Labour Day Dinner

Monday September 7

Kind family friends JoAnne and Dave organized a holiday dinner and get-together, so we drove up through lush cornfields and vineyards to their house above Beamsville. There we had a little reunion with more friends, Ben, Patti, Michael, and Sandy, and reminisced about the time when Holt's Dad and Mom, Harold and Linda, lived here in Grimsby.
JoAnne had set a beautiful table, with cobalt-blue glasses, blue-patterned placemats, and a length of white tulle thrown over it, a bit of practicality that nonetheless made a very elegant picture. And the sight of it brought back a story about the first Christmas that Holt brought Barbara out to Albuquerque to meet his parents. Of course, everyone was a bit uncertain, wondering what the unknown person(s) would be like, but as it was Christmas, there had to be an exchange of gifts. So Linda presented Barbara with... a potato masher and a little white tulle canopy for keeping the flies off a picnic dish, with the explanation, "I thought it was so romantic," and that tiny glint of a joke in her eye. Needless to say, we liked each other from that moment (and a few others) on.
After the tulle was removed for business, JoAnne's table hardly had room for all the platters and bowls, so we passed to the left and heaped our plates with all sorts of fresh, local, summer foods: succulent oven-roasted chicken, red-skinned potatoes, fried okra, Patti's sweet potato casserole with pecans, baked yellow squash, sweet corn, green beans, thick slices of beefsteak tomato fresh from Sandy's garden, and corn bread in sticks and muffins; and then around again for seconds. And at the end, when no one thought they could eat a bite more, JoAnne put the ultimate persuasion on the table: home-baked peach and pecan pies, and who could resist just a slice of each?
Good food, good conversation, good people - a heart-warming and memorable evening. So thanks, JoAnne and Dave! (And pssst - JoAnne - we want your piecrust recipe!)