Starting with a libation of wine, beer, or soda, we relaxed semi-circle in the front room, the former kitchen of the Lusk House. Garnering attention were the lit and decorated tree, the four foot table surface with the country village, and the three-tiered Rudolph shelf. In all the years of DP8, someone noted, we had probably never sat in the front room.

            Complementing the drinks was a veggie tray and a Joyce appetizer – puff pastry squares topped with caramelized onions, gruyere, and apple.

Forty minutes later, the call for main course wafted in. Center stage was a two-parter: a slow-cooker pork tenderloin that had simmered in sauerkraut, joined with a roasted pork loin.

            Sides: mashed potatoes with flecks of red skins; a glass tray of asparagus; a bowl of steamed, brown-sugar-maple-syrup glazed carrots; homemade applesauce; Pillsbury biscuits; and pork gravy.

A twenty minute break was deemed vital before dessert, so into the den we sauntered, continuing our chats and taking time to look over the forty pastel paintings of Deb’s on the wall as well as the Christmas decoration on the beam.

The dessert centerpiece was a homemade peach crisp, using this year’s peaches from the Teator backyard. A dollop of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream was available. Rounding out the dessert line-up was a choice of homemade chocolate chip cookies and/or Jacobsen’s Danish butter cookies.

A little more than two hours after start, dinner was over and all the catch-up on news.

And some of that catch-up included: a note that this was the first dinner of our 20th year (the entire list is head-filling); deer in the backyards, and otherwise; hunting season arriving in a week or so; bears in the area; bears destroying the Karneses’ mailbox, and visiting neighbors’s backyards; November weather being mostly pleasant; the Monteverds gone to warmer climes; Dennis joining DP7 this month; Mark’s photo of a possible flip house on Red Mill Road; fire at Baumann’s; Chay’s painful back; a season’s end to Deb K’s mud trails at Ravine Farm; update on the Notars’s Florida house – optimistic due dates but realistic delay dates; wine clubs; Deb T’s decorations; Deb T’s paintings in den; autumn clean-up; abundance or not of apples and nuts on the ground; Thanksgiving plans; Den traveling the morning after DP7; cycling season is done, except for a bonus day possible; the whereabouts of the remainder of DP8; Christmas prep; whereabouts of offspring; the Waldron compound in Jefferson Heights; Dennis’s ordeal with Covid; Notars’s church work; as well as more topics than a few that did not stick my cranial walls.