It’s sunny, with that pale haze of clouds like a ring around the horizon. I cut my finger on the tin foil box this morning, trying to catch it as it was falling.
Don’t do that.
It’s a little deeper than I thought but barely bled, I think it will be fine. I should probably cover it. So goes life; accidental bumps and bruises and scratches and cuts. We don’t notice the absence of them until we have some.
We have entered our second round of holidays since my mom went wherever we go when we’re no longer here, and I realized she never showed me how she made her roast. I muddled through with mediocre results, and I can’t say with any certainty she approved.
Life is a weird thing, and the absence of it, even weirder.
Still, this year was better than last year, and maybe next year will be better still. Or it could be worse because there’s no real trajectory to these things. My brother has been gone much longer and still last night as I was cutting up the onion I laughed to myself about how horrified he would be both with my technique and the result, and how he would have shouldered me out of the way, taking the knife and trying to salvage something more uniform.
It was going to be quieter, just me and my dad, but I’d asked a friend to join us, a friend who also has empty seats around the table. We talked politics and talked TV; after the meat came out on the dry side, she suggested letting it braise in the broth, and while she was eating she said how her mom always cooked it partway and then sliced it and finished it in the liquid in the pan.
“So your mom was with us too tonight,” I said.
Even in the absence of her.
Sometimes it feels as though our entire existence is empty space filling up and filled space being emptied, a mobius strip ever twisting on itself, the one turning into the other turning into the other.
Every single thing in the universe is ephemeral. The only thing that varies is the scale of time.
There’s no way to know how the next holiday will go. We had, all in all, meat notwithstanding, a pretty nice evening.
The dessert was great so at least there was that. An apple crumble with vanilla caramel pecan ice cream. If you make it, though, please do yourself a favor and add at least a teaspoon of vanilla to the filling.
Trust me on this.
And I used whatever apples we could get, in this case galas and honeycrisps.
As for the granny smiths the recipe calls for, we didn’t notice the absence of them.
Have a great Thursday.
A Bit to Read 
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