Gearing Up

My stomach rumbles in preparation. If I thought it were healthy or that it would help I would have taken a laxative. In this season of giving thanks, I am thankful for my mother's homemade dressing. She did all of the necessary prep work for it today. Stale bread has been crumbled, copious amounts of this and that added and now the doughy concoction sits to stew in some pre-nebulous mixture waiting to be placed into the empty crevice of a rather large dead bird. My mother fixes the same recipe every year. Only one year, the year of cancer as I like to call it, when my grandfather was slowly loosing his battle with prostate cancer was it not fixed. That was a sad year. We ate out because in between radiation treatments and various visits to various doctors neither my mother or grandmother had time to prepare the traditional meal. And, ah yes, the making of the dressing used to be a team affair where my mother and grandmother joined forces to prepare the family recipe handed down from my grandmother's mother to her. That time passed as well a couple of years ago when my grandmother badly burned her arm on the roaster trying to lift the turkey and pivot it around with two long forks. She was no longer strong enough to do it. She grew afraid of helping any more. Now I am not even sure if she would remember to how to make the dish she was so proud of. What I find so amazing is the simple fact that tomorrow I will not only eat dressing, but in some very odd way I will be eating history and tradition. My belly will be full with essentially the same food stuffs that filled my grandparents and great-grandparents belly before them. Who knows how long back this culinary chain goes? And no matter who dies or who grows old and forgets the over-eating of the dressing goes on.