The water goes third, from the silver spigot above the stove, after the chicken stock and the turkey that remains from Rosh Hashanah dinner the night before. My dad grips the five-pound pewter pot in both his hands, bearing the weight as my sister stands on a chair, controlling the flow. Eventually, he sets it down on the burner with a gasp and a soft clang, and the water splashes a bit before slowly waning by the squeak of the handle above. My sister hops off the chair and drags it to the table, back first and two legs off the floor, while my dad sparks the fire with a dial and puts it on the highest setting. There is no time to watch the flames wet the pot-- blue and orange waves like goldfish in a pond, because there is too much to do, too many days of repenting for this to be relegated to the one before Yom Kippur.

Next, the peeling. Carrots, potatoes, parsnips, turnips, and celery-- grandmother be damned. My sister cuts her finger, and a bandaid replaces the knife before any blood can drop onto the peelings in the sink. She is referred to matzo ball duty, mixing the egg and spices into the dry matzo and molding it into balls with her hands, which will be pink from cold by the end, crusted with all kinds of salt and egg and oil. They are laid onto a wax sheet with care, far enough away from the stove to stay chilled.

As my dad peels, I slice and quarter. The potatoes and the turnips are cut into brick-like squares, everything else cut more-or-less evenly into circles, the celery into crescents. A carrot cigar hangs out of the corner of my mouth, and every so often, an imitation of Bugs Bunny tumbles from above the cutting board. “Ehhh,” I say, crunching on the carrot loudly. “what’s up Doc?” My sister giggles and my dad starts quoting Blazing Saddles, My Cousin Vinny, and The Princess Bride.
After every vegetable and starch is in the bowl, the turkey bones are scooped out and placed on a scratched and white cutting board, where my dad picks off the meat, still steaming, and plops it into the pot. His fingertips are burnt by the end, so I kneel on a chair and pour my diced work inside as well, everything congregating with a plop. A timer should be set, someone once said, so that we could know for sure when we should put in the matzo balls. Instead, the youngest is assigned to the task, happily watching the boiling pot and calling over someone to poke a potato or carrot every so often.

Finally, the matzo balls. We each take turns ladling the tan clouds into the broth with our hands, watching the soup swallow them before they float to the top-- proof of fluffy success. Now, the kitchen officially smells like the autumn, like the High Holidays, like my dad’s house. We wait at the scratched kitchen table with celery stuck to our socks and carrots smoking in our mouths, anxious to get our own small bowl of Home. The rest, the remaining four-point-whatever pounds, will be poured into an assortment of tupperware with faded names written on the mismatched tops and frozen for nine days. After the ninth day-- a day of promises and books of death and uncomfortable flats and dresses and synagogue and fasting, we will sit down and we will chant the haMotzi, the Kiddush, and whatever that prayer that ends with shel yom hakippurim is called. We will eat the challah and drink the manischewitz (or grape juice) and we will serve ourselves the salad and the brisket and the kugel and we will say the haMotzi once again because Stuart was in the bathroom and we will all wait for our bowls to be summoned by my dad into the kitchen, where he will ladle two matzo balls and broth into every bowl-- two and a half for the kids and his mother-in-law-- and we will all rush to the dining room and sit down and eat half of the soup before he himself is finished. We will eat the soup for four more days after that, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, until all the matzo balls are gone and there is one lonely container left in the fridge and three matzo balls in the freezer that we will watch forlornly as they are heated and brought over to Russ down the block, who will kiss cheeks and give out candy that was made before 1985 and smell like starch and his dog, who is even more blind and deaf than Russ. The first mitzvot of the new year.