She’s the one, the only one, built like an Amazon

The kitchen will be done today, except for the stained glass window. It’s been a long, slow process, three months of hard, painstaking work for our contractors, three months without a kitchen for us. Everyone has been remarkably patient and cool-headed throughout, maybe because we all knew we were creating something beautiful, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Most of the materials we used were old, “repurposed,” they call it – the 1880s ceiling tin Brendan found for sale in Ohio and had shipped here, the first-growth pine floorboards from an old 1770s barn wall we bought from an old-wood guy in Cape Elizabeth, the maple the contractors used to build the kitchen cabinets and the wainscoting in the dining room, which came from a 100-year-old mill floor in Biddeford. We bought our appliances second-hand, cheap and in excellent shape, from a guy up in Poland Spring who has a barn full of barely-used, traded-in stuff.

The contractors never once quailed at these materials, never complained about the unorthodoxies of using them. They rose to every challenge, scraped and sanded and then painted the ornate old squares of ceiling tin they’d carefully jiggered into place and cut to accommodate the overhead lights, planed and sanded and endlessly poly’ed the rough, weatherbeaten dimensional countertop planks into smooth, richly golden expanses. The patinaed copper from the 1902 bathtub Brendan bought from a guy north of Waterville has been siliconed to the bartop with sandbags and clamps. The old copper was curved; they’ve subdued it and wrested it into place.

As of yesterday, the wavy sort-of-opaque glass is in the upper cabinet doors.  The (new) porcelain sink has been set into the countertop and hooked up. The tall wooden door with beveled glass and carved details that used to hang in the front entryway is now a swinging door between the kitchen and the foyer. Right now, they’re downstairs, grouting the Mexican tile backsplash, replacing the glass in the door to the mudroom, shaping the copper edges around the bartop, and then, I think, they’ll be done.

Later this afternoon, when they pack up their tools and drive away, we’ll wander around the big, cavernous-feeling, dazzling room, slightly befuddled, dazed with the joy of having our kitchen and dining room, which were so ugly before, be so beautiful now, all one big room instead of divided, with two more windows and the brick chimney exposed, freshly painted a warm neutral buttery color, everything gleaming and rich with history, every detail exactly what we’d wanted all along.

The kitchen feels as if it’s been in the house forever; our aim was to have people walk in and assume that, feel it instinctively. Our house is old and tall and beautiful, and it wants to feel comfortable and attractive in its outfit; it also wants an outfit befitting its dignified  age. Before, the kitchen was all pink granite and white melamine, white appliances and a hideous Brazilian cherry floor. The dining room was no great shakes, either. The walls were painted a cold sky blue. The huge side window was Sheetrocked over. The house chafed and protested against this bullshit with every joist and beam; we could almost hear it. Ridiculous as it sounds, I can’t help thinking that it’s rejoicing in its new duds, even preening a little, and I don’t blame it.

Tomorrow, we’ll unpack the boxes of cooking utensils and pots and bowls, baking pans and cookie sheets and wooden spoons, glasses, cups, plates, and the bags of staples, rice and lentils and pasta. We can slot the spices into the indented maple ledge built into the back of the island, empty the corner of the living room where all the kitchen stuff has been stored since February, move the table and chairs back into the dining room, rearrange the couch and armchairs around the fireplace in the living room, vacuum and mop and dust and hang pictures.

Once that’s all done, the inevitable question is sure to arise. What should we cook to inaugurate our new kitchen? What should its first meal be?

Our friend Rosie will be visiting this weekend. She is a brilliant, accomplished, knowledgeable cook, a famous bartender and inventor of cocktails, but despite that, she’s never intimidating to cook for or to mix drinks for, because she is impeccably philosophical. She wants to be pleased; she wants to enjoy our hospitality. A couple of years ago, I forgot to trim the strings off some sugar-snap peas I had sautéed with green beans to go alongside Brendan’s roast. And my Dauphinoise was too dry, because I hadn’t used enough cream. We ate our meal, picking peapod strings out of our teeth, putting away plenty of Dauphinoise despite its flaws.

