As Thanksgiving crashes down on us, I am thinking, as one does at this time of year, of tradition.

I am thinking of talking to the turkey. Not talking turkey but talking TO the turkey.

It's a thing my grandmother did each year as she stuffed it, sewed it up, trussed it and gave it over to the oven.

A peculiarity, but one so dear to me. I do it now myself.

Back then, my mother might be there, leaning over the counter watching or helping clean up, though she was often off working. I would be self-importantly helping (but probably just as much getting in the way), tossing the stuffing ingredients together or patting the overflow into a casserole to be cooked once the turkey was done.

Grandma, a short, stout woman in a homesewn housedress, would be at the counter, wrestling with the slippery, awkward bird, having already made the recheio (Portuguese for stuffing, and pronounced, perplexingly, something like roo-SHADOO).

At this time of year, I think of that plain, worn kitchen with its formica counters, painted cabinets and linoleum floors and the old stove with the built-in stew pot. It was, as kitchens often are, the heart of the house. There Grandpa brought the bounty of his garden for Grandma to freeze or can. There, Grandma, Grandpa and I had innumerable dinners promptly at 5 o'clock each night. There I learned to bake a cake, make all the standard Portuguese dishes, build a beef stew or a Portuguese bean soup, boil up guava jam, stock the freezer with solid-pack tomatoes, do the dishes properly, keep everything clean and in order.

There, Grandma taught me not only cooking but grace and generosity (although I haven't always lived up to those lessons). When my mother married a man from Minnesota after my father died, she learned to roast a duck and stuff it with wild rice, because that was the food of his home and he missed it. We routinely packed up boxes of papaya, cabbage, avocadoes and such and took it to St. Anthony's convent in Wailuku for the nuns. When someone was sick, she would make a pot of soup and drop it off. If Grandpa's political cronies showed up suddenly, she'd huff a little (she thought politics was a big waste of time), but she'd put more vegetables in the soup, or cook a quick stir-fried corned beef and cabbage and smile her fabulous smile. She had a great sense of fun and did enjoy company.

But back to Thanksgiving.

Grandma's recheio was the simplest possible preparation: hunks of Portugese white bread (you could buy it at Yukouchi Bakery in those days), toasted in the oven, then tossed with lots of butter-sautéed onions and our garden-grown salsa (Portuguese for flat-leaf parsley) and moistened with a bit of chicken broth.

Grandma liked to mix it with her hands, tossing it lightly, lightly, so it wouldn't get too soggy or compressed.

She'd put the turkey on a roasting pan and place handfuls of stuffing in its cavity, all the while murmuring. "Here you go, turkeylinga," she'd say. (Linga is a Portuguese word ending that transforms the noun to mean "little" and has an affectionate nuance to it.)

"Oh, you're going to be so 'ono," she'd say.

She'd pull the big spool of cotton kitchen twine out of its hiding place and the craft needle out of its home in one of the kitchen drawers and, especially in later years when her eyesight was going, she'd turn to me to thread it. And then she'd sew up the turkey's rear flap and talk the whole time, her gnarled fingers greasy with butter and flecks of minced parsley spotting her hands, "Stay still," she'd say as the needle slipped or the flesh tore. "No make trouble."

Then she'd truss the bird, winding the string around its legs and all the while muttering little phrases. "Here we go!" she'd say when the bird was finally ready.

And then, as Portuguese women often do, she might make the sign of the cross and say a little prayer over it before she closed the oven door.

Send recipe requests to Wanda Adams, Food Editor, The Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802; fax, 525-8055; e-mail wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.