Our Thanksgiving table was set for six on Thursday. My 'little'* brother Paul and his wife, Lugene, family friend Steve Green and my mother were expected to join Arthur and me. My mother came early to help with preparations and stood at the kitchen sink to peel potatoes. After she finished, I fixed her a cup of tea and she sat by the fire, enjoying all the ways it warms.
"Mother used to recite nursery rhymes to us," she told me when she returned the empty cup to the steamy kitchen. Then she launched into this one:
“Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold
Some like it in the pot, nine days old”.
My mind immediately went to the twenty-first century version on You Tube that sends my eldest granddaughter into fits of giggles. But she took me back to the beginning of the twentieth century. "It was your fireplace that brought it to mind. Imagine a pot hanging on the fire for nine days. Wonder how many people got sick after eating nine-day-old porridge?"
She allowed that having to live on pease porridge day in and day out was grim but it was better than the alternative - starving.
*Paul, who is three years younger than I and the youngest of our family of five siblings, is everyone's little brother, though he likely is the tallest of us all these days.
(Click here to read memories of my childhood Thanksgivings, written last year)