Mid-meal, I broke down and apologized.

Rosie shot back, “Julia Child said, ‘Never apologize at the table.’ I never do. You shouldn’t either.”

And that was that.

Therefore, I know that whatever we make, Rosie will not complain; she will eat enthusiastically and without criticism. Even so, I’m not going to try anything new or complicated. I’m superstitious. It’s the First Supper. It has to be good. My mind keeps drifting to my current favorite standby, which is foolproof, easy, fast, no-fuss, comforting, and delicious: Haddock filets cut into bite-sized pieces and marinated in lemon juice and harissa spices, then added to a skillet in which chopped chorizo and leeks have been sautéed in olive oil and white wine. The fish is poached till it’s tender and cooked through, then this smoky, spicy stew is served over wild rice cooked in chicken broth, with garlicky steamed red chard alongside.

I’m already drooling at the thought of digging into a plateful tomorrow night; we’ll light candles, open the windows, dim the chandelier.

But a dream should come true, and a heart should be filled, and a life should be lived in the piney wood hills

Once in a while, in the late afternoon or early evening, we get a wild hair and go up Foss. Going up Foss is a very old ritual that long predates my arrival in these parts. In a small knapsack, we bring a cold liter bottle of hard cider and a bag of roasted cashews, and water and a treat for Dingo.

We all get into the car and drive several miles back through the woods on dirt roads, through the tiny mountain hamlet of Eaton with its clean lake and 19^th century town hall, past the turnoff to the Snowvillage Inn, where we had a long, decadent dinner last weekend with Brendan’s grandmother (“an orgy,” she pronounced it, and she wasn’t kidding) and then we head upward.

Foss Mountain Road has a few isolated houses with old barns and a working llama farm. The road is so steep, the car occasionally tips and jolts upward as the engine strains to heave us over the hump to the next flat spot. It’s rutted from frost and snowmelt, as grooved and corrugated as a dry streambed in places. We jounce slowly up through dense woods for a good long time. When we come to the tiny turnoff, we park and get out of the car and hike up through a big, scrubby blueberry field that leads us to a narrow path through a small birch wood. This path is studded with boulders and slick with fallen leaves and wet from an underground spring, so we have to tread carefully and occasionally grab a branch or walk on higher ground. Above the wood, we hit the huge granite outcropping and scramble up it to the top.

The summit of Foss affords a 360 degree view of the White Mountains and their valleys and lakes and woods. It could be 1802 up there, or even earlier. There are three or four houses visible in valleys far below, but no roads, no traffic sounds, no other signs of civilization. Once in a while you hear a distant hunter’s shotgun. Otherwise, it’s pristine and silent up there on that granite roof, just the wind rustling in the blueberry shrubs, the giant rushing peace of wilderness, the imperceptible ticking of sunlight on the rocks.

Every time we go up Foss, it’s a different landscape, depending on the season, the weather, the mood of the place. Sometimes on a hot, sunny summer evening there’s a small crowd up there, kids picking the ripe blueberries, running in a pack down the paths through the meadow, dogs forming their own pack and milling around, drinking from rain pools in the rocks and sniffing one another, adults gawping at the view, mostly silently, sometimes with quiet talk.

The other evening, Brendan and Dingo and I were the only ones there. It was a chilly, lowering sort of day, with a brisk fresh breeze and thick low clouds. When we got to the top, we were quiet for a moment, in frank awe.  The land had a blue tinge, a strange cast, almost like an old photograph of itself. Suddenly, a sunbeam slipped through the clouds and lit the slope below Mt. Washington with a powerful shaft that made a distant lake shine like mica.

It felt like being in a giant cathedral, a reverent hush, an indrawn breath, mystical and strange.

We sat on our usual outcropping and opened the backpack and popped the cork out of the hard cider and had a swig each.

