THREE kinds of pierogi

My brother Paul manages just fine. The latest manifestation of this is the house where he and Anna now live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The main part of the house is a 17th century mansion -- huge entry hall, big fireplace rooms on either side, wide swaying staircase, many mazed rooms upstairs -- with a later-ly added kitchen wing. Oh, and the Bay, right there, as the front yard.

We drove to the house down a long, tree-lined drive, away from Route 50, which is no longer the double-lane rural highway of our Ocean City-directed youth. Paul and Anna are watching over this place while the property around it is developed into what the Eastern Shore is developing into. I think Paul and Anna would rather have the run of this place -- where for now their telescope works just fine -- without the development, but I also think they will happily be there with the Bay and the house echoes for as long as they can.

And we did manage to add to the echoes: almost the whole family was there Christmas Eve, Anna having made a traditional 12-course Christmas Eve meal. The big kitchen was all Wysockis and Wysockis-by-social-attachment, raucous, hungry, and silly. Lots of nieces, some of whom peeled away at various times to wander quietly in the dark upstairs seeking evidence of romantic life from the past: crinoline, servant buttons, brain fever. (Leading to a conversation about the side of the buttons on which we -- the family of potato farmers we all assume ourselves to be -- would have been. Would still be, without the trust in education to which my parents still cheerfully and respectfully adhere.) Not so many nephews, led by Paul's son David with his new Christmas camera that he cleverly fitted with a homemade light bounce to ease up on the flash.

But dinner.

Wild mushroom soup. Borscht. Goose. Cod with pistachio crust. Cabbage, red and green. Breads, stuffed and buttered. And three kinds of pierogi. Three kinds of pierogi. Three kinds of pierogi. My father would have been smiling wildly if he had not been so happily eating: this is his idea of what life should always be, him surrounded by his children and their children, and the remembered food of his grandmother's kitchen. My mother liked the more boisterous scene of the kitchen before and after, lots of hands involved (but never enough, and too often female) in the cooking and clean up but also lots of children and conversation swirling in between the pots, butter, hot water, and bourbon.

My memory of the evening will always be a bit feverish because I was, well, feverish or building up to it. Everyone there from out of state -- with the exception of Dennis who had gotten his flu shot -- came down that evening with something hallucinatory. When we got back to the house we were house-sitting, I sank into bed with the dogs and did not get out until two days later when he had to leave for the MLA. The two little dogs pushed up against me, happy for the extra warmth, and I slipped in and out of fever dreams about pierogi, paisley, and presenting the paper I had been asked to give.

Dennis, bless him, went to my parents yesterday and did all the cooking that we do for them as our present whenever we are there on Christmas. He put together the huge afternoon buffet himself, with help from Amanda niece, while my mother made her famous date bars. And so a late Merry Christmas to you all.