have finished a pot of coffee and polished off a big bowl of hot barley cereal with dried cherries and raisins before anyone else is up. The house is usually empty when I come back about noon for a bowl of soup (microwaved Campbell’s creamy tomato) and a piece of fruit. Some of us are usually in the kitchen together in the evenings. There have been a lot of baked potatoes topped with cheese sauce, roasted root vegetables, concoctions of black beans and asparagus and things wrapped in tortillas. No one is a vegetarian, but there hasn’t been a lot of grilling or pan frying or baking of meat.

I don’t know how the idea to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner came into being. I don’t know who proposed it, or when. I only know that yesterday we were all in the kitchen at the same time, and lists were being made and responsibilities assigned. It’s almost as if it is some kind of requirement of citizenship that we have turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and pie together and not another day of Thai rice noodles with peanut sauce from a box for one and a plain tuna sandwich for another, eaten at the same table perhaps but each with a magazine spread out, a quick rinse of the dish, and then back to work.

We divvied up the tasks. One person is in charge of the turkey. She got it today on our weekly trip to town at the health food store. It cost $44. (It is organic. And free range. I think it also has a degree from Yale.) Right now it is in a water bath that we’re changing every two hours or so, because it is also frozen solid. Three big sweet potatoes are boiling on the stove, destined for sweet potato pie. There is a box of cornbread stuffing mix on the counter. I bought two kinds of cranberry sauce — whole and jellied. I was going to make my own whole berry sauce with grated orange peel and walnuts, but by the time I remembered that I had only a few minutes left before the van was due to leave town for the return trip, and the raw cranberries were in the produce section on the other side of the store. (I’m guessing that’s where they were. Shopping in an unfamiliar grocery store can be like shopping in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language.)

But I did remember my bread ingredients. I’m making my all time favorite dinner rolls, from Mary Gubser’s Mary’s Soup Kettle and Bread Basket, a book that I acquired because I forgot to send back the book club negative option card. I have used this accidental possession with joy and with love for thirty years.

“Mary’s Dinner Rolls” are easy. You mix the dough up the night before, knead it lightly in the bowl, and then refrigerate it until two or so hours before you want to bake it. The secret ingredient? Cardamom! Cardamom usually costs about $13-$15 for a three-ounce bottle. I found a small packet, just a few teaspoons, at the health food store for only $3. (Organic, even!)

Alone in the kitchen tonight, I mixed up my dough. I tried to remember the ritual meditations from Gunilla Norris’s Becoming Bread, a resource I use frequently at home, especially during the holidays. I couldn’t, of course, but I did my best to bring some mindfulness and some intention to the work of measuring and stirring. I held in my thoughts the people I will eat this bread with, the people I am not eating it with, the people I wouldn’t be eating it with even if I were at home because our lives are so full with others.

I sliced open the little packet of ground cardamom and its smoky frangrance rose up to me. I’ve written a short story in which a character experiences a painful longing for people he is no longer connected to after he breathes the aroma of cardamom bread baking. His story ends in disappointment because he can never have that time in his life back. When I eat my cardamom rolls tomorrow, I will give thanks that I can.

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