“I’ve never seen it this beautiful here,” I said finally.

“Me neither,” said Brendan, who’s been going up Foss for 30 years.

Dingo lay at my side, not saying anything.

The cider we bring up Foss is made from local apples, similar to the apples that grow on the old, gnarled little trees in the orchard around the farmhouse, sour, flavorful, tiny things that look like weird stones. The dry, deep, tart taste of that cider always reminds me of Foss; or rather, that’s the only place we ever drink it.

It’s part of a ritual Brendan had, growing up, with his childhood friend Colie, who was one year older and whom he knew all his life and played in the woods with as a kid, came of age with, remained friends with into adulthood. Colie died suddenly in a car accident in December 2010. Whenever I drink cider on Foss with Brendan, we toast to Colie.

The mountains were layered one after another back to the horizon all around us in every direction, in shades of grey and blue and grey-blue and dark blue, like a roiling, turbulent, wild sea in a storm. Mt. Washington turned into a massive giant wave about to send our little craft up its towering flank. We both saw it and shivered together in that pleasurable make-believe fear.

The wind died down. The sun stayed hidden. The granite we sat on felt warmer than I’d expected it would. It was dry up there – no rain pools in the rock for Dingo to lap at.

A flock of nine little birds, tits or pipits maybe, starlings, the tiny kind whose silhouettes look a bit like Piper Cubs, lifted all at once out of the brown, dry meadow just below us. They hurled themselves into the air high, high above our heads and, in a game of follow-the-leader, flew in a big circle, swooping and soaring around us, and coming to ground again, back where they’d started. A moment later, they performed the whole airshow again.

After that, it was time to go. We hiked down to the car, nosed it down the vertical road, headed home slowly with the windows open to let the fresh cool air stream in.

Back at home, we mooched around the fridge and cupboards a bit aimlessly, without much excitement, and then we took ourselves out to an inn just across the state line in Maine. We sat in their basement pub and ordered a bottle of pinot noir and a couple of burgers made with local organic beef and gluten-free buns.

The wine was just fine, but the meat tasted too clean, too wholesome; it had no funky tang, no gamey whiff. They might have butchered a healthy young animal just that afternoon and ground its most tender bits less than one minute before molding them into burgers.

“I like a little noble rot taste in my burger,” I muttered, salting mine and adding lots of ketchup.

“I like a lot of noble rot taste in my burger,” said Brendan, doing the same.

That night, I had strange dreams, dark and ominous, but I slept more deeply than I had in a very long time.

Beneath the stains of time, the feelings disappear

This past month has been the cruelest April I’ve ever known, breeding icicles out of the dead land, mixing ennui and irritation, stunting dull roots with unseasonable snow. Cabin Fever Month is almost over, finally, and it’s going out with a soft exhalation of sunny updrafts that shake the new buds and cause the crocuses to bob like the heads of dashboard hula girls, and all is forgiven, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten any of its earlier depredations.

The phrase “mixing memory and desire” has always resonated deeply, but I’ve always internally translated it to “muddling nostalgia and craving.” Memory and desire are more literary and refined, the sort of emotions a well-bred lady might swoon with, requiring smelling salts, a lavender hankie, or, at the very least, a thimbleful of sherry, a turn about the topiary garden.

Nostalgia and craving are blunter, more animal and immediate, and therefore closer to my own experience. They’re also basically the same thing, except one is hunger for the past and the other is hunger for the future. For decades, I used to experience recurring, agonized, frenzied, gut-piercing nostalgia and craving—looking back through a rosy gel of subjective distance at some time when I was “happier” or “freer” or “more alive,” and in the middle of that, craving something that I couldn’t quite imagine but that I knew I would recognize when I found it, something I’d never had before but knew existed; it was all very convoluted, but no less intense for that.

