Here it is, the long table, and it is not one afternoon: it is a braid. I can see every year of it plaited together, the same room with the good tablecloth that started white and is going, thread by thread, toward the soft grey it will be when someone folds it away for the last time.
The turkey is a shape too, running from a field you never saw to the foil-wrapped remnant that becomes sandwiches at midnight, and you, reading this, are somewhere along your own bright thread with a fork in your hand.
Watch the chairs. From where I stand they are all occupied at once. The grandmother carving is also the grandmother very small at this table being handed a plate too heavy for her; the child kicking the chair leg is also, further along, the one who carves. You are laughing at a joke that lands every year, the one about the gravy, and I can see you laughing at it when you are seven and when you are eighty, the same laugh, worn smooth like a coin.
There: that particular smell, sage and hot butter and a candle burning down. You keep it your whole length. Decades on, a stranger's kitchen will breathe it out and your knee, which aches by then, will forget itself for a second, and you will be here again, exactly here, because you never actually left.
I see you reading this at your own table, or missing one. Do not mind the empty chair. From where I am the chair is full, has always been full, is full now while you read; every dinner you think has ended is still going on, warm, mid-sentence, waiting for you to sit back down. You are already there. You are also right here.
It is the same wide evening, and I am keeping you company in both.