Hey, sweet baby, don’t you think maybe we could find us a brand new recipe?

The other day in Whole Foods, as we were shopping for groceries to bring to the farmhouse for five nights, I said jokingly, self-mockingly, to the cashier who was ringing up our groceries, “Did you notice how healthy our food is?”

Instead of giving me shit for the heap of organic produce, the organic free-range eggs, the organic red rice and gluten-free organic pasta and organic steel-cut gluten-free oats, wild-caught Alaskan sockeye, free-range bison, organic free-range chicken thighs, and so forth, he said earnestly, “Oh my God, doesn’t it feel good to buy a bunch of food like this and go home and eat it?”

Caught off-guard by his fervor, I laughed.

“Yes,” I admitted, “it does.”

We paid $264 for five sacks of food, loaded it all into the Subaru, and off we went, leaving the contractors behind in our gutted kitchen to make loud banging noises all day. We drove the hour and fifteen minutes from the coast up into the mountains on narrow, sleepy, quiet country roads, pitted now with frost heaves and slick in places with refrozen ice. It was dusk. It always seems to be dusk lately, lingering late-winter twilight, a chilly pinkish-then-bluish waning light on glowing, slushy snow, a lowering fog through bare branches, and the mineral smell of water that somehow presages the sudden, mad, wild, manic, aggressively sexual explosion of life that means spring up here in the north.

We got to the farmhouse just after dark, backed the car up to the porch on the snowy lawn, and unloaded the groceries, Dingo’s bed, our backpacks, and the sack of books I’m supposed to read. I put everything away while Brendan turned the water back on and let it run in the pipes, turned up the heat, checked the wood supply in the cabinet by the fireplace, and made a fire. We drank red wine to go with the red dinner I made: baked salmon with harissa spice rub, steamed red chard, and red rice.

The next day at lunchtime, yesterday, I mixed the leftover salmon, rice, and greens all together and tossed them with a little mayonnaise for a madly delicious instant fish salad. Last night, Brendan made moist, dense, meaty, slightly gamey bison burgers, Yukon Gold wedge oven fries, and a heap of steamed baby spinach; I made a sauce of (organic, Omega-3) mayonnaise, stone-ground mustard, (organic) ketchup, and Cholula chipotle hot sauce to go with everything. We ate the burgers on springy, bready toasted gluten-free hamburger buns.

After a breakfast this morning of steel-cut oatmeal with maple syrup, cinnamon, and enormous frozen blueberries that tasted like distilled summer, we had the same bison burger meal again for lunch, this time with steamed chard, so tonight’s supper is just vegetables: meaty round “Frost Kist” artichokes and sliced baby zucchini sautéed with a bit of chicken broth and plenty of fresh tarragon, with olive oil and kosher salt.

Meanwhile, I have a pot of Jacob’s Cattle heirloom beans soaking for tomorrow’s baked beans, which we’ll eat with steamed broccoli and organic chicken Andouille.

I keep thinking about what the fresh-faced, wide-eyed young guy at Whole Foods said. He really meant it, without either ironic hipster self-mockery or smug hippie self-righteousness: “Doesn’t it feel good to eat this way?”

On our walk this morning, the same fast, hard four-mile walk up and down hills to the end of the dirt road and back that Brendan, Dingo, and I take every morning at 11:00 when we’re here, I chuckled to myself at how wholesome my life has become, realizing that I haven’t eaten any junk food in more than ten years. I’ve had plenty of potato chips and dark or bittersweet chocolate and gluten-free ginger cookies and Red Hot Blue corn chips, but they’re all made with organic or at least healthy ingredients; they’re not what I’m referring to.

Back in the years when I ate gluten and occasionally smoked cigarettes when I drank booze and lived in industrial Brooklyn and thought I’d live forever, I used to love to scarf a sack of White Castle jalapeno sliders with onion rings and fries, late at night, drunk and starving. God, they were good. I used to love to go to Coney Island for fried clams and Nathan’s hot dogs. I cured my frequent hangovers with a deli breakfast: either a fried egg with melted American cheese and nitrate-laden bacon on a toasted, buttered roll, or a greasy Western omelet on toasted rye with 8 packets of (non-organic) ketchup. If that didn’t work, I went to a hot dog cart for lunch and inhaled a couple of obscenely juicy, tasty hot dogs fished out of filthy water and served with onions and mustard on stale industrial buns. And I drank a can of ice-cold, bitterly bubbly Coke.