These wild nostalgia/craving interludes used to feel like the emotional equivalent of huddling in a little rowboat, without oars, riding high ocean swells in a rain and lightning storm. When they hit, there were certain songs or pieces of music I could not listen to because they caused my soul to leap from my body in exalted agitation—during different eras, this might have been Schubert’s C Major Quintet, Al Green’s “Jesus is Waiting,” Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” or Cat Power’s entire “Jukebox” album. And during those times, I couldn’t eat at all.

What was I nostalgic for? What was I craving? I can hardly remember now.

These days, in my settled, contented, grounded middle age, when I crave something, it’s usually food, and when I feel nostalgic, it’s usually for a recent time that reminds me, tamely, of something in the present. This past April, with all of its icy winds and lowering skies and terrible vicissitudes, couldn’t shake that. It only made me more aware of how different my life feels now.

Craving, like nostalgia, has, in recent years, moved closer to home. These past few months, having no way to cook, being in the throes of kitchen renovation, I’ve become aware with renewed appreciation of the fact that our house is surrounded by a startling number of excellent restaurants, all within a three-block radius. There are other, equally excellent restaurants, five or seven or ten or twelve blocks away, but with such bounty, who needs to walk so far?

The restaurants within a 5-minute stroll of our front door are as follows: a funky, tin-ceilinged brick-oven pizza place that makes the best gluten-free pizza dough I’ve ever eaten; a Japanese noodle place with luscious sushi rolls drizzled with house-made mayo and toasted almonds, and slurpy noodles in rich broth with pork belly and halved hard-boiled eggs and scallions; not one, but two homey, stylish, slouchy, glam hipster bars that serve healthy gourmet food; a New Orleans joint with dollar oysters at Happy Hour and classic Louisiana grub and a tray of different sauces and pickled peppers on every table; a locally beloved Italian-French place with cozy booths and perfect tequila gimlets and a menu of Mediterranean-inspired dishes that changes all the time; an elegant Thai “street vendor inspired” tapas-and-skewer bar whose chef was recently up for a James Beard award; and finally, our favorite, a classic corner bistro with perfect steak frites, perfect simple salads, perfect pot de crème, and perfect service, décor, and everything else. (There’s another Japanese place, too, and it looks great, but we love our regular one so much, we’ve never seen any reason to try it.)

All this, within three blocks. Even during the two decades I lived in New York, no matter what neighborhood I was in, I never had this variety and quality of culinary excitement so close by.

We go regularly to all of these restaurants, except three. We have to remind ourselves to go to the Thai place and the Mediterranean place and one of the bars, good as they all are. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is; they’re three of the most lauded joints in town. Finally, I realized that what drives me back to a restaurant is a combination of craving and nostalgia—for something in particular: the corner bistro’s steak frites, or the pizza place’s baby arugula pizza with pesto and goat cheese, or the noodle house’s shiitake-avocado roll, or the Cajun joint’s addictive, saucy, tender chicken wings, or the roast cauliflower salad with hummus at one of the bars.

I haven’t yet found that magical thing at the other three that induces me to go back, zombielike, drooling with anticipation like Homer Simpson headed for a box of donuts. All three places have exceptional food, but none has yet inspired in me that sweet-spot lust for a dish that announces itself on my palate in the mid-afternoon slump of my workday and makes me text Brendan, “Happy Hour chicken wings at 5?” and makes him text back within one minute, “Okay!!!”

I’m already half-seduced by the Thai place’s steamed vegetables with smoky eggplant dip. Last time we went to the Mediterranean place, I had grilled lamb chunks in red lettuce-leaf wraps with yogurt sauce; I think that might be it, but I have to have it again to know for sure. And the other bar has stools in the plate-glass window facing the street where you can sit and watch everyone go by as you drink and eat; who cares what you order?

As Kierkegaard said, “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”

I think what he’s trying to say is that he would have loved the eggplant dip at the Thai place.

