Thanksgiving Came Early

I sighed, gazing into the empty vegetable drawer. Three days after the earthquake, the power was back on, and so was the water. The freezer was full of freezer-burned meat that needed to be eaten quickly. We had plenty of rice, a few eggs, and even a little bit of milk, but no vegetables.

I hungrily searched the garden. A few tiny leeks, a handful of herbs, an abundance of parsley, some stunted carrots; hardly enough to make a meal.

But I was not yet desperate enough to brave the lines of stern-faced housewives at the grocery store as they snapped up every scrap of fresh food before I even got through the door. What would happen, I wondered, to the people who really were desperate, who didn’t have our well-stocked pantry, or who had lost everything in their freezer? How could they compete with the others who were panic-buying simply because fresh food had become scarce?

The warm early autumn breeze carried the fragrance of yakiniku from somewhere in the neighborhood. Perhaps someone else had partially-thawed meat to use up. Our neighbor across the street stood on a ladder trimming his pine tree. Other than the grocery store, our neighborhood was a haven of peace and serenity. I sighed with regret over the beets and Swiss chard that I planted in the spring, which had been choked out by weeds in our absence over the summer. If only we had been able to plant a garden this year. I thought of our friends with large farm plots, starting to feel jealous.

Then it dawned on me that in Hokkaido in the autumn, no one needs to go hungry. The abundant vegetables in the fields don’t care one bit that there’s been an earthquake. Scarcity was an illusion that had grown in the minds of the self-sufficient. But I had no need to rely only on my own resources, and neither did anyone else. I could ask for help. What if I asked my farming friends? There was no bread in the stores, either, since there was neither milk nor eggs. I can make bread without using either. Why not make a trade?

So we asked. And our friend arrived in our genkan with a huge box of potatoes, a bag of vine-ripened tomatoes, a bundle of green beans, some eggplants, and the largest kabocha I had ever seen. “No need to return the favor,” he said, smiling. That night we ate a feast, and we continued to feast for a week.

I delivered a bag with two little loaves of fresh sourdough bread to his wife at church the following Sunday, tears in my eyes as I hugged and thanked her.

Lord of the Harvest, we give you thanks for your mercy to all of us here in Hokkaido. By your grace, the earthquake happened in autumn. No one went hungry, and no one froze. And we thank you that you welcome us to ask for help.

(By the way, we saved one pie's worth of the kabocha and froze it for our Thanksgiving pie.)