Late November

As we reach the fourth week of November, we have so much abundance to be thankful for: an ever-growing circle of friends, families (perhaps further away than we’d wished, but there), a home filled with love. And then there’s the continuing abundance of food produced by the land on which we live.

Last Saturday, several friends came to dinner. We roasted one of the pumpkins, and served it mashed and sweetened with maple syrup, along with a fresh-picked salad. Stored potatoes, fresh dug carrots, and frozen green beans went into the pot roast. The toasted pumpkin seeds made a wonderful dessert (along with the chocolate that Alicia brought and the Girl Scout cookies I bought from Michelle and Nina).

Sunday, I dug some of the Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes) to bring to my sister. A member of the sunflower family, this late-blooming, spreading perennial bears its yellow flowers in late October. It’s knobby, homely looking tubers – sweeter after several frosts – can be cooked like potatoes.

Last night, I took out the horseradish roots I dug earlier in the fall. Like the sunchokes, they are not much to look at. But they make a wonderful grated horseradish preserve that my dad -- and we -- love. Richard scrubbed; I grated. We haven’t tasted it yet, but inhaling near the food processor sent a fiery rush through my nasal passages and tears to my eyes. And I was worried that holding them in the frig for so long had weakened their taste!

This morning, before we pack the car, I will pick fresh salad greens for my niece, Dori, and parsley, sage, winter savory and thyme for my mom.

Along with thankfulness, food, friends and family, however, late November brings Thanksgiving, a complicated holiday, made ever more complex as we continue to learn to separate the rosy myths that surround it from clearer-eyed looks at the arrival of the English colonists to this continent. One excellent version, 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving, offers a more complete look at this history. So does the "The Real Story of Thanksgiving."

The challenge is that what most people in the U.S. learned about Thanksgiving is a mix of both history and myth. The relationship between the Europeans and the Native people in fact included at least one shared feast and some ongoing diplomacy. The early English settlers first survived only because of the generosity and help from Native people knew how to live on this land. However relationship between the two groups also was characterized by European kidnappings of hundreds of Native people taken to Europe as “novelties” and slaves, the repeated stealing of Native food stores, the privatization of collectively-shared land, massacres, policies of genocide and forced removal. Many of the first "thanksgivings" observed by the English settlers were actually "victory" celebrations after massacres of the "heathen savages." Within a generation there was a state of ongoing war between the two peoples. It is a painful story that many of European descent struggle to attend to.

The part of New York State where we live was – and still is – home to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people. So even as we love and tend this plot of land on which we live, we must grapple with the painful awareness of who else loved and tended it before us, what happened to them and why. There are no simple answers for rectifying historic wrongs. But there is the obligation to continue to question how those of us who live here now, enjoying the harvests of this place, are should respond to horrific injustices we didn’t create, but of whose histories we are now a part.