Cedar by Iris Rosewater

It’s Thanksgiving and for some reason it seemed like a good idea to host it at my mother’s house. I’m re-evaluating this decision as I whisk around her kitchen, trying to find a decent saucepan. She has not thrown many away - I recognize a couple from when I was about 4 years old - and they have accumulated over the years, all with handles loose and cracking from one-hundred runs through the dishwasher, their Teflon coating thin, scraped, and chipping. Every lid doesn’t match or fit exactly and must have come with a pot that actually found it’s way to goodwill, or maybe that’s where they all came from… I can’t decide. I make a mental note to buy her a new set for Christmas. I sharpen all the knives I can find that aren’t slightly rusted, and take a sip of egg nog before preheating the oven.

My husband is watching football in the living room, and the dogs bark when he gets excited about a good play, which makes me laugh. My son is sitting at the table, making his fifth turkey out of construction paper, and his hands are lined with a fifth color between every finger and over every tip as he traces out a thumb-head and four hefty finger-feathers. My daughter has dragged her grandma into the spare bedroom to put her dolly down for a nap, and I can see them through the open door, gingerly tucking an old afghan under the plastic chin, the doll’s blinking eyes closed, hemmed by a thick fringe of lashes. My little girl holds her finger against her lips, shushing grandma, and then guides her, fingers wrapped tightly around a wrinkled pinky-finger, to the door on tip-toe. The kitchen is calm and I am alone in it as I poke through the cupboards to retrieve mother’s box of family recipes to prepare our holiday meal.

The recipe box is a relic from my great-grandmother. Opening the cedar lid triggers a dozen memories. I stop and lean into the scent, closing my eyes and sorting from the blur of visions… my grandmother’s round thumbs picking through the file, how heavy a cup of sugar felt to my little hands as I helped my mother make cookies, the tickle of her apron’s red ruffle brushing against my cheek. This is a magical box, I realize with reverence, carefully pulling out our family’s nurturing records. If I follow this map -if I toast the pecans for the frosted cranberry salad just right, if I put the precise amount of brown sugar on the yams and pull them out when the marshmallows have just turned from golden to brown, then I will be a little girl again with my feet dangling from my aunt’s dining room chair. I will hear my father laugh, though he left us years ago. With these little handwritten slips, spotted with flour and egg, I can resurrect our dearest ghosts. I take my selections and lay them out on the counter for reference, taking a quiet moment to compare all of our curled script on varying shades of yellowing white… the matriarchs’ collective history of family and love… tying the apron behind my neck and smoothing its dusty ruffles before I begin.