Monthly Archives: November 2015

A Thanksgiving Dressing

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IMG_2069  No Southerner I know stuffs the bird. In my experience we always serve dressing on the side. My Grandmother Harbison made a cornbread dressing and Grandmother Journey served a fancier oyster dressing, still using cornbread as a base. I like both but Mother is partial to a plain cornbread dressing without oysters so her cornbread dressing is what we have for the holidays.

Near Thanksgiving last year I shared memories of my Grandmother Harbison’s kushmagudi, a cornbread and potlikker dish which has become a staple of our cold weather holiday table. During my father’s extended hospital stay, Mother has often mixed up a quick kushmagudi when she gets home from the hospital at night.

As my Grandmother Harbison’s health made it more challenging for her to cook the holiday feasts, Mother began to make her own cornbread dressing from a recipe she found somewhere. It’s a very easy recipe, moist and rich, and even though it wasn’t exactly the same as Grandmother Harbison’s dressing, it got Grandmother Harbison’s seal of approval.

The celery in the cornbread recipe reminds me of another Thanksgiving tradition at my family’s house. In addition to using celery in the dressing, Mother has always put out a dish of raw celery sticks with our turkey. I grew up with raw celery as part of the Thanksgiving meal and never thought it was unusual until people from outside the family informed me that they had never heard of such a thing. Even so, it is a nice complement to turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce. We put celery sticks on our turkey sandwiches on Friday and that is a crunchy and delicious addition to the Thanksgiving leftover tradition too.

Even though circumstances dictate a spartan Thanksgiving this year, I packed Mother’s cornbread dressing recipe just in case I find the time to make it. And remember that a proper cornbread recipe does not include sugar.

Simple Cornbread Dressing

4 cups crumbled cornbread
2-3 slices crumbled white bread
½ cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped onion
2 large eggs
Sage, to taste
¼ teaspoon black pepper
2 cups chicken broth
1 can cream of chicken (or cream of mushroom) soup, undiluted

Combine all ingredients and mix well. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour (or overnight) for flavors to blend. Pour into 2-quart baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving 2015: “Simple Gifts”

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IMG_2063    Abraham Lincoln declared the national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863 amidst some of the darkest days of the Civil War. Lincoln hoped the gesture might be a unifying measure. That didn’t really happen back then but Thanksgiving has since become a time of celebration and unity that transcends the crass commercialism that accompanies it. We take a day – or maybe only a moment – to pause and give thanks for whatever blessings we may have. Lincoln’s gesture reminds us that at the worst and most hopeless of times, we should remember what we have to be grateful for.

2015 has been a tough year for my family. As I write this, my father is in his fifth week in an intensive care unit. It has been very touch and go but after some pretty radical procedures Dad will soon be moved to a specialty care facility at another hospital where the goal is for him to progress to the point that he can come back home.

This would be good news for everybody, but especially for my mother who has been by Dad’s side every single day, holding his hand for hours on end and diligently making tough decisions about his care. My parents have been married almost 63 years and the bond between them is unusually strong, especially in the tough times. Mother is a cancer survivor; when malignant melanoma was found in one of her eyes thirty years ago Dad was beside her, fighting tirelessly with her the whole way. They have been a formidable and indominatable team throughout their decades together. Now it’s Mother’s turn to speak for Dad and she is showing how tough, resolute, and resilient she can be.

In the six months since my Dad’s health issues began a noticeable decline, some of my friends and acquaintances have faced their own challenges, serious illness, and a few deaths. Back in the summer I remarked to a friend that “I’m not ready for this part of my life.”

Who is?

So we take it day by day and try to be as positive as possible, even on the bad days and through the dreaded phone calls in the middle of the night. Dad still can’t speak but this weekend he wrote a few sketchy notes. He asked for his glasses and then wrote “How do I get out of here?” When Mother arrived at the hospital he wrote “I love love you.”

Mother said last week that there would be no Thanksgiving celebration this year. I understand how she feels and know how difficult it will be to work in Thanksgiving among the hospital visits.