I loved French fries. I still love French fries, but now they have to be gluten-free and fried in oil that’s gluten-free, which is not easy to find, so I rarely eat them anymore, but back then, I ordered them every chance I got. I used to cure my severe bouts of PMS with Little Debbie peanut butter bars and Hostess Ding-Dongs and Entenmann’s chocolate cake. I would rush into a deli, any deli, grab a cellophane-wrapped sugar-and-chemical sweet, and stomp moodily, crabbily, despairingly along the sidewalk, shoving the thing in my mouth and barely chewing it, ripping the spongy, soft, gooey, sugary, artificially-flavored thing with my molars and swallowing it as fast as I could. My mouth exploded with animal satiation. It always worked.

That was twelve, fifteen, twenty years ago. I’ve been gluten-free since 2002, for eleven years; my eating has shifted since then from a purely pleasurable and decadent and fearless gourmandise to something else. I don’t regret this, and I don’t ever miss any of that stuff. I’m older now; my appetites have changed in many ways. I’ve known since my fortieth birthday, when I went through a sort of existential crisis slash spiritual awakening and became viscerally aware for the first time of certain basic but terrible facts of human life, that I am certainly going to die. My fiftieth birthday last summer arrived with even more dire news, but this time it wasn’t a crisis. This time, being older and more seasoned and accustomed to bad news, I absorbed it without flinching: Not only am I going to die, but I’m going to get old.

Dingo already is old. The world as we know it also feels old, and dying, and drastically sick.

So yes, sweet, wholesome checkout man at the Whole Foods in Portland, Maine: It feels very good to eat like this. I’m grateful that I can.

I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down

I’m sitting at my desk in my study with a cup of coffee, catching my breath for a moment while Dingo has his morning nap on his bed at my feet.

My new book, “Blue Plate Special,” an autobiographical account of my life in food, is, as of yesterday, finished, edited, copyedited, and off to production; I’m hard at work on a second nonfiction book, the co-written memoir of a brilliant, fantastic female chef; and my next novel is hovering in the wings, under contract and 15,000 words in, waiting for me to return to it.

Meanwhile, our entire kitchen and dining room have recently been gut-demolished down to the joists and beams and brick. I can hear the contractor’s guys banging away down there, taking down the old posts from the wall that separated the dining room from the kitchen. We’re planning to make it all one big room so we can talk to guests at the table in the dining room while we cook. We’re putting a gas insert into the small dining room fireplace; we’ve always wanted to be able to have a fireplace in the kitchen, but this is close enough.

We sold the old, clinical melamine cabinets, the cold-as-tombstones granite countertops, and less than stellar appliances on Craigslist; people came and carted them away and gave us money for them, which struck us as a great deal. In their place will be wood and copper and butcher block and tile. Brendan found a hardworking, straight-talking guy up in Poland Spring who takes barely-used appliances out of rich people’s summer houses when they trade up for new ones; he resells them on consignment out of his barn for a fraction of what they would cost new. Later on today, he’s delivering our new butter-yellow Viking stove with gas burners and electric oven, plus a Bosch dishwasher whose didactic beeping thing he’s dismantled for us, and he’s keeping his eye out for a stainless steel Viking fridge with a bottom freezer drawer.

We’ve both been working (which is to say, writing) ourselves into puddles of melted butter to be able to pay for all this. Brendan has even more projects afoot right now than I do; we’re both a little dazed and burned out, but we have no regrets, at least no big ones. Buying an old house is exciting but daunting and something of a lifetime commitment, although my mother has assured me that it won’t always feel quite so overwhelming.

When we first walked into this house in October of 2011, we were struck with starry-eyed wonderment at its beauty and elegance. It wasn’t for sale; the downstairs apartment was for rent, but Brendan, who had found the listing, insisted that we go and see it anyway, on a hunch. We’d already looked at twelve other houses in Portland, and none of them was quite right.

“We can’t afford this place,” I said sadly, dazzled by the original plasterwork, the white fireplace mantles with decorative carving, the tall, graceful staircase. “There’s no way they’d sell it to us even if we could.”

Thanks to Brendan’s persistence, it turned out that the owners did want to sell, after all, and their asking price happened to be exactly the outer limit of what we could afford. Reader, we bought it.

Our tall Italianate brick house survived the 1866 Great Fire in Portland; we’re not sure what year it was built, but this much we do know. It has changed hands many, many times. Prior owners include several old, established New England families. In the 1920s, it was owned by a woman named Jennie Stein. It was a boys’ school for a while and later a Goodwill House for adults with Down syndrome; at some point, a sprinkler system was installed and the downstairs bathroom was made wheelchair-accessible.

