Thanksgiving

Weekend Tea

My mother gave me the tea the came with her tea set, a British ‘weekend morning tea’. I drank it Saturday morning with cream and a bowl of oatmeal. Delightful. The house is all out of order from our days at home doing nothing. It’s nice to do nothing some days. Saturday we went nowhere. I made whole wheat bread and set ciabatta to rise, I threw a bowl, edited a poem and read with my feet tucked up on my rocking chair. On Sunday, we woke early enough to eat before Liturgy and still keep the fast. We had eggs, bacon, coffee, bread, and butter in the cold pre-dawn.

 

After mass, and still full from breakfast, we watched the frosted ground soften and my husband began making a nativity set while Yarrow chased Luba with her tiny broom and I filled my mind with herbs and tinctures. We ate bacon tuna melts with leftover creamy potato-broccoli soup for dinner, with Yarrow refusing everything but avocado and croissant. She would eat avocados forever if we had enough of them, washing them down with heavy cream until her fatness made the burden of clothes impossible.

 

 

Tea Cakes and Russian Reflections

Autumn is quickly fading into winter and my thoughts are primarily wrapped up in making the homestead a cozy, warm little retreat amid the snow, though the trials of the Karamazov clan can drive out all practical thoughts for hours on end, even now that my rereading of the book is over. The cold nights, little mounds of snow against the yurt, and the scent of burning logs all encourage my distraction. I want to sit bundled in my rocking chair with hot Russian tea, Dostoevsky, and a little blue and white plate of three tea-cakes set in a triangle, while Yarrow sleeps in her cradle and the night breathes all around.

I learned to make tea-cakes from my mother, and her recipe book, which was not at all Russian, but the cakes truly are: tiny, crumbly, rounded, and so easy to display - they go so well with the strong "Peter the Great" tea I found at Bagusha's - half it's lettering in Cyrillic, with my pretty dishes, and with the immoderate heroes who run wild in all of Dostoevsky's writing. He makes me think about the cult of moderation, which cuts both ways, stealing away the passion that makes great saints as well as great sinners. We don't like to think of moderation as a stumbling block to sanctity, but it very often is. What would Magdalene be with out her immoderate love, or Mary of Egypt, or Paul with only moderate zeal, or Francis who was unable to avoid extremes in any case. Dostoevsky's Russians are forever reminding me that God longs to be taken to the extreme, and that moderation is at best a lukewarm virtue, based more on fear than love.