31. Comfort bowl, comfort fork

Sometimes I say my balcony is the best 40 square feet of my home. It's an urban oasis, in any time of day. I am grateful for it, for the views, for the sliding glass doors that let so much light in. I am glad for every time someone has been here with me, from my very first guest (we ate milk and cookies one afternoon) to my most recent guest (we watched fireworks one night when the baseball team had won a home game).

I eat a lot of meals alone here. But I don't necessarily feel alone, because others are present through both memory and objects. Tonight I'm thankful for the many ways other people's presences are felt in our lives, even when they are far away, even when we have not actually met yet, even when they are no longer alive.

One of my oldest friends (in the sense of longest running friendships) gives me bowls. I give her things with fish on them. She is with me at dinner tonight because I ate it from this Pier 1 bowl she gave me. It's a ceramic flower of a bowl, just right for all kinds of foods that need to be encircled and embraced, just right to be half encircled itself in one cupped hand. Soup, beans and rice, beef stew, ice cream, scrambled eggs, cereal and milk, even, maybe once, barbecued potato chips — any food becomes comfort food when eaten from my comfort bowl.

My garden-partner friend is in these scrambled eggs with sautéed onions, green pepper, and Brandywine tomato, because we grew those last two ingredients together.

Mom is here in the Paul Revere pattern stainless steel dessert fork, which I took with me from home when I left for grad school in Pittsburgh, and which has been my comfort fork for probably 30 years now. (I wonder whether anyone ever noticed it was missing.)

My late father and my lively stepmother are here in tonight's cooking vessel, the Pampered Chef saute pan they gave me on one of their visits here on their way to Branson.

A friend-who-wears-many-hats is in the glass I'm drinking from, because one of those hats is kayaking buddy, and when she won third place in a kayak race we were in and got a medal and a commemorative glass for it, she let the glass live here as my fourth place consolation prize.

A Canadian friend is here because she remembers that I once called that tiny turquoise chimenea an "unnecessary ceramic object" and she will comment on the UCO any time she spots it in a Facebook photo. For photos, I'll light a votive candle inside it just for her, even if it's neither dark nor chilly.

Someone I know just a little, whom I have yet to meet, is here in the companionable form of one of her books, which is out of print, but after I ordered it months ago, not knowing that, Amazon kept looking and kept looking and gave me the option to say never mind, and then they found a copy, and in timing that has nothing to do with Amazon, this week was probably just right for it to arrive.

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And I'm glad for you, for your good company in this year-long lark, whether you've been "liking" and commenting on Facebook or quietly reading, or maybe visiting for the first and only time. I'm thankful for your real presence in the world, among people who know you and are glad to be at a real table with you.

Whose not-there presences are you thankful for today? How are they showing up?