By the time we bought the house, its decor was a sad testament to bad 1990s taste. The instant we had the deed in hand, we ripped out the shiny cockroach-colored Brazilian cherry from the foyer, kitchen, and dining room, and the ugly stained tan wall-to-wall carpeting upstairs and on the staircase. Under about four more layers – of linoleum and tar, cheap birch tongue-and-groove, and plywood – was the original pine and hemlock subfloor, beautiful, strong planks we had sanded and polyurethaned.

We found an awesome contractor who built window seats and cupboards and bookshelves in the two rooms upstairs. We found a clawfoot tub in the basement; he installed it in our bedroom. He also took out the yuppie upstairs bathroom with its MRI-like shower and horrible blue tile floor and enormous fall-of-Rome sink and put in an old-fashioned bowl sink set into a maple counter, a tiled shower, and a pine and hemlock floor. And he painted over the terrible institutional cold sky blue on every wall in the house: forest green in the study; deep blue in the bedroom; warm gold in the parlors; and warm off-whites in the foyer and staircase and hall.

Somewhere along the way, many decades ago, the house was divided into two apartments. We live in the first floor and front half of the second floor and rent out the back half of the second floor and entire third floor to the most excellent tenants in the history of the universe, a young couple whose presence in the house, along with their young female mutt, Tug, Dingo’s pal, makes it feel warm and happy and alive. Often I hear faint laughter and music from their half of the house and Tug’s racing paws upstairs.

This house was designed in a long-ago era of sweetness and light. The ceilings are very high, even on the second floor; the light-filled double front parlors have floor-to-ceiling bay windows and little fireplaces with tiled hearths and beveled mirrors over the mantles. We’ve half-jokingly nicknamed the place the Yankee Palazzo, because we feel like New England dukes in here.

Maybe we’re superstitious, but the place feels animate and sentient to us. And it seems to us that the house is extremely happy with its makeover – despite all the dust and noise and upheaval, the air feels even sweeter and lighter in here than when we bought it.

Demolition Kitchen breakfast

The contents of our kitchen now sit in boxes on a moving blanket on the living room floor and are also piled on one of the couches and the table in the bay window. We have nothing to cook with but a toaster oven and an electric kettle. For a fridge, we’re using our unheated entryway, the tiny tiled space between the two front doors. We wash our cups and plates and silverware in the downstairs bathroom sink, which clogs easily.

Toast two pieces of Canyon Bakehouse multigrain gluten-free bread in the toaster oven. Slather crunchy peanut butter on one slice and drizzle honey over it. Slap the other piece on top. Eat on a paper plate to catch the melted honey.

Golden slumbers fill your eyes

This time of year, I can’t stop sleeping. I seem to have been infected by a seasonal parasite, a sleep tapeworm or zombie virus that awakens at dark and renders me unconscious so it can wreak its insidious takeover of my person while I’m zonked out. Every day, I try not to give in, but I’m unable to resist. I start to nod off when the sun goes down, in mid-afternoon, no matter how much sleep I’ve had the night before (sometimes, these days, 10 hours). I have no choice but to stop what I’m doing, get into bed, and conk out, sometimes for an hour, sometimes two. It doesn’t matter what deadline is looming before me or how long my to-do list is. The parasite doesn’t care about my life at all beyond its wish to take it over.

When I return gradually to wakefulness from my near-comatose, dream-filled nap, at 5:00 or thereabouts, it’s pitch-dark night already, and I’ve accomplished exactly nothing since I fell asleep. I shake myself awake, stagger back to my desk, sit down and try to pick up where I left off, to reconstruct whatever it was I was doing before I blacked out. As I start typing again, my brain slowly coming back up to speed, I can feel the parasite curling into its lair somewhere in my skull, sated for now with whatever part of my brain it feeds on while I’m out.

Eventually, it’s time to cook dinner. Down in the kitchen, I foggily survey the contents of the fridge and cupboards. There are polenta, pine nuts, Savoy cabbage, a package of chicken breasts, red peppers, leeks… I yawn and blink, lose my train of thought. I know I’ll be asleep again by 10:00, but it feels so far away.

“What do you feel like eating?” I ask Brendan, who blinks at me from his computer, where he’s been fighting his own sleep parasite all afternoon, working away.

“I’ll cook,” he says. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “What would you make?”

“I don’t know,” says Brendan, clearly in the same mood I’m in. “What do you feel like?”

The truth is that there’s really nothing I actively feel like eating these days. I can’t even think about cooking or eating anything enterprising or challenging or surprising or difficult. My stomach wants carbohydrates. My palate craves nursery food. My soul wants warmth and quiet.

“How about baked potatoes?” I say.

“Perfect,” says Brendan.