We’re going to lay down someplace shady, with dreamland coming on

Living without a kitchen for a season due to an extensive, much-wanted renovation is a first-world problem, of course, especially if you have enough money (albeit barely) to eat out a couple of nights a week as well as another house to decamp to the rest of the time.  So I’m not complaining when I say that we’ve had to adapt this winter, strategically, in certain ways, and also that we’ve discovered what it means to be forced to eat in restaurants: it’s not the treat you might think it would be.

For the past couple of months, maybe almost three, our Portland house has been filled with the banging and screaming of power tools during weekday work hours, and everything in it is covered with dust. We spend two nights a week there so I can go to my two Pilates classes and work my Thursday soup kitchen shift, and also so we can go out for Wednesday drinks night with our group of writer pals – our only social life, these days.

Brendan’s family farmhouse in rural New Hampshire, where we live the rest of the time, is isolated and remote, and winter is not over, although it’s late April, so when we’re here, we tend to burrow in and work all day, take long walks, cook much-anticipated meals, watch whole TV series at night (“Nashville” and “Battlestar Galactica,” lately), go to bed early, and sleep deeply till morning.

It’s just the three of us: Brendan, Dingo, and me. We’re a compatible and democratic little unit; there is no strife or discord amongst our ranks, and although no one is strictly in charge, things get done as they should, according to the strengths of each. The house is well-guarded against interlopers, chipmunks, porcupines, and UPS drivers, for instance, thanks to Dingo’s superior hearing and barking abilities and diligent – even obsessive – attention to outside goings-on from his lookout post on the window seat. We can go to town to replenish the larder thanks to Brendan, the only one with a driver’s license; he also keeps the fires burning in the fireplace, moves the laundry along when it needs noodging, and makes the best Italian food for hundreds of miles around. As for me, I sing  along with CDs and try to keep conversations lively, for morale. And so our little ship sails forth.

This weekend, the air temperatures are slightly less frigid than last weekend. A warmer wind blew in during the week and melted the lake and much of the snow. Yesterday, on our walk, the dirt road was soft and strewn with squished baby frogs who’d gotten in the way of the ten or twelve cars, mostly Subarus, of course, that drive along the road each day. The lake was a rich steel blue, choppy in the fresh breeze, shading to black around the edges. The mountains were cobalt hulks under a cloud-dense, abruptly sunny sky. Down at the beaver pond, we counted two new dams, making a grand total of five; their population is thriving, exploding even. A gosling swam behind its parents as they came bustling over to check us out. The little protruding hummocks near the shore had newborn, spindly stalks and greening moss.

Yesterday, in the early afternoon, Dingo and I went out to sit on the porch and take stock of the outdoors. We lounged in the sunlight, smiling at each other. This was a strange, tense week; the news close to home was terrible, and the news further away was as bad as it always is. But here we were, dog and human, on a porch in weak but certain sunlight. The trees were all still bare, with knobby little buds, but the grass was turning green, and the crocus spears were finally poking out of the dirt.

As befits the change of season, we’ve been eating and drinking much more lightly – less meat, less booze, less butter for the humans, less food in general for the dog. But even in the most ascetic of diets, there has to be some indulgence, although that becomes relative: a decadent pleasure in the early spring is different from winter’s sausage and cheese and olives, heavier, chewier luxuries.

Last night, at cocktail hour, I opened a bottle of Pinot Noir, poured a couple of glasses, and set out a plate of hors d’oeuvres: slices of English cucumber, whole red radishes, flaxseed-and-sesame crackers, and a bowl of spicy hummus. With our glasses of wine diminishing at our elbows, we devoured the whole plate while Dingo lay at our feet, accepting any bits of cucumber or radish that came his way.

The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance

Running a marathon is a brave, ridiculous act of endurance and hope and derring-do and personal triumph.  It transcends politics. It transcends everything. It’s a big throng of people, tens of thousands of them, all nationalities and races and religions and colors and shapes and ages, shoulder to shoulder, striving together for the same thing, to the same end: to get to the finish line.

