Mary Kate Skehan

If your family is like mine, you’ve spent the time and energy normally reserved for dividing up Thanksgiving potluck assignments determining how many people may attend your holiday, and under what public-safety conditions. The truth is, some families’ scaled-back Thanksgivings this year may actually mark an improvement on the traditional meal. We all know that turkeys are bland and fussy to prepare, one reason we don’t eat them all year round. (My father has a more gruesome objection involving the perceived similarity of turkey and human flesh, which I generally prefer not to consider.) Melissa Clark’s bacon-wrapped turkey breast is surely an enormous improvement.

In a valley of the Catskill Mountains near the tiny village of Hobart and not much else, there’s a farm with a red barn and a trickling spring-fed stream. Chickens and geese roam through the yard, cows and their young graze in the pasture, and a vegetable garden thrives on the hillside. If this sounds idyllic, you’ve never spent a week on a working farm. I recently had the opportunity, mostly by accident. I thought ‘housesitting’ with two friends in the mountains meant a few chores: watering the plants, say, or feeding the cats. Roxbury Mountain Maple Farm turned out to be home to 130 chickens, 50-odd chicks, 30 cows, 12 ducklings, six roosters, five geese, four ducks, three cats and two dogs.

Between my parents, my six brothers, my sister and I, we were always gathering for something special in normal times: a graduation, a baptism, a cookout, even just pastries after Sunday Mass. But then the days and weeks of quarantine stretched darkly before us with nothing to celebrate, minor or major. The days all run together, differentiated by nothing except my parents’ choice of detective procedural for binge-watching. Until this week, when we got the news: L. is coming home. My younger brother L. is a second lieutenant in the Marines, the second of my brothers to become an officer.

I fled New York City in March for my hometown in Pennsylvania. I brought with me one suitcase, a good chunk of it filled by my favorite book: the bestselling Nothing Fancy by Alison Roman of the New York Times. I’m now facing weeks here with three shirts and an impractical selection of underwear, but I regret nothing about my packing. As my father drove up the turnpike to evacuate me, I had decided in a burst of wartime can-do spirit that my contribution to the household would consist in cooking for the family, and damn if I wasn’t going to make a go of it. There was more than a little self-interest in this idea. Like all middle children, I long for a chance to shine in front of my family.