By Annis Pratt
Here comes Thanksgiving, with my annual
Turkey Panic. Is there anyone else who has reached a ripe old age and, having
prepared Thanksgiving dinner for what seems like eons, still gets her knickers in
a twist over baking that great huge bird?
Illustration published
in The Birmingham Eccentric, Nov 23 1992, by T. Graves
I have kept this
picture for years, covered with scribbles and post-it notes. You would think
memos like “14 lb took whole 5 hours,” “Use foil at browning time, not throughout,” “In at 9 done by 12.30 but too dry – baste more,” or
“O.K., no problem – cooked in 4 hours,” would reassure me that I have lived
through this before and will again, but I always confront some new worry.
There was the time my ten year old
daughter opened the over so many times to baste the turkey that it took eight
hours to cook. There was the time when I roasted it at home and brought it to
my younger daughter’s apartment an hour’s drive away, only to find it stone
cold and dried out on arrival. There was the year that my older daughter became
a vegetarian because she didn’t want to eat anything that “had eyes and could
look at me.” She was delighted with her
Tofu Turkey, but the rest of us felt weirdly guilty feasting on our succulent
bird. Then there was the time when my younger daughter ordered a complete
dinner from Whole Foods because she would be coming home from the hospital with
her new baby on Thanksgiving Day.
“Put your forks down,” declared my
son-in-law, brandishing a ladybug he had found in the stuffing. “We can’t eat this!”
Thawing a frozen turkey was always
problematic, so I decided to order a fresh one, only to find it icily solid,
fore and aft. I telephoned the butcher
in a panic. He told me to immerse it in lukewarm water for an hour and a half
on each side; it felt like giving a bath to a wrinkled baby.
When the family is all at the table
and we are saying grace at last, it is always, always worth it. In 2001, in
spite of the enormous tragedy of 9/11 and my husband’s death the year before, our
hearts were full of thanksgiving for two new arrivals in the family. My granddaughter had been born on September
18 and then, in October, my younger daughter and her husband underwent an
arduous trip to Ukraine to bring my seven year old grandson safely home. The
first time he saw a potato he wanted to peel it and cook it. He only spoke
Russian, but it was clear to us that he
had spent a lot of time in the orphanage kitchen.
He was puzzled by the turkey on his
first American Thanksgiving, but wolfed down a big serving of the mashed
potatoes he had prepared himself. Then, with an enormous grin, he realized that
he could ask for more.
Although she grew up in New York City, Annis Pratt makes her home
in the Midwest, where she taught English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
for many years. In 1990 she threw her full professorship out the window
to move to Michigan, where she is engaged in community activism and novel writing
Passionate about the environment and an
enthusiastic sailor, canoeist and kayaker, she chose a genre where she
could create compelling fiction about ecological degradation.
At 75 years old, she feels like she is in the second out of her
ninth inning, having published the first volume of her historical fantasy
trilogy when she was 73.
Blub: The Marshlanders and Fly Out of the Darkness are
the first two volumes of The Marshlanders Trilogy, historical fantasies about
the conflict between self-sustaining Marshland communities and Merchant
Adventurers trying to drain their lands. These are page-turners about the
conflict between people who respect their environment and developers who see it
as a source of income.
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