I ran the New York City marathon in 2002, after 9/11. All the past year, I’d felt sad, helpless, angry, horrified, devastated, shocked, all the things everyone else around me was feeling. Running the marathon went beyond the personal to the civic, communal, soulful.

While I was training, I raised money for an independently funded track program for inner-city kids, which let me feel I was helping someone, somehow; I needed that. On race day, after years of watching from the sidelines, it was a thrill to join the crowd pounding and sweating their way through all five boroughs.

A few miles from the finish line, I started crying: there I was, in Central Park, I’d made it. With less than two miles to go, I stopped running to hobble, wrung out and in pain. The runner next to me cheered me on. We’d been running side by side since the Bronx; I listened to him and ran the rest of the way. After I crossed the finish line, euphoric, I was grinning and high on endorphins and relief and pride, walking around with a space blanket over my shoulders, my legs shaking.

Who would bomb the finish line of a marathon? Why?

This morning, I poached some eggs and served them over spicy kidney beans with avocado alongside and Cholula chipotle hot sauce on top.  We couldn’t finish our breakfasts; this almost never happens.

Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams, what you do and what you see

I learned how to make stir fry from my college freshman-year roommate. Actually, Lisa was my second college freshman-year roommate. My first one and I didn’t much like each other. And I hated living on campus. I was two years older than most of the other freshmen, due to my high school chairman’s giving me an out-of-date financial aid form during my senior year of high school, and then my own inertia during my first year off when I should have been re-applying for financial aid, forcing me to defer a second year.

Finally, in 1982, I got to Reed and moved into one of the “cross-canyon” dorms, a bunch of identically cold, modern one-story buildings with linoleum floors and track lighting and soulless little bedrooms barely big enough for one person, let alone two strangers. After living and working in Europe for a year, and then another year living back at home with my mother and sister in upstate New York, working at a construction job, I found dorm life both too claustrophobic and too public. I hated the big cold communal unisex bathrooms as much as I hated having to share a room. And I loathed the food at Commons, the Reed dining room.

I petitioned to be allowed to break my room-and-board plan. Because of my quote-unquote “relative maturity,” the authorities let me. After my first winter break, I moved all of my things into a plain little apartment near campus to live with my friend Lisa, whose other roommate had just moved out. Rent was $125 a month for both of us, and in return we each got our own bedroom, plus a bathroom with a tub, a little balcony and an open kitchen-living room. It was nothing special, but I set up my record player, hung my Japanese parasol over the single bed, and set all my books on the little bookshelf. I found a lamp at a thrift store, and I was in business.

Lisa and I had, on the whole, an easy, warm, uncomplicated friendship, unlike my relationship with my first roommate, who frankly hated my guts (something to do with locking the door to have sex with my boyfriend and making her wait till we were done? something to do with my personality, which was earnest and perky and Pollyannaish in those days? both? other things? well, I didn’t like her much, either).

Here in my little box of a room with its cheap hollow door, thin walls, low ceiling, and sliding glass window, studying in my bed, leaning against my green corduroy “husband” pillow, listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash while incense burned on my nightstand, I felt I could breathe finally.

It was Lisa’s apartment, though. I moved in to an already-existing household. She had a certain way of doing things and certain expectations of me.  I have always been a deeply private person. Lisa liked to come into my room in the evening and perch at the foot of my bed and have talks. To me, this was invasive; to her, it was cozy and congenial. She liked to fret about my current relationship and tell me what was what; I preferred to live and let live, no advice, no judgment, no noodging. I chafed sometimes under her big-sisterly clucking and wide-eyed admonishments. She was sensitive and could sense me chafing, and, hurt, she retreated. Things were a little chilly until I approached her to assuage her wounds.

“I’ve always been this way,” I told her with my usual earnest eagerness. “I am weird, I know that. I’m so private.”

“You are not weird! No no!” she told me, shaking her dark curly head and talking in a funny, high half-duck half-Japanese voice.  “I just love you! I love to talk to you.”

