It wasn’t  the right kind of dressing, but she appeared anyway, suddenly and unexpectedly, surprising her daughter, right there in the Cracker Barrel.   She came as if summoned by the inferior dressing.  

Her mother’s  dressing had had absolutely no sage ever.  Ever ever.  It was a bitter herb that led to bitter dressing, she had told her daughter.   No, the right way to make dressing was to boil a whole chicken, use its broth, and then season it with celery and celery salt.  Another key difference was baking a clump of made-from-scratch biscuits to use as the breading.   And then, unexpectedly and scandalously, to roll the dressing into a ball.  “Chicken balls,” her grandmother and mother had called them, and no one who ever tasted those poultry orbs ever wanted any other kind of dressing again.  

So it was a surprise to her daughter, eating Thanksgiving dinner across from her husband in a Cracker Barrel, that her mother would make an appearance, eleven plus years after her death. Eleven years without chicken balls.  Soon after her  mother’s death, she and her brother had made  attempts to duplicate them and had gotten close.  Still, to her, the texture and the flavor did not match the genius of her mother;  the taste had died with her.

The Barrel’s dressing was not bad in that it was sage-less; may be her  mother appeared to give a reluctant nod of “okay-ness” to her daughter.  Maybe it was the combination of the mashed potatoes and the sweet potato casserole.  Or may be it was the wonderful Lebanese family a the next table that drew her mother there.   There were seven of them, with one child and the rest young adults.  They reminded her of the “kid’s table” she and her cousins were always relegated to, well into their twenties.   Not that they minded.   The cousins had their own traditions and did a lot more laughing about silly things than the adults did; yet it was comforting knowing the moms and dads and grandparents were in the next room, talking politics and gas prices and such, allowing the “kids” a few sacred moments to ones,  not the confused twenty somethings becoming adults.  As long as her mom and dad were in the next room, the world was still in order, still made sense, and the holidays familiar and the same as since she was born.

Going to the Cracker Barrel had become her and her husband’s new tradition.  It was not as depressing as it sounded.  Her job kept her in a constant state of fatigue, so the holidays had to be about rest.  With no extended family near by, it made sense not to cook a big meal for just the two of them, though she could have.   She had inherited the talented cooking and baking skills of her mom and grandmother.  She just did not have the natural clientele they did.

Eating her sage-less dressing, her mother entered.    It was  “your mom’s still with you Thanksgivings past,”  asking to be recognized.  Often the daughter would deny such requests from the past; why dwell on something that is no more?  But this time, she let it in.  Her mother came to her in the celery of the dressing, the  earthiness of the mashed potatoes, and in the Lebanese laughter.  She closed her eyes and let her senses experience it all, the smells, the sounds, the simple joys.  She felt her mother’s presence in all these.  She  also felt the the jarring reality of her absence, an absence she had worked  hard to can and put up, like the jars of strawberry preserves her mother made each summer.

She wanted to linger there, to let the sadness wash over her, to let herself miss her mother for once, in all its piercing splendor.

But she was at a Cracker Barrel for goodness sakes.   So she let herself experience her mother’s absence for just a few moments more, let her gooey chicken-balled hands hug her shoulders tightly, and then let her turn away to head back to the kitchen.