Femme Apologizes to Faulkner Even As She Posts This Sentence

As she absently mixed the filling for the pumpkin pie, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, preoccupied with the party she was throwing in the evening--stirring, stirring, the wooden spoon making circles in the batter's latte-colored, liquidy mass, until she finally realized she had been repeating the same motion, eyes glazed and unseeing, fixated on the 1970’s vintage clock across the kitchen in her grandmother’s house (the ugliest clock she had ever seen in her life—why had someone chosen to use lime green and tan for rosmaling colors?); she jerked herself out of her reverie, swapped the wooden spoon for a spatula, and held the mixing bowl with one hand over her target, and she scraped out the ginger-and-cinnamon-smelling goo (why did her pie crust never come out like her grandmother’s, even though she used the same recipe?), then licked the spatula, remembering how her grandmother used to let her do it when she helped with the Thanksgiving pies as a child (the smells of the kitchen, and even washing dishes afterward—the soap making swiss-cheese holes in the oily residue inside the pans—were memories she treasured even as she knew how she had resisted helping Nana in the kitchen at the start, squirming out of Mom’s grasp, and trying to run outside with the boy cousins, but eventually getting scooped up and replaced in the fragrant, bustling warmth of bubbling gravy, steaming pies, and a massive bird roasting in the oven—was it the joy of cooking or just Stockholm Syndrome that kept her there year after year, once she had learned to love the smells and the activity of the busy kitchen on Thanksgiving?), and this time, she fixed her gaze out the window, listening for the sounds of the snowfall which was swirling little white specks all over the brown leaves and grass on the ground, and she marveled at the silence of it all, knowing how in just a couple of short hours, there would be a sea of relatives coming through the door, bringing in wet boots and noisy coats and small mittens drying on the Victorian-era radiators; it seemed so idyllic, and she was grateful to have inherited both the house and the hideous clock after all, even with the layer of sadness lying like dust over everything in the house (she had cleaned everything vigorously, at least three or four times, but it was still there), and also despite the new inconvenience of the light rail, which would invariably have a train going by when she needed to cross Hiawatha, but what did that matter when she had a home which had been the epicenter of the family’s warmth and happiness together for 80 years?