Our houses seem full of ghosts this day before Thanksgiving.
We almost feel them do-si-do near the stove, almost hear them jostle the stock strainer, dressed and buttoned down, spit-shined head to toe, smelling pretty, nudging at us, tugging at us.
Tomorrow we will wake to the smell of onions and parsley softening in oil.
Today we will pick and choose from imagined pictures of holidays past. We will convince ourselves we have to make this year look like the old one in the picture – perfectly pulled off, complete with butterball glow, an unbroken wishbone, an apron with pockets and lace.
In my mind file, my mother, each Thanksgiving, is wearing high heels very early in the day. She is adorned with a silver Monet choker and dipping a spoon to taste gravy. I lean my head on her hip and feel the brocade of her dark blue dress slide and swish against the slip underneath. Her bracelets dangle and clink. Her cocktail ring shines and I want to wear it. She is rested, lipsticked, the meal ready.
When she reads this, she will laugh, and call me. “You aren’t serious?” she’ll ask.
Because, of course, I made it up. I cut and pasted one image of readiness and style and assumed that all her moments were perfect.
She was not always ironed, not always sweet, not always a heroine. Neither were any of my other delicious relatives. They were women getting by on their best efforts, sometimes flying by the seat of their pants with a stopped-up sink, a partially defrosted turkey and a fever budding in their youngest child.
When I try to force my remembered past-pictures toward a preconceived Norman Rockwell perfection, I am being unfair to my aunties, my grandmothers, my mother, myself.
Surely, if I try, I can push this fake Thanksgiving to fade across the white wall of pretend, and leave room to see what really unfolded – vivid, alive.
It is more likely my mother wore Keds, her red stretchy pants, and a shirt stained with pan drippings. She had a table to set, my brothers and herself yet to dress, and even more canned olives to open and set out again in the used-twice-a-year china bowl.
Surely, if I remember it real, I recall four impy children swiping the cheese and Triscuits from the counter, popping the olives on the tips of our fingers, brandishing them at each other, and then swallowing them whole.
We left the bowl empty two times, three, and again.
Thanksgiving was less than perfect but more than enough of everything else – raucous, rambunctious, forgiving, messy, an attempt, a gathering, a sample, a trial, an error, a family.
Surely I’ll remember all this tomorrow, when I’m pouring sugar and water into a pan to heat, and then jumbling the wooden spoon through red and floating cranberries. Surely I’ll remember this when I hear the pop-pop-pop of the berry skins breaking in the hot sugar.
And, surely when my little son says – like he does every year – “Mama, can we have the canned kind too? It tastes better,” I won’t wilt and dither on about the perfect Thanksgiving from the past – the one that did not include canned-
shaped cranberry sauce. Because, again, I’d be making it up.
To their credit, the women in my past were never completely ready or done. They’d laugh now at me entertaining the notion that they were. “HA!” they’d say, gleeful, smart.
They’d remind me that children liked the canned sauce, and that the olives were always gone before the meal started. They’d remind me they shrugged through it, fed people, got on with the dishes and pie.
Tomorrow I’ll think of that; I’ll ready the pop-pop-pop fresh sauce, and then I’ll open a can. My son’s cranberry treasure will slide, gelled and ridged, a lump on a plate. I’ll watch his face delighted.
I’ll call it good enough.
Natalie Costanza-Chavez is a Fort Collins writer and poet. Contact her at grace-notes@comcast.net.
