It is middle afternoon. Outside the woods preserve their winter twilight. Thanksgiving dinner has been cooking over the coals in the hearth since late morning. The hours have passed in the kind of wakeful stillness I always associate with Innermost House.
The pot is ready to come off the hearth. We don't have bulky potholders, but instead use two palm-sized squares of black sueded leather, which also serve Michael for handling the hot tea kettle. They have the advantage of simplicity, if the disadvantage of regularly disappearing into the darkness.
So the first thing I do when the pot is ready is look for the holders. It is a daily ritual for me. I proceed in the faith that they must be somewhere. Thankfully we haven't many places to look even in our shadow world.
The built-in pine cutting board in the kitchen holds the hot cooking pot so there is still plenty of room on the counter. The standing space in the kitchen is less then two feet wide by three feet deep, but I have never needed more.
I recall a friend's visit to Innermost House, in whose Carmel beach cottage we have often stayed. She stepped into our kitchen and filled the room, just as I do. She just stood there for moment in a kind of daze. I understood. We live in parallel worlds.
I choose my favorite pair of bowls for the occasion, earthen-colored and finger-ridged by some unknown Japanese craftsman. These homely bowls are now approaching a hundred years old. The man in Japan who made them is gone; the man in San Francisco's Japantown who sold them to me is gone; the people who first lived with them are gone.
Yet here the bowls stand in the late autumn light. The sight of them fills me with a strange sense of wonder at our being a part of their history now, and they being part of ours.
I remove the heavy lid from the pot and have to call Michael in to see the transformation. It is another daily ritual. I have seen the stew transformed like this from the raw to the cooked hundreds of times, and so has he. But this time is this time, and it is always the first time in Innermost House.
While the hot stew cools a little Michael opens the red wine and pours it into a small green-glazed bowl we share between us. I usually only take a taste or two. With dinner I mostly drink water.
I bring in the bowls, each on its own wooden tray, and set them on low stools beside our chairs. Before we begin we sit quietly for a moment. The afternoon light streams into the darkness across the wall over Michael's chair. The quails call their autumn cry outside. The fire is mature with warmth and welcome. There is so much here to be thankful for.
We eat with the wooden trays on our laps in our low chairs. The wine and water bowls rest on the broad, flat chair arms. So for surfaces we have our laps, the stools, the chair arms, and the hearth. Together they serve as a several-leveled low table. So close as we are to the raised hearth, we have the sense of sitting very near the floor.
Michael washes up, which greatly increases the likelihood of the bowls surviving for another century! I serve some of the aged local cheese and ripe fruit from the farmers market, along with apples we picked yesterday here on the farm. The recent cold has nipped the apples into an especial sweetness you can actually see when you slice into them. In a homely semblance of the Innermost Life, they turn translucent around the core.
Our special Thanksgiving meal is like any other dinner we share at Innermost House during the cool weather months. The ingredients are much the same, give or take a carrot or two. Somehow that is the way it is supposed to be.
I have to think for a moment what I mean by that. I think I mean that thanks-giving to me is for what is—everyday—the ordinary things of this life. It is the ordinary goodness of things I am so grateful for.
I have to think for a moment what I mean by that. I think I mean that thanks-giving to me is for what is—everyday—the ordinary things of this life. It is the ordinary goodness of things I am so grateful for.
If the sweetness of an Innermost Life depended on a wide variety of pleasures served in a wide variety of ways, it wouldn't be the Innermost Life. To me Thanksgiving Day is not a holiday from ordinary life, but a holy day in celebration of the translucent sweetness of life at the core.