We celebrated Thanksgiving with two friends. Karen Pasquale and her son Tony.  Karen has seen no one since Covid started except her son and me.  He’s a chief who owns Terra Luna in North Truro. He didn’t open this year because he couldn’t keep his staff safe. It’s a relatively small restaurant with the tables close together and the kitchen is small.  Every day since last March he makes his mother a gourmet lunch.

 We had planned to hold the dinner in the living room 12 feet apart eating on sturdy tray tables with the door and two windows open and the ceiling fan on.  But the day was mild, close to 60 degrees @ 3 pm when we had agreed at Karen’s suggestion to dine.  We realized afterward that we actually preferred having the enormous feed at that time instead of the evening, when we had always done.  We were not as tired as we usually were and it was far easier to clean up.  We ate on our screened in sunporch, which felt safer and easier than the living room.  We’ve eaten our there many times in warmer weather. 

 Tony made fried smelt and fresh Wellfleet oysters for hors d’oeuvres.  Karen roasted a moist and delicious turkey and made her family’s Italian stuffing.  I made cranberry-apple sauce [with a touch of pomegranate syrup], a leek dish of my own invention, Julia Child’s whole pumpkin stuffed with gruyere, onions, panko crumbs and cream (Le Potiron Tout Rond) in Mastering II] and a rum pumpkin pie.  I would set that pie up against any other pumpkin pie I’d ever had. It’s a great pie.

 As we were finishing the hors d’oeuvres, the showers that had been piddling on and off all day suddenly turned into a pounding rain.  Fortunately, the rain came straight down – no wind at all-- so that not a drop of water entered the porch.  The torrents battering the plastic roof were so loud that at times we couldn’t hear eac other speak. We could only tell that mouths were moving.  Still, we had a loud and hilarious time.  Many stories exchanged.  After our three-and-a-half month drought this summer and September, any rain, even a storm like that one, is very welcome.  Slowly the water table recovers, although the trees, bushes, perennials and small animals that died are gone.

 I am a little less worried that Trump will not leave the White House and more worried about the damage he is doing, as much as possible, so that Biden will inherit a dangerous mess.  I hope he doesn’t do anything more to Iran, so Biden doesn’t have to deal with a war there.  This man is the least patriotic president I’ve ever experience.  He doesn’t care what damage he does and in fact is trying to do as much as possible. He’s of a piece with Moscow Mitch who wants as many Americans as possible to go hungry and ever starve, out of spite. All he cares about is packing the courts with rabid conservatives, as he did the Supreme Court.  So much harm they’ve done to us.

My computer is acting weird again.  And the wall units in the living room and my office that both heat and cool have gone dead. What fun it is to live in Covid times. There’s no way to get anything fixed.  Things fall apart, the center cannot hold as Yeats wrote in Ireland’s troubled times.