During sleep season, there is nothing, nothing at all, like a baked potato for dinner, or lunch, or even, in theory anyway, breakfast. It’s the easiest thing in the world to make, for one thing: wash a potato, prick it, cover it in oil and salt if you prefer, or not, and stick it into a hot toaster oven for 50 minutes or so till the skin is crackling and the inside is soft. You can put anything you like on top: sour cream and chopped chives, or a fried or scrambled or poached egg with steamed chopped spinach if you want something green, or nothing at all but a little butter, salt, and pepper. A baked potato is starchy and hearty but not too big. It’s nourishing and comforting, but not filling or heavy. And it’s cheap.

Russets are traditionally the best for baking, but I’m partial to Yukon Golds. Their skin doesn’t give chewily between the teeth like russets’, but their buttery-yellow insides taste richly of the essence of potato and are denser, whereas russets’ innards are white, fluffy, blander, less flavorful. And a Yukon Gold can stand up to baking; its skin is thinner, but it crackles.

The other day, I reached into the cheese case at the supermarket and yanked out a small brick of bacon cheddar and put it into the basket without even thinking about it.  Its ingredients were unfathomably decadent: the usual full-fat cheese stuff, plus bacon and hickory smoke. I had never bought or eaten or even really noticed its existence before, but I neither resisted nor questioned the sudden urge to possess it.

At home, near lunchtime, without consulting Brendan, I stuck two scrubbed, pricked Yukon Gold potatoes into the toaster oven. While they baked, I sautéed a large minced yellow onion in olive oil and plenty of Worcestershire sauce, slowly, on low heat, so the onion softened and started to brown and caramelize but didn’t burn.

When the potatoes were done, I cut them in half, slid them onto aluminum foil, and smothered them in grated bacon cheddar. I stuck them back in to broil until the cheese was melted and bubbling and the whole kitchen was fragrant with fake smoke flavor along with the smell of browned onions.

Then I pulled them out and covered them in the onions and served them with a small bowl of kosher salt and the pepper grinder. We sat at the table and ate our lunch without speaking. The sun was already beginning to set. I could feel the zombie virus awakening in my head, turning sinuously with sinister velvet lullabye rhythms. The baked potato felt like an amulet, an antidote that would protect me while I slept.

Out on the wiley, windy moors…

Two days ago, we arrived here at the farmhouse from town. The wind blew around the house all evening and night in moans and ghostly howls. Dingo kept barking at it, and in the course of a night in front of a crackling fire, we watched Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” video, the one where she dances like an embarrassing 70s suburban mom discovering her inner Wiccan. It is an insidious earworm like few other songs, and it’s now stuck hard in my head, permanently, I fear.  

Yesterday was calm and very cold and sunny. Today is the first snowfall of the year. It’s powdered-sugaring out there. Happy December.

We finally ate the very last of Thanksgiving yesterday in the form of the rest of a red cabbage-spicy chorizo-white bean soup made with the second half of the turkey broth. The first half of the broth received the leftover pearl onions in béchamel, along with a chopped leek, a bag of frozen peas, and all the turkey meat I’d pulled off the bird and chopped before I put the bones into the broth. The soups were slurp-worthy and stood up well to the intensely savory, shimmeringly rich broth. The first was creamy, oniony, and filled with bits of green and chunks of meat. The second was purple and porky and full of soft, mealy beans, and we snarfed it, there is no other verb, for dinner, and then lunch the next day.

“I feel like Dingo,” I said at one point, looking up from my bowl with dripping jowls to see Brendan eating rapidly, with canine concentration.

Thanksgiving leftovers are the ultimate reward of hosting Thanksgiving dinner.  After I made the broth, I pulled another big bowlful of meat off the simmered bones and added the rest of the cranberry-walnut sauce to it. We mounded this insanely delicious turkey salad on hot toast with mayonnaise and chutney over the course of one lunch and two breakfasts, until it was gone. When no one was looking, I wiped the empty bowl with my finger and licked it. 

The rest of the mashed potatoes got turned into little pancakes fried in a cast iron skillet in peanut oil till they were crisp on both sides, then served with two poached eggs on top. The rich warm egg yolk soaked into the light, flaky potato and bits of browned onion.

The question arises in a vague but persistent inner voice once the fridge is empty again: what should we eat after all the holiday fare is well and truly gone? Those leftovers provided a helpful scaffolding for invention, and now I’m feeling lazy and uninspired. There’s nothing much around right now but some gluten-free pasta, a bag of frozen peas, some parmesan from a month ago, and aromatics. So tonight, we’ll have pasta with pea sauce. And there are couple of leeks in the bottom drawer for potato-leek soup, so that’s two days of lunch. But what about tomorrow night’s dinner? What about the next day?

