I’ve been scrolling through my digital photos and reminiscing about the the changing cast of characters, packed around our table on Thanksgivings past. Our usual dining room table, that is, augmented by one or two additional, impromptu addendums to accommodate the crowd. Everyone smiling over the “groaning board” of turkey, trimmings and potluck contributions.
For many years, we joined our friends Nancy and Steve and their family and friends in Upper Marlboro, Maryland for Thanksgiving. After they moved to Delaware we were still invited but decided it was just a bit too far to travel for the day. So we honored the “friends and family” tradition by hosting our own feast with anyone who wasn’t already committed elsewhere. Interns, far from home. People whose families lived too far away for just a long weekend visit. A cousin or two who live nearby.
This year many of us are paring and/or hunkering down, Zooming with family and friends, cooking alternative menus. We are going to make some Indian-inspired dishes and put the turkey off till next week, when we have finished quarantining from our daughter who is visiting from California, luckily for an extended stay through the remaining holidays.
It will be a memorable day and year, one way or the other. Hopefully the story we tell in the future will start like this: “Remember that one Thanksgiving when we all had to stay home because of the pandemic…”
Happy Thanksgiving, all!
Ah, remember when we could just stand near each other and talk…This was probably our “critical mass” of about 16 guests a few years ago. It has averaged at about 8-10 since then. Also remember when you could sit around the table after dinner and play silly games like this one where you pass around phrases and draw pictures to illustrate them?This was a tradition dating from our trips to Nancy and Steve’s feast. Our daughter always baked a chocolate cake because she didn’t like pie. The sentiment is timeless.
This past week, I had two food encounters with friends – one in person, one over the miles via Zoom – that were fun and meaningful despite the distance between us. It’s possible, it just takes a fair amount of planning.
The first was a tea in honor of my friend Debi’s recent birthday. Usually, we go out for tea somewhere within a two-hour drive or less from our homes. We’ve been doing this for so many years to mark her birthday in October and mine in February, sometimes twice a year but other years somewhere in between as a combination treat. If we’d actually kept notes, we could have by now written a “Guide to Tea Around DC.” Instead, we tend to try to test our memories every year by discussing the places we’ve been.
We tend to recall places by some memorable decor, type of tea, theme of the offerings, or in some cases an event. The latter includes recalling the time at Beans in the Belfry in Brunswick, MD when the waitress slipped and dumped all the little sandwiches into my open purse, or the time we arrived for a relaxing tea experience at Sweet Simplici-Tea in Sykesville, MD only to find a full-on beer festival happening on the same street.
This year, instead of braving a tea room in the time of COVID-19, I planned a socially-distanced tea for Debi at my house. This involved thinking about what we usually have at the teas we’ve liked best (a full menu including soup and salad along with the usual tea savories and sweets and of course scones and a selection of teas), finding recipes, and then actually baking, cooking, and making a really big mess in the kitchen. Next, getting out some nice china, tea cups and saucers, cloth napkins, and etc. I got a whole new appreciation for tea rooms, and will never scoff at the $25-$30 they charge per person for full afternoon teas.
The second food experience stemmed from the fact that some of my folklore women friends missed our usual food adventures when we meet in person for the annual American Folklore Society meetings. We decided to cook and eat and talk together one evening.
We chose to make gnocchi from scratch, something that none of us had ever attempted. Not just normal/simple gnocchi, but a recipe for sweet potato gnocchi with sage butter sauce which sounded totally awesome (and was).
It was deeply satisfying to knead and shape the dough, watch the little pillows come to the top of the boiling water, then to brown nicely in the bubbling browned butter. We had some laughs when our friend Lucy lost the flour she had measured, “which was here a minute ago,” and other little silly things along the way.
We then all sat down and ate (in my case, way too much of) the finished product, talked, laughed some more, and got a little weepy that we weren’t able to meet together. But somehow, the fluffy little balls of potato pasta eased the sadness. And the miles between Cathy and I in the DC area, Sue in Northern Indiana and Lucy in Northern Ohio melted away with each mouthful.
Debi contemplates a tea a few years back in a commercial tea room.Debi sits at one end of our long table for tea at our house last week. So much for the intimate tea experience.Tea goodies in progress. The kitchen was a disaster area after all that baking! How do they do it at tea rooms??Sweet potato gnocchi served up with friends on Zoom. I’m still eating this days later and every time I have some, I think about my friends and how much fun we had preparing and eating together even at a distance.
A trip to one of Pennsylvania’s 111 State Parks is as likely to uncover some of the state’s industrial past as it is to introduce you to natural wonders. Case in point, our visit yesterday to Canoe Creek State Park in Hollidaysburg.
In this case, it is the state’s once-thriving limestone industry that we learned a bit about. I say “a bit” because although you can view what is left of the two historic lime kilns (see photos below), the interpretation consists of three pretty worn interpretive signs, and the small museum/interpretation area at the park office was closed. (Double bad luck for us as we were hoping to get our recently acquired Pennsylvania State Park Passport stamped!)
One of the signs reminded the reader to think about how this quiet, seemingly bucolic parkland was once teeming with sound, sights, and smells. My imagination ran even further into the senses, speculating that you could probably have even tasted industry in the air as smokestacks belched, engines sent fumes billowing, and sweat poured off laborers.
Now, all we could hear was our own footfalls, a few distant crows calling, a woodpecker drilling for insects, and – when our trail skirted a scattering of homes on the outskirts of the park – a tinkle of wind chimes in the distance. The air was fresh in the mid-40s degree weather, and the dappled sun illuminated what was left of the autumn leaves in the tall maples, tulip poplars and oaks.
Ghosts and echoes of industry past, fitting for a Halloween hike.
What’s left of the Blair group of lime kilns stand like sentinels to a more industrious past.View from the top. Steve attempts to glean helpful info from the park brochure. Or perhaps starts mapping our course on the notoriously unhelpful trail map.Limestone, limestone everywhere. The trees which have grown up in the hundred or so years since the limestone industry thrived here cling tenaciously to it.The second kiln site is more ghostly, half hidden in the overgrown woods.A portion of the trail follows the old road bed of the railroad which carried the processed lime to market. Traces of the crumbling railroad ties are underfoot.
