My brother with two birds for the grill

There was simply too much good food made for me to go over it all in detail, so, I’m going to let the photos speak for themselves. I will say there was cider-roasted root vegetables, stuffing with sweet chicken apple sausage, brussels sprouts and bacon with a maple glaze, ham and turkey barbecued on the Weber, freshly baked herb biscuits, and sweet potato pie and my pear tart for dessert. Wishing you all a warm and lovely start to the holidays, and there’s a bit of writing below…

Beet-stained hands

The neighborhood…

The table…

The pear tart…

Happiness is a car ride home with my brother. Traversing streets we grew up on and talking about what has changed and what has not changed, laughing and trying to tune in a radio station then making our way to the streets of San Francisco, our new homes. We pass places on the highway I went to as a teenager with friends—I think how it’s amazing that in the ‘90s you just had to know how to get somewhere. Before google and cell phones we relied on our intuition, we showed up at movie theaters and restaurants when and where we said we’d be there.

Family is a beautiful thing—how it changes and adapts over time. How we claim people who did not start out as family, but become so because of marriage or a death, a new city or circumstances we never saw coming, and we care for each other. Nurse each other through grief or cancer or Alzheimer’s and a brain that is just fine, simply living a different version of reality now.

No one is obligated to love, it’s something we do almost despite ourselves. I gather with my family for a portrait. I set the timer on the camera and we assemble; I dash across the room to take my position. We are tired. We’re splattered with dish soap and remnants of recipes, we’ve raised glasses and cooked for hours and set the table—my family is bone tired yet gathers for the portrait because I ask them to. I’m carried by these people, day in and day out, and they don’t require anything in return. We’ve simply made our way together and will keep on doing it, accepting that we can’t know how love will be or what people we’ll become. And in the meantime, I can still put my head down on the kitchen counter while my dad makes me laugh until I ache. My mother would give me the shirt off her back, her very bones, if she thought it would save me some small pain. And my brother—he’s the glue, the sweet and easy temperament providing balance to the rest of us despite our bull-headed tendencies. It’s a gift: what the heart gives and forgives. We make the best of it. The knowing, and the not knowing too.