Time and Patience
It was Thanksgiving morning. I promised my mom the night before that today was going to be the day I learned how to cook the big Thanksgiving dinner that she spent all day making every year. I was to be up at 7 am so I could be there for when she put the turkey we had prepped the night before into the oven.
I woke up to early morning light that had found it’s way through an opening in my curtains. The sunshine fell on my shoulder and the warmth of it felt like the perfect reason to stay in bed just a little bit longer. I rolled over to check the time only to realize my alarm never went off and I was already 2 hours later then I said I’d be. I jumped out of bed and threw on the first pair of jeans I could find along with the sweater that was lying in a heap at the foot of my bed and stepped into my slippers before making my way downstairs. I opened my bedroom door (strange, I could’ve sworn I left it open last night) to find that the morning had moved forward without me. I walked downstairs and toward the kitchen. I could hear George Jones playing on the radio we kept on the counter.
“Good morning Kylie Anna!” She greeted me before I had even rounded the corner. I wondered how she always knew it was me. Both of my sisters were still asleep upstairs so I could have been any of us. I guess moms just know those sorts of things. Maybe it’s the way my slippers dragged on mornings when I woke up before I was ready to. “Morning mama. Sorry I’m so late, why didn’t you wake me?” She was standing at the counter humming along to the radio and chopping celery. She looked up for a moment but continued chopping, “you just looked so cozy. You didn’t even wake up when I shut your door like you normally do”
“Why’d you shut my door?”
“So we didn’t wake you.” She was mostly referring to my dad who was in the other room watching the pregame commentary for the football game that would be starting soon.
“Mom the whole point was that I’d be awake so I could help you!”
“You can help me now! All you’ve missed was the prep stuff anyways and you already know how to do all that. I would have woken you up for the cooking part. Grab an apron and come take over the chopping I need to check on the turkey.”
My mom was always doing a million things at once on Thanksgiving. As I put on the apron and washed my hands I had a chance to look around the kitchen and see just how much she had already done. She had finished prepping the turkey and put it in the oven and she had gathered, chopped, and sliced mountains of vegetables herbs and various ingredients before I had even gotten out of bed. She even had time to make a quick breakfast of cinnamon toast for her and my dad and had saved a few slices for when my sisters and I woke up. I grabbed a slice and took a bite, the cinnamon sugar was perfectly caramelized and cracked as my teeth bit into it. I began chopping and by the time I had finished my small task my mom had gathered all the ingredients for three different dishes and set them up on different sections of the counter.
“Okay the turkey is in the oven, all the prep work is done for now, so we just have to keep an eye on the time” she said with a glance at the clock. We usually have Thanksgiving “dinner” at around two o’clock and people start showing up around one thirty. It was nine thirty now so we had plenty of time. Or so I thought. We only have two ovens and one of them is very testy so we were only going to be using it to keep everything warm as it finished. The turkey would be done about an hour before everyone got here so we would have about an hour to cook everything else. My mom showed me that the only way this worked was to have everything ready to be put into the oven as soon as the turkey was out and to cook it all in groups based on what temperature they were supposed to be cooked at. She taught me how to make the three dishes she had set out; green bean casserole, a chicken pasta dish, and the cranberry sauce and then left me to do those while she started peeling apples for the pie. I got through the green bean casserole with out a hitch but I had questions on the other two.
Every time I had a question my mom would put down what she was doing and give me her full attention until I understood. I would occasionally look up at what she was doing and see her take a knife to an apple and peel off all the skin in one go. She had such ease in the kitchen. She always knew what her next move was and she never needed a recipe to tell her what to do. She was able to keep track of what I was doing, monitor the time on the turkey, and prep the pies all at once. I had no idea how she was able to do all of this by herself every year. I was amazed when we finished on time, especially considering how often my mom stopped or slowed down to make sure I understood.
Later, after everyone had eaten and the stress of planning and executing such a big day had died down, I asked my mom how she did it with out having a mental breakdown. She took on the character of a wise old lady and said “Its just time and patience my dear. As with everything in life.” She said it like that to make me laugh, and it worked.
