"I Would Rather Be Here Now"

On Thanksgiving morning, I chopped celery and onions at the kitchen counter, surrounded by trays of bread I had sliced and dried the day before.  As I measured tart cherries and golden raisins, I wasn’t watching the clock.  I chopped up an apple and a pear while classical music played on the radio.  I boiled broth while my partner, Marilyn, made calls to her siblings and got the house ready for our guests.  I placed steel bowls on the counter: the large, slightly dented one that has been in Marilyn’s family for decades, and the smaller one I acquired twelve years ago with a set of steel pots.  The clanging of steel is the sound of the thalis and katoris of my childhood.  Yesterday, though, I was participating in an all-American ritual, one taking place all over the United States.  I was making stuffing, adding sage and thyme, inhaling the aromas.  The steel bowls were for mixing the stuffing—that is the word I learned during my first Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania in 1984, though Marilyn calls it “dressing.”  I tried a recipe for Northwest Fruit Stuffing last year, my first year making stuffing, and it might be a new tradition now.  The smaller steel bowl was for the vegetarian batch for our friends who were coming to dinner; I added turkey broth to the larger batch.  I was completely content as I worked in the kitchen in old pajamas printed with purple flying elephants, a Cedar Crest College sweatshirt, and an apron.  I said to Marilyn, “It is such a luxury to spend a long time doing just one thing, instead of having only a short time to do many things.”  The latter is my reality most days of the week. 

Making the stuffing was one of the things I was most grateful for yesterday: the opportunity to slow down, to create good food, to inhale aromas and feel textures, to know I would be sharing the food with good people.  To know that what I was doing was important and to know that it was enough.  There was nowhere else I wanted to be yesterday morning, nothing else I wanted to do.  As I cooked in my pajamas, I thought of a bumper sticker I had bought recently: “I would rather be here now” it says.