Thanksgiving Break: A Brief Photo Essay

I spent many hours this break writing thank you notes, but now they're finally all done! Well, except for the ones to Scott's family members, but since I delegated those to him, I'm just going to buy stamps for them, too, and hope for the best.

Our house looked very festive for Thanksgiving. Mary and Kat came over to share the evening and the feast with us, which was wonderful. Scott roasted a delicious turkey, made stuffing, roasted brussel sprouts and cauliflower, and generally did just about all the cooking. Between Mary and Kat, we had the requisite pecan and pumpkin pies, so it was quite a traditional success.

Today I sewed curtains for our kitchen on Jemima, as I've christened her. Somehow she managed to last through three curtains without having been oiled or tuned up since who-knows-when. She's probably about forty or fifty years old, one of those rock-solid Singer sewing machines that never quits. Thanks to Scott for picking her up at the ReStore.

 

Otherwise, we've spent the afternoon very quietly. One of the complex board games Scott loves has deeply absorbed all his attention. The paper wreath on the wall is the product of a hard afternoon's work on Mary's part; my product of that same afternoon was a paper bird mobile that's hanging above my head in the living room right now.

Monday, last two weeks of class, here we come!

Some more Christian Wiman, from Every Riven Thing, for your Friday reading.

One time

I. Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

Then I looked down into the lovely cut

of a missing river, something under

dusk’s upflooding shadows

claiming for itself a clarity

of which my eyes were not yet capable:

fissures could be footpaths, ancient homes

random erosions; pictographs depicting fealties

of who knows what hearts, to who knows what gods

To believe is to believe you have been torn

from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.

I come back to the world. I come back

to the world and would speak of it plainly,

with only so much artifice as words

themselves require, only so much distance

as my own eyes impose

on the slickrock whorls of the real

canyon, the yucca’s stricken

clench, and, on the other side,

the dozen buzzards swirled and buoyed

above some terrible intangible fire

that must scald the very heart

of matter to cast up such avid ash.

2. 2047 Grace Street

But this world is more often refuge

than evidence, comfort and covert

for the flinching will, rather than the sharp

particulate instants through which God’s being burns

into ours. I say God and mean more

than the bright abyss that opens in that word.

I say world and mean less

than the abstract oblivion of atoms

out of which every intact thing emerges,

into which every intact thing finally goes.

I do not know how to come closer to God

except by standing where a world is ending

for one man. It is still dark,

and for an hour I have listened

to the breathing of the woman I love beyond

my ability to love. Praise to the pain

scalding us toward each other, the grief

beyond which, please God, she will live

and thrive. And praise to the light that is not

yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,

crying not as if there had been no night

but as if there were no night in which it had not been.

Now Playing: Bach, Mass in B minor, "Gloria/Quoniam to solus sanctus."

Up early this morning, I'm working on poetry for a project for my Writing from the Earth class. I randomly stumbled across an online edition of The owl and the nightingale, a 13th-century Middle English poem, with this lovely paragraph in the introduction:

Despite their worth, her activity and her personality contained elements repellent to all well-balanced beings…. Mere seriousness or usefulness, even the happiness that comes of serious living and practical service, was not enough. The right life was made up of these and something more. The life of the owl needed as its complement the life of the nightingale, the joy of being and doing for the sake of being and doing. God made the world not merely for lamenting and for consoling distress, but as well for rejoicing and for sympathy with joy. Life was serious if rightly led, and it demanded the utmost of all who partook in it: yet that very seriousness could not exist healthily and healthfully in its common, less in its highest, aspirations and endeavors, without joyousness. – Introduction to The owl and the nightingale ed. John Edwin Wells (1907).

For your Friday evening reading pleasure, another selection from Christian Wiman's Every Riven Thing.

From a window

Incurable and unbelieving

in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree

rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get

to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined

or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion

beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.

Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood

exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)

and though a man’s mind might endow

even a tree with some excess

of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.

And that is where the joy came in.

Essay 2, Part 4.

Of course, my personal associations with bread include more than heavy theology and obscure etymology. A quick glance in any recipe book would reveal this food’s wide cultural use. Somehow, the English word manages to include everything from Indian naan to South Asian roti, from Irish soda bread to Southern corn bread. The fact that bread is present in almost every culture in some form gives it a cultural breadth that my family has always enjoyed. It’s one of our favourite foods, a relatively easy way to participate in humanity’s diversity. My sister, a skillful baker, manages to produce beautiful loaves that look completely different from each other and that hail from totally different traditions—highly-frangible rice bread, sweet, glossy challah, hard, bubble-filled baguette. Perhaps the most coveted bread she makes is Finnish pulla. This bread only appears at Christmas because it is so labor-intensive. Laura usually bakes two loaves, but none of it ever survives past one meal. Sweet, dense, flavoured with cardamom, pulla is a family favourite. Though we have no Finnish ancestry whatsoever, we maintain the tradition from which this bread derives by using it to celebrate this holiday.

So perhaps it’s time for me to overcome my long-standing fear of yeast and try to bake some bread myself, as a way to experience afresh the layered importance of family history, of cultural appreciation, and of faith. Aside from the connection I always see as I watch yeast shaken out of its packet into the mixture, bread requires self-sacrifice from the baker, too—you have to be willing to dedicate significant amounts of time and attention to bread. Is the dough too sticky? Add flour. Is it too flaky? Add water. Why is the dough not rising? (My perennial question.) Probably it needs to be tucked away in a warmer, moister spot. Why is the loaf baking lop-sided? (Check your oven coils. Probably there’s one that’s not heating properly.) It commands attention from all the senses, from sight to touch to smell to hearing. Does the timer have ten more minutes, or was I too preoccupied with The Georgics to notice that it went off five minutes ago? By forcing me to employ all my senses, as well as my seldom-used biceps, bread forces me to enact my own incarnation, my own physicality, even as it reminds me of my fragility, my dependence broadly on other human beings and on microscopic eukaryotes in particular.

A particular dependence that I think I’m going to have to cope with by removing myself from the fermentation process by one step. I can never seem to coax yeast to thrive for me; most of my loaves don’t rise properly. But one of my friends, a born-and-bred Hoosier, recently introduced me to another variation on this food. It might have been concocted just for yeast-phobes like myself since it doesn’t require the baker to deal with live yeast. Or it might have been the creation of a backwoods Indianan with too much alcohol on hand. Though it’s not as classy as brioche or as nutritious as anadama bread, it’s much easier to make. Tonight it’s time to try some beer bread.