Giving Thanks
Usually, I'm fantasizing about moist turkey and wet gravy, cornbread dressing, perfectly-mashed potatoes, tender green beans, and a thick slice of pumpkin pie with REAL whipped cream right about now. But instead, I'm sitting here wondering if I'll have the same experience I had the Thanksgiving I was newly pregnant with Madalyn.
We spent that Thanksgiving in Gainesville with my dad's side of the family. My grandmother is an amazing cook. I realize lots of grandmothers are amazing cooks, but this woman makes sugar cookies that literally melt on your tongue, and can glaze them with tinted powdered sugar frostings in Martha Stewart fashion. Her turkey is always moist, her gravy, flavor-bursting- her mashed potatoes make you want to cry tears of joy right into her perfectly pressed table linens. So it came as a real shock that year when I lifted a fork of cornbread dressing to my mouth and soon thought I'd bit into a salt shaker. I tried again with a little turkey and still- no good. Oh well. I would have leftovers at my mom's later that week was all...but how sad that my grandmother's greatest gift was actually beginning to fade with her age...
Then later that week came, along with mom's leftovers- also terrible. And then it was why God, why? Of all the foods I had to have a weird pregnancy aversion to, WHY the dressing?! YOU KNOW how I love the dressing!
So this year, as our bags are packed and waiting by the front door until Shaun gets home, and as visions of sleeping-in and leaving the monitors in my mother's room dance in my head- as I imagine having a date night with Shaun, my mother cooking and doing our laundry and cleaning up after MY CHILDREN- I'm trying not to get my hopes up about enjoying the holiday feasting. Instead, I'll count all these blessings worth giving thanks over- for there are so many- and the feasting will have to wait until next year, (and then I'll double-up to make up for lost time.) But for now, seeing "Pride and Prejudice" WHILE IT'S STILL ON THE BIG SCREEN (gasp!) will have to suffice in feasting's place...and if the flick's as good as it looks in the previews, and if Hollywood didn't ruin what Jane Austen perfected, it just might...
Have a Great Thanksgiving all of you- and savor that cornbread dressing!