One thing Lisa and I agreed on absolutely was food. When I moved in, she already had a well-established everyday menu, and, to keep things simple, I fell right into it. I loved the consistency, the lack of thought it required, the tastiness and healthiness of it. And it was cheap, and I always knew what was for dinner. And breakfast.

On Saturday mornings, Lisa and I walked up the hill to the Safeway on S.E. Woodstock and did the week’s shopping. Without discussion, we always bought a staggering heap of vegetables, including Chinese cabbage, bok choy (I can still hear her trilling “bok choy!” in that funny voice, cracking me up in the produce section as she flung a big bunch or two of it into our cart), and hot little Chinese red peppers. We bought baking potatoes, one each per night, as well as chicken breasts and ground beef (we both hated tofu), soy sauce, and sesame oil. Shopping for our everyday breakfast was even simpler, because every breakfast was the same: strong French roast coffee with half and half and sugar; English muffins with real butter and raspberry jam.

Every night, in our tiny galley kitchen, we pricked and oiled two huge russet baking potatoes and stuck them into a hot oven. Then we stood side by side, chopping everything we needed for that night’s meal, nice and small, a good assortment, a little more than we thought we’d need. We grated ginger and minced garlic, little heaps of both.

Lisa’s recipe went like this: Over high heat, sauté the meat first in soy sauce and sesame oil, a little of the garlic and ginger – cut-up chicken breasts or a wad of ground beef – then take out and set aside. In more sesame oil and soy sauce, sauté the rest of the ginger and garlic, the minced scallions and hot red pepper till just soft. Add the rest of the vegetables in this order, stirring for a minute or two in between: slant-cut carrots and celery first, then thinly sliced red or yellow Bell peppers, then zucchini and mushrooms, then broccoli florets, then the chopped greens. Stir the entire time. Add more oil or a little water if it starts to stick. Add the meat back in with its accumulated juices just before it’s all done and stir well and cover for a minute or two.

These stir fries were incredible, and I’ve never had a better one; 30 years later, I still make them according to Lisa’s recipe and still serve them over the scooped-out innards of enormous, well-baked russet potatoes. The fluffy white potato soaks up the sesame-soy-ginger-garlic-meat juice gravy. The vegetables, because they’re all cut small, meld together.

Into the crackling potato skins, Lisa taught me to put butter and salt and pepper and fold them together into madly delicious tacolike things.

With loaded plates, we sat at our little dinette with its gold-flecked Formica top, on matching chairs with padded seats, and feasted. Lisa didn’t drink, and neither did I in those days, or at least not much, so we didn’t have booze. We always ate with chopsticks. There were never any leftovers. The next night, we always started fresh.

Just when you think it can’t get no better then it does

We both woke up feeling well-rested and chipper this morning. I made French toast with vanilla and cinnamon, custardy on the inside and crisp on the outside, and served it with hot wild blueberries with maple syrup. We drank big cups of coffee and then we took our usual 4-mile fast walk over hill and dale along the lake and through the woods. The sun was shining, there was a breath of warmth in the air, not one car passed us the entire time, and the road wasn’t too muddy.

We came home warm and a little out of breath. After we’d shucked our jackets and shoes, I opened a window to let the fresh air into the house, whose atmosphere is tinged with a winter’s worth of wood smoke. It’s not unpleasant, in fact it reminds me of BBQ potato chips, but it’s a decidedly wintry smell. And it’s time for spring.

Then we sat at the table at our computers, tapping away like industrious, wholesome little chipmunks, just as we’ve been doing nonstop for the past many months.  We have our formation: I sit at the end of the table, looking at the long meadows stretching down to the lake and the hulking mountains beyond and the huge sky above. Brendan sits to my left, facing the short meadow that slopes down to the beaver pond, Dundee Hill rising behind it, the same huge sky above. My long meadows have the birch trees; his short meadow has the lone, ancient crabapple planted far from the orchard and a lone, short, handsome oak.

