Thanksgiving on a screen
Every Thanksgiving of my life, I've been in Duluth. Even the years I couldn't really afford the flight, even the year I had a fever and slept through the whole thing on my mother's couch, I've been there, at her table: some years with the leaf put in for her cousins and whichever neighbor had nowhere else to go, some years just the two of us. This is the first year I haven't.
We decided in October, my mother and I, though really she decided and told me. She said she wasn't going to have me on a plane and in her house in the middle of all this, and that she'd rather miss one Thanksgiving than all the ones after it. I argued for about a week and lost, which is the usual length.
So today we had it on a screen. I propped my laptop against the fruit bowl at one end of my kitchen table and she propped hers against the gravy boat at the end of hers, and we ate at the same time. Her four o'clock, my two. She made the whole dinner anyway, for one: a small turkey breast, stuffing, the cranberry sauce from the can with the ridges still on it, which is the only kind our family accepts. She said she'd freeze the rest and be eating it until Christmas. I made a chicken, mashed potatoes and the green bean thing, and it was fine, and it wasn't hers.
It was strange, and good, and strange. The sound kept cutting out, so half of what she said arrived a moment after her mouth moved, and we kept talking over each other and stopping and both saying "you go." She showed me the table. She'd set it properly, cloth and good plates and all, just for her. She said it didn't seem right to do it any other way. Then she held her laptop up to the window so I could see the lake, gray and going dark at the bottom of the street, and I could see her reflection in the glass, holding it up, in an empty dining room, and I had to look at my potatoes for a minute.
Afterward we read three chapters, as usual, and argued about the butler.
I'm grateful for a great deal this year, and I know it. I've got work, and I've got my health, and my mother's well, and a lot of people I love are safe. There's a long list of people who can't say that tonight. But I'd like to be in Duluth.
Who did you eat with today, and how far away were they?