Pain and Thanksgiving

Here I am. I’m sitting with my little dog snuggled beside me-all cozy. I have the turkey parts cooking in the crock pot so we will have rich broth for the dressing. The bread is drying in the oven. In a couple or four hours I can go in and chop my celery, carrots, onion and bread to make the dressing. Then it will be done for tomorrow.

Rachael will soon come down and put together the cranberry salad. She will have to work today until MIDNIGHT. Then she has to get up tomorrow and work until five. How crazy is that!

And so Michael and I are going to be cooking turkey tomorrow. That should be a real trip. I’ll provide the brains and know how. He’ll provide the knees. It is so aggravating to know how to do so many things and not have the knees to take the multitude of little steps to get it done. I never realized how much stepping around was required to do something as simple as fixing a turkey!

I used to go through all the chopping and stirring and fixing without a thought. I would start from scratch and not sit down until the turkey was in the oven and everything was finished. Then I would clean up afterwards and, other than a little whine about being tired, I hardly even paused.

Now. Now I plan every step around the kitchen before I stand up. We are blessed with a very small kitchen. Rachael can practically stand in the center of it and cook a meal.  Well, not quite, but almost. Because I can’t swivel on my knees and take the necessary tiny quick steps I have to carefully plot the stages of every operation: Start here with the veggies from the fridge, scoot the plastic bowl full of those down the counter, across the stove, down the counter across the sink, pick up my favorite knife from the drawer, move all of that on to the bar where I can then go along and then around to the other side where I can sit down and do all the dicing, slicing and combining. Oh Wait! I forgot the cutting board. Now I have to get up and walk all the way around the corner and the fridge to the cupboard where we keep the cutting board. And oh yes, a couple paper towels might come in handy.. and a wet dish cloth to wipe up any smears or crumbs—especially onion juice. Now, back around to sit down and actually do the work.

Does that sound ridiculous? Yeah, it is. A normal cook would stand at the counter; pick up her instruments when she needed them, chop and slice, take the many tiny steps back and forth and around until her dish was assembled and in the oven. I never used to think about it. But now I simply cannot stand or walk that long. Some have thought, maybe still think, that my reluctance to stand and walk is due to laziness; they have never known the pain I walk with on every step. Those same people have attributed my weight to my laziness when actually the reverse is true. The weight gain came with the enforced sedentary life style after I was no longer able to walk and move freely. Oh well. What goes around comes around.

Meantime, Michael and I will  have a good time getting Thanksgiving dinner ready for Rachael tomorrow.

BTW,  Bilbo is now in Lake Town.  After the barrels floated down the channel from the elves' hall, they were collected and roped together in a raft and poled from the mouth of the channel down the river to Lake Town. I haven't had time to take him much forther...