The fellow who cleans the ranch house took sick leave before Thanksgiving. Didn't matter much, as only 13 guests and family members were coming for the holiday. By the time they settled in at the ranch house and over in town, the amount of hunting clothes and travel wardrobe strewn over the bedrooms and the numbers of bath towels covering the tub and shower space of the bathrooms concealed housekeeping conditions.

Biggest problem became going to the grocery store. The big rains before Thanksgiving slicked the 15 miles of dirt track to a mud slide between the ranch and town. Five days ahead, I started thawing two turkeys and laying in a large cache of supplies in case more rain fell. Once unloaded at the ranch, a check list showed all the order was for emergencies except the turkeys. I had bought candles, canned heat, thermos jugs, wood matches, liquid starter, air wicks, extra coffee, canned milk, 36 rolls of toilet tissue, a large bottle of aspirin, one vial of paregoric, insect repellent, and a grocery sack loaded with dried fruit, mixed nuts, and granola.

Two years had passed since the draws ran for more than a few hours, yet I hadn't forgotten being stranded at the ranch in the old days. For years after we all stopped smoking, we still kept four sacks of Bull Durham in the pantry. No matter which side of the Pecos River Mother lived, she stashed a big can of coffee in the cabinet, be it a trailer house on a lease outfit or her home base here on the Divide.

The next trip to the store, my mind focused clearer on the dry track. I left enough space by each item the four teenage grandsons ate to quadruple the amounts. However, one of the boys changed to a vegetarian too late for me to know to buy collard greens and broccoli florets instead of spare ribs and loin steak. The news came via cell phone on the way home, too late to buy one less leg of lamb and drop a rack of pork ribs. His mother apologized. The apology was unnecessary. Over the last half century, starting with my brother and sister through my eight childrens' college days, I had fed every cult and cause known except the New Guinea Wigmen, who don't eat white men until they run short of traditional enemies. (The Wigmen claim we are too salty.)

Once cooking, my cornbread for the dressing flopped. My 95 year old-cousin, ranching below Sherwood, caused the cornbread to fail. When I went by her outfit to swap pork sausage for fresh yard eggs, she said, "You make the best cornbread I've ever eaten. Use six of these eggs to make me a double recipe." Blood rushed to my head the way my face felt in high school asking a girl to dance. I never have been able to handle a compliment, especially one by a lady with 90 years of cornbread tasting experience. No cooks on either end of Spring Creek, or either side of 09 Divide had ever reached that peak.

I didn't even store the groceries before I was whipping up a double recipe. And how wonderful the bread was going to be. The reddish gold yolks in country eggs stand twice as high as a caged hen's egg. Metal measuring cups gauge stone ground cornmeal as close as an assayer weighing gold dust. The richest unbleached flour, hands down, goes to King Arthur's brand. Buttermilk shaken to a high foam cuts sourdough starter perfect for the delicate taste of the yellow meal and white flour to take the hot black skillet of foaming butter into the mixing bowl.

"Ah, victory," I thought. "How ol' cousin Elizabeth is going to love this bread." The next move is a blur. Standing over the white mixing bowl of my mother's, I reached to the spice shelf and picked what may have been the most potent bottle of fennel seed to ever be harvested. In a trance, I suppose, I shook an offering in the palm of my hand and dropped it in the batter.

"Ah, victory, to send my stupid soul to perdition!" The bread tasted the way shellac fumes flavor a wood worker's shop. First, I considered burning my cookbooks and living on frozen dinners. Next, I thought of converting the kitchen into a hothouse to grow tomatoes. Last, I took the bottle of fennel and the pan of cornbread and threw them in an antbed by the back gate.

By the nest day, I made a rally. A sack of store-bought cornbread stuffing passed without notice. The vegetarian grandson won four games of dominoes, proving the dreadful green-leaf anemia hadn't slowed the circulation of blood to his brain. The emergency provisions stayed on the shelf untouched. By Sunday, I was back to baking my cousin a pan of sourdough cornbread…

December 6, 2001