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In this season of socializing, we are all facing a stark reality. Gatherings with people beyond our households are not safe health officials warn.
Danger lurks within familiar settings. The Coronavirus insinuates itself wherever it can find a chink—an open mouth, a nasal passage, wherever people mingle too closely, whenever a storyteller goes on too long or speaks with too much gusto. And even when people sing.
A friend recently decided at last: no more Sunday dinners with their sons, twenty-somethings who still move within their worlds following youthful habitudes, not always CDC guidelines. She told them, sadly, this is the day when one grain of rice finally tips the scale, acknowledging her denial about the invisible threat within treasured family time despite her caution in all other settings. What if, through asymptomatic transmission, her husband unknowingly infects his elderly mother while visiting her?
How will we share holiday feasting without stretched-out tables, without everyone bringing legacy-recipe dishes, without rooms brimming with people and aromas of garlic and cinnamon and thyme?
Making Do This Year
We already ache as we anticipate trampled traditions, having to forgo the simplest of pleasures—for our own and others’ safety. Somehow, we will make do. We always do. Or will we?
Thumbing through clipped recipes and cookbooks, I seek innovative renditions of old standards, a diversion in hopes of creating new sensations and memories. I land on Pumpkin Bread with Sage and Gruyere. Why not replace the customary sweetness with savory flavors? I list the ingredients and will hunt for them during my supermarket’s senior shopping hour just past dawn.
I start preparing for our national celebration of gratitude and plenty without knowing who might eat whatever I make.
As the holiday looms, much depends on outbreak stats, risk assessments, possible “safe seating” arrangements and potential for open-air ventilation. Might it work to gather in the garage, as we did last summer when our cookout got rained out? How much do those propane heating towers cost that I see on porches and patios? Dread. Upending. Shifting ground. We are all in this together.
Culinary mainstays, inventive adaptation, and caring gestures might somehow carry us, as we try to carry on.
Giving Thanks
At reconfigured tables, or through safely delivered drop-offs, we can still give thanks for abundance, for Earth’s gifts and home-made delicacies, for breath. For family and friends who have survived their brush with this viral scourge despite sometimes still feeling short of breath. As we mourn loved ones and associates who have succumbed, we can recall memorable times shared with them, thank those who cared for them and so many, many others.
Somehow, we must go on. To gather what we need for colder months ahead. The future always remains inscrutable, yet we pretend we can predict it. COVID shattered that collective delusion. Yet, still we teeter as we ponder uncharted realms, wonder how we will navigate winter’s vicissitudes during this pandemic. As we hunker down, how might we weather days with less light?
As we contemplate ways to celebrate, who and what will we gather? We can still fill our kitchens with traditional, and perhaps new, dishes; serve them to those within our “bubble”; describe them to loved ones far away. We can dress in our finest. If we connect through devices, we can don festive hats to amuse each other and enliven the tiny frames we occupy. We can remember those who may be struggling beyond our imagining.
We can light candles, say grace, wish each other happiness and health. We can express compassion, including to strangers. We can view masks as accessories of kindness.
We can gather in, shelter from the insidious raging storm, pledge to try to thrive where we are planted. We can drink to all that sustains us, embrace the poignant uncertainty--and novelty--of this ever-changing moment.