Yet, remembering Lincoln’s gesture as well as the gesture of the English immigrants and indigenous people at that proverbial first American thanksgiving, it seems that the hardest of times may call for the most fervent of thanks. These times give us an opportunity to reflect on what we still have and appreciate and hope for.

We may not have a feast with a bird and all the fixings but I am sure my family and I will find time enough and reasons to give thanks on Thursday.

IMG_2067Simple Gifts (Shaker dance tune)
– Joseph Brackett (1848)
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

I thank you for reading my journal.

Finding the Links in the Paint Rock Valley

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IMG_2019  The small white wood-frame Presbyterian church building in the community of Trenton, Alabama, in the Paint Rock River Valley of northeast Alabama is the sort of simple church architecture I seek out in my travels. The church was built in 1903 and held its last service in 2008. The building’s current owner, Trenton native Jean Arndt, graciously opens it for community events. It no longer has heat and electricity; when I first visited in 2013 there were handmade quilts draped over each pew for the visitors to wrap themselves against the November chill.  IMG_2006

The ambience, along with the soft light filtering through the many windows, created a warm, cozy venue against a chilly rainy mid-autumn Saturday when I returned to Trenton Presbyterian Church for the second time recently. The event was the Heritage Harvest Festival 2015, part of the effort of my friend Judy Prince and her network of supporters to build and nurture community in the Paint Pock Valley.

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I travelled down early with three communication arts videographers – Howard Melton, Julian Johnson, and L’Debra Henderson – who are my students at Alabama A&M. We were there to shoot the event to provide video documentation. The bad weather caused the turnout to be small but the gathering was engaging and responsive.

Musicians and storytellers were among those in attendance. Trenton native Billy Smith performed a set of 17th Century Scottish tunes on the lute. His performance was prefaced with memories of his family and of growing up in Trenton. He also included a history lesson on the Moorish origins of the lute and the instrument’s adaptations over the years. IMG_2035

Jean Arndt gave an informative history of the church and her family’s generations-long affiliation with it. She had a particularly evocative account of car headlights illuminating her night-time baptism in the nearby Paint Rock River in the ‘40s.

The area’s rich Native American history – particularly with the Cherokee nation – was remarked upon and Judy Prince gave her personal testimony about the history of the area and her efforts to build community throughout her life and career not only in the Paint Rock Valley but as a social worker and Civil Rights activist in Birmingham and Mississippi in the 1960s. IMG_2043

Trenton native Randy Jones provided musical accompaniment on the church’s old piano as the gathering sang cherished heritage hymns including “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (my mother’s favorite), “Amazing Grace,” and “Simple Gifts,” the Shaker hymn. Jones later performed the adaptation of “Simple Gifts” from Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.”IMG_2055

Observing the gathering, I realized that the goals of Paint Rock Valley’s cozy harvest gathering have much in common with the recent Friends of the Café dinner I attended at the Alabama Chanin factory in Florence. Although these were very different proceedings, each sought to bring diverse communities together to build a unified and productive whole.

A theme of the Florence event was a celebration of handmade items and locally grown and sourced foods and the concept of the “maker” in all of its incarnations. Similar themes come to play in the efforts of Judy and others in the Paint Rock Valley. The burgeoning revivals of handcrafted and farm to table, the various “roots” movements, and the call to be better stewards of the land and our natural environment are themes that Paint Rock Valley and Alabama Chanin have in common although each comes at it from a different place. While Alabama Chanin originates with a Shoals-based fashion designer, Judy Prince’s Connect UP efforts find focus in a rural and comparatively isolated valley along the lyrical Paint Rock River. IMG_2022

Driving down to Birmingham on Saturday afternoon, I mulled the lessons and similarities of these two discrete but intricately related gatherings. The links are clear and the aims are the same. It is up to all of us to make the connections.

It may be the case that with increased awareness, participation, and attention to the honest and talented people in and from Paint Rock Valley, Paint Rock Valley’s time in the spotlight may be imminent. IMG_2056

Community activist Judy Prince is pictured above. More information about the Joys of Simplicity Wellness Adventures and the Connect UP Program may be found at Judy’s website, www.tinyurl.com/lutybme.