Easter is here, and I’ve been put in mind of an old question that’s haunted me more and more over the past few years – about whether great family occasions, which I consciously associate with the food, aren’t really more about the people who were there when the memories were made?
Everybody within driving distance would gather in the ‘usual’
place at the ‘usual’ time for the usual, beloved family feast…
I’ll never forget the last time I stood on the hill overlooking the little river in dairy country (about three hours west of my current home city), which had been so much an integral part of my childhood and youth, thinking: ” This is probably the last time I’ll ever stand here; the last time I’ll ever see the old cabin; the last time I’ll ever want to be here.”
I surprised myself by speaking those words aloud as the gentle autumn wind whipped ripples diagonally across the the icy, iron-black water and carried the Sugar Maple leaves down to the dry, dead meadow floor. The whole scene was a stereotyped dance of death: the death of the past summer with the death of the year impending; and, unlike other autumns before, the death of a my whole life before that day. The low, weak rays of the late-season sun just stamped a kind of finality on the scene which nobody could have denied.
Only my Dad and his sister were there with me, to ‘close’ the cabin for the winter. Suffering from disuse, the place had been sold, and the next spring, a bunch of strangers would come to open it up for their first time, changing it forever. The hot tears steamed as they crawled down my cheeks and I realized it was also confirmation that all the great, joyous family reunions of my youth, and everyone and everything that had represented them – as some character in an old movie once said – were gone, like tears in rain.
Who killed the magic?
Because in that instant, I realized that the place had not been as special as I had fancied it had been. The magic in it, for me anyway, had been the special people I had met there for maybe the time I would see them all together, were what made it special for me. Now they were half gone – the older half passed on, and the younger half all gone their own ways. Only I of my generation had no younger extended family of my own to carry on any kind of tradition, in any other place where we could all have come together.
For the first time in my life, Ifelt truly alone, and my future looked very dark, indeed. No more holiday feasts; no more magical turkeys, no more of Aunt Dorothea’s scalloped Potatoes. No more of my own Mom’s fluffy whipped potatoes. No more of my other Aunts’ specialty desserts; my Dad’s signature mulled cider; my grandfather’s nutty but beloved toasts to, ‘another year gone down the tubes’, and ‘God bless us, everyone’.
Who killed the magic? The person who had given it life in the first place. I had killed it myself.
It was never really the food…
And I realized that it hadn’t ever been the food that had been special. “I can always make any or all of the old recipes again!” I alone among my cousins had been interested enough in cooking and the power of food to bind family that I had gathered the ancient recipes, pestered them out of my elders, and carefully annotated them with the old, vital family secrets that made them so special to me. Now, I had no one else to make them for, no one who would appreciate them for what they had meant to me.
That day was Thanksgiving weekend Sunday 30 years ago last year. I’ve never forgotten, never quite gotten over what that weekend – and all the other Holiday feasting long weekends – had meant in my life. And how lonely and sometimes pointless life often seems, now, with holidays impending and nothing to look forward to but small, undistinguished meals for three with only symbolic, year-jerking toasts to ‘days gone by’ and ‘absent loved ones’.
Take it from me…
Develop your own family traditions, from your own generation on down, so you’ll always have special points throughout the year to look forward, and people with which to celebrate them! I hope having handed down highlights of my own vanished family’s culinary history in this blog will provide some sort of basis on which to help you get your own grand, self-perpetuating family preservation project started.
~ Maggie J.