Dingo lies either sacked out behind Brendan’s chair, half on and half off the braided oval rug, off-duty, or vigilantly on the windowseat, keeping his eyes out for invading nogoodniks and dastardly porcupines. Sometimes he leaps up barking like a gunshot, giving us both near-heart attacks and causing us both to yell DINGO! SHUT UP! We shove him out the door to the porch, where he leaps onto the grass and rushes to the dirt driveway by the barn, barking so hard his whole body convulses. Sometimes it’s the beleaguered UPS man, sometimes it’s a car turning around at the foot of the drive, sometimes it’s a flock of wild turkeys, but mostly, there’s nothing there at all.

We’ve been calling this the Year of the Woodshed, but it’s turning into two years: two years of nonstop effort, paying for our ongoing house renovation, getting our shit together, working hard to get settled and secure and replenish our savings account, taking no vacations and hardly any days off, waking up every morning with a to-do list and a sense of urgent pressure, clenching our jaws at night in our sleep, lying awake in the early morning hours, stewing and worrying, wondering whether we can get it all done.

Of course, writing is the only thing we want to be doing. It’s our calling, passion, and ideal occupation. We’re not working at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart for minimum wage. We aren’t forced to sell our bodies or drugs or pyramid schemes or fruit by the roadside or Jesus.

And we have this farmhouse to escape to when the banging and sawing get to be too much. We’re free and lucky. We know it.

Anyway, so there we all were, at just before noon today, everyone at his or her station, doing his or her job.

After a while, Brendan looked up at me. I looked back at him.

“I am so sick of this shit,” he said.

“I am, too,” I said.

“We need a vacation.”

“We don’t get a vacation.”

“Fuck that,” he said.

“FUCK that,” I echoed.

“I want tequila,” he said.

“It’s Saturday,” I pointed out. “So we’re allowed.”

“I don’t care what day it is,” he said. The car keys were in his hand and his shoes were on. Dingo and I caught up with him and then we were all in the car, off to town.

We came home with a bottle of Herradura Silver, some grapefruits and limes, a People magazine, and, because we needed it and therefore it sort of justified the gas we used to get to Hannaford and back, a 12-pack of toilet paper.

So now, here we sit at our computers, still in formation, me here, Brendan there, Dingo on his windowseat. But now, at our elbows are daytime cocktails: hefty slugs of tequila shaken over ice with the juice of one fat grapefruit and one juicy lime, poured with the ice into tumblers and garnished with thin jalapeno slices.  Between us is an open bag of Lay’s Simply Natural thick cut sea salted potato chips. The only sounds in here are the clinking of the ice as we drink, the crunching of potato chips, the rapid-fire tapping of our computer keys, and the gentle, yearning exhalations of Dingo as he lifts his wet black snout to the tabletop, trolling for a chip or two.

It’s 3:00 in the afternoon. I’m sure that one of the primary warning signs of alcoholism is day drinking, especially of hard liquor. FUCK that. I’m going to run a hot bath and make another round of drinks and go and lie in the tub with People magazine.

Another Haddock Recipe

I can’t stop cooking haddock. It’s cheap and local, so fresh it quivers on its shaved ice in the store.

My new thing with haddock is the following meal, of which we are currently enamored:

Simmer a cup of well-rinsed red rice in 1 ¾ cups chicken broth.

In a big skillet in plenty of good oil, sauté 2 chopped leeks and 2 chorizo sausages and 6 chopped cloves of garlic.

Cut 1 pound of haddock filets into chunks and marinate in the juice of 1 lemon and 1 tablespoon harissa spices (or paste).  Add to the leeks and chorizo and gently poach on both sides. Stir well.

Meanwhile, chop as many cloves of garlic as you like and add to ½ cup chicken broth in a huge pot. Steam a pound of baby spinach, covered.

Serve rice, spinach, and fish-leeks all together in 2 big shallow bowls. Add hot sauce as desired.