Last year we had Thanksgiving on the porch in our winter coats with two friends.  We could see our breath. 

This year Melenie and Jay came back and we also hosted neighbors Dale and Stephen.  Melenie and Jay arrived Wednesday and we had a take-out supper from our favorite Chinese restaurant.  I had already started printing out all the recipes, making a timetable and of course, tidying and didn’t really want to cook a full supper for four. 

The next morning @ 10, Melenie and I started cooking together, a tradition we had not been able to share last year.  We made mushrooms Pierrot first, then rum pumpkin pie.  Then we took 45 minutes off to chat.  After a brief lunch of leftover Chinese food, we made a winter salad, potiron tout rond, a recipe I adapted years ago from Julia Child.  Woody cooked an 11-pound turkey on a spit, which self- bastes it.  Then Melenie and I made a new and wonderful stuffing – bread cubes, of course, sauteed onions, cut up organic apricots soaked and then heated in Grand Marnier, dried cherries, died fresh apples, duck fat (rendered from an earlier meal) and dry vermouth. Woody’s turkey was perfect, as was everything else including apple cranberry sauce with a tiny bit of black currant liqueur I make every year. 

Dale made two hors d’oeuvres, wonderful deviled eggs and a scallop pate.  Melenie and Jay had brought champagne and we followed it with Konstanatine Frank’s gewürztraminer.  We were stuffed long before dessert.  Then we all went upstairs and watched the Bills wipe up the floor with the Saints.  None of us except Jay had any stake in the game, but Jay is an Eagles fan so he was rooting against the Saints. 

Before Woody put the turkey on the spit to roast, he and Jay cleaned out two sheds (our very strange Thanksgiving tradition) and brought all the lawn furniture to the gazebo where it’s protected from the worst of the winter weather. Woody had put all the gardens to sleep earlier in the week.  There are a few odd jobs left – manure the rhubarb, mulch the tree- and herbaceous-peonies, protect the roses. 

I’ll open up in my June ’22 juried intensive poetry workshop this Monday.  First, I post it on Facebook for my ‘friends” and followers to have first crack at applying. We post it in Poets and Writers magazine in the ads at the back of the zine.  I hope to find the 12 poets and the two alternates by mid-January.  I read every submission myself, of course.  I have poets send five poems no resume.  I choose those I want to work with, poets I believe I can move to a higher level.  Except for occasional poets who just will not submit to zines or the occasional crazy one, everybody who’s taken the workshop has been published and a large percentage of them have books out. Plus, permanent bonds are established with other poets in the workshop, bonds that still last from the first workshop 13 years ago until the present. A number of them stay in touch with me.

I am starting to prep for my ZOOM reading this week for a Bloomington, Indiana synagogue.  We have to start thinking this week about our solstice party, how many we’ll feel safe with, for instance.  Until we sit down together later in the coming week, I have no idea what we’ll do and with whom.