Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Weekend will be our last day at market this year. It’s always bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s usually dark outside when we set up, and we really want to be snug in our bed. On the other hand, we get to marvel at a market sunrise as we set up the tent.
On the one hand, I miss the students. Most go home for Thanksgiving. The students who stay always seem a little homesick, even if they are excited about the dinner party they’ve planned. I know this because they ask me how to choose and cook squash and seem to hang on my words of advice with both a faraway look in their eyes and an intense concentration on simple instructions. Just in case, you are wondering, a squash is ready when the stem is withered and comes clear away from the fruit. If you are on a diet, squash has 0 points on the Weight Watcher program and tastes pretty good if you just add salt and pepper. Not that any of us do. Real Thanksgiving squash needs to bake like a boat filled with butter, brown sugar, and some salt and pepper. That’s what Maple Ridge Farm advises, anyway.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of bustle, and my weeds usually sell. I once brought burdock down to sell. Howard said it couldn’t be done. He bet me it couldn’t be done. I won the bet. It wasn’t easy, burdock being the stuff that sticks like velcro to pet fur, sweaters, and your hair. However, in my research on the uses of burdock, I discovered that it was the original inspiration for velcro and had some quality that made flowers last longer, so it was the perfect organic flower foam. The selling point for me was that my grandpa had made me tiny burdock baskets with handles. I sold three bunches and could have made a fourth if I’d been willing to go back to my patch and dig up the burdock roots, which is apparently really good for something.
Thanksgiving in Canada is a different occasion than in the United States. The first time we visited our daughter, it was Thanksgiving Weekend in New York. The excitement was palpable in the street. There was the Macy’s Parade in the morning, and in the afternoon, on the way to the Subway, you’d pass people carrying casserole dishes wrapped in tea towels and pies covered with aluminum foil and be stopped on every corner by someone hawking flowers. It’s not like that here. Here, Thanksgiving is closer to the end of the harvest. The leaves are turning, but the reds and oranges are almost like warning signs that winter is coming.
Louis Armstrong wrote that in summertime, the livin is easy. Thanksgiving reminds us that the living is about to get hard.
It’s this that captures me every Thanksgiving at market. There’s abundance, but its not going to last.
I used to feel guilty about my ambivalence around Thanksgiving. I’d give myself little lectures about getting thankfulness together. I’d wonder why I couldn’t do it better and berate myself about all the good things I’d overlooked. However, part of appreciating life is to let more of it in. It means embracing what Zorba, the Greek termed, “ the whole catastrophe.”
Thanksgiving is bittersweet, it’s both sweet and bitter. It’s on one hand and on the other. It’s when all the seasons collide, and although to everything, there is a season, on Thanksgiving, we see Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter come to fruition.
Picture of Burdock