Thankful

A beautiful field of pink peonies. My mother loved to grow them.

For friends and neighbors and laughter. Red wine, white wine, roses [including a tight pink bud on a glossy chocolate cake]. For the glass stand the cake is lovingly placed on, a bridal shower gift from my mom's close friend, Vera. For H., who glued the pedestal back on for me the other day, since the cake stand slipped out of my hands after the block party. For broken things of beauty that are not beyond repair.

For my favorite flowered cotton tablecloth, bought in Bar Harbor, Maine. [It has withstood wine, gravy, coffee, ice cream and tomato sauce spills.]

For candlelight. Fresh fettuccine. Asparagus.

For children. Teens.

For a dishwasher that hums through its work, after the dinner party.

For different childhoods in different places that brought us now to lives that merge...like roads that meet at a traffic circle, but not a circle people speed through. A circle where people stop and look. Patsy and Andy, Dean and Julie, Anne and Michael, Barbara and John. All in Montclair. All of us lucky.

For all my mother taught me about entertaining before she died when I was 20. [That's just five years older than Figgy.] For Quaker lace tablecloths and pink garden-grown peonies, carefully arranged in a cut-crystal bowl. For wedding china and good white napkins. Pearls and a charm bracelet. For the pleasure she shared when she baked a layer cake with me. For guest towels, aprons, shiny round silver pans. Rib roast and twice-baked potatoes, and asking me to open the Pillsbury biscuit can on a weeknight [slit the wrapper, pop the can, a little scary---loud noise, dough jumps out]. For the fluffy pink strawberry dessert she spooned into delicate, stemmed glass dessert dishes. For sugar bowls and creamers and silver spoons.

For the gift of entertaining, and of being entertained. The words were not spoken, yet I took them in. Look, Alice, look how much fun it is to prepare a special meal, to have company. Look, Rosie, at how pretty the pink parfait looks in the eight glass dessert dishes. Look at the shiny silver. Look at my pearls.

Thankful for that. Good night.

P.S. The lovely image is from dorkmuffin.com. My friend Madonna, who lives up near Sarasota Springs, NY, has beautiful old pink peony bushes at her farmhouse homestead. I haven't seen her for over a year now, but I hope she and her family are well and that her heirloom peonies flourished this summer.