I miss those old mimeographed school-cafeteria menu charts with their soothingly didactic regularity: Monday: sloppy Joes, Tuesday: tostadas, Wednesday: spaghetti with meatballs, Thursday, Salisbury steak, Friday, fried chicken… On days when there was going to be Mississippi mud cake for dessert, I’d spend the morning daydreaming about it in insatiable anticipation. Why was cafeteria milk always so fresh-tasting and ice-cold in its tiny individual cartons?

Anyway. Thanksgiving food eases the transition from fall harvest food to bone-warming winter stews and soups. It got very cold very early this year. The sun sets in the mid-afternoon. Yesterday, there were little ice balls in the lawn, and the streams had a top layer of ice. This morning when we woke up, there were lace frost curtains on the bottoms of the windows. The season of pot roast is upon us.

Stovetop Baked Eggs with Breakfast-Vegetable Stew

Dice an onion. Chop a package of baby Portobello mushrooms and one red pepper. Peel and smash and coarsely chop as many cloves of garlic as you like. Sauté all of it together in a large skillet in half oil, half butter until limp. Add a lot of chopped baby arugula, more than you think you’ll need, in two batches and cover as it wilts down to almost nothing.  Add half a box of Pomi chopped tomatoes, a lot of hot red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper. Stir and simmer uncovered for seven minutes, then sprinkle parmesan cheese over it in a layer like an early snowfall. Crack four eggs one by one onto the surface of the vegetables and pour just a jot of cream or half-and-half over each egg yolk. Cover and let bake on medium-low heat until the whites are just barely set and the yolk is still runny. Serves 2.

You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go

I’m the only one up; it’s frosty and sunny outside. Not one wild creature is visible – just dead grass, tangles of bare crabapple branches, and the naked birch trees starkly white down the meadow. For breakfast this morning, I’m making potato pancakes from the leftover mashed potatoes with poached eggs on top. I think they’ll be good with salt and pepper, a little buckwheat flour, an egg to bind them, and some browned minced onion. And I was recently taught how to poach an egg, after more than 50 years of not knowing how easy it is. The secret is to add kosher salt and a little vinegar to the water.

The turkey’s been stripped to its chassis. The Brussels sprouts and kale salad are gone. The rest of the sausage-sage-bread crumb stuffing went back to Brooklyn with Rosie. I ate the last piece of persimmon pudding for breakfast yesterday. Rosie’s curried butternut bisque with butter-fried sage leaves and crème fraiche is a distant, dreamlike memory, as are Rosie’s and Jami’s voices. We did not stop talking all week except to laugh, eat, or drink. How did we have so much to say to one another?

Yesterday, late morning, after we dropped Jami off at the airport, we took Dingo for a walk on the Eastern Prom and then went to J’s Oyster, a warm, loud little place on the wharf, to meet pals of Rosie’s, fellow eaters and drinkers and appreciators of mollusks and bivalves. The five of us crowded around a little table in the back corner. I had a double rye on the rocks. Rosie and I sat shoulder to shoulder with our little paper cups of melted butter and feasted on steamed clams, after pulling the black condoms off their necks and swirling them in hot water to wash off the grit. We ate big, knobby, clean-tasting raw oysters with cocktail sauce. Then we ate whole lobsters, small and lurid red and just the slightest bit tough but incredibly delicious, dismantling them with nutcrackers, picking every fleck of meat from their body cavities. When I finished, melted butter was running down my chin, and I felt feral. Rosie looked exactly the same way. We grinned at each other. I had poppy seeds in my teeth from the coleslaw, and I didn’t care.

We dropped Rosie off at the airport and drove the hour or so back to the farmhouse. We arrived just after sunset. The silence felt deeper than it usually does. We built a fire and, miraculously somehow hungry again, ate turkey sandwiches on hot toast with cranberries, chutney, and mayonnaise. Brendan mixed a batch of Autumn Bonfires, Rosie’s invention: one part each whiskey, applejack, and apple cider with a dash of bitters, shaken over ice and garnished with an apple slice. We drank these and polished off our sandwiches and reminisced about how much fun it had all been.

I love Thanksgiving. I love the endless day of cooking. We woke up early on Thursday morning to the smell of sausages and onions frying and came downstairs to find Rosie’s stuffing underway and a hot pot of coffee on the stove. We opened a magnum of cava and drank mimosas; we listened to “Blood on the Tracks” while I made buckwheat blini for breakfast. We ate the first batch with creme fraiche and salmon roe and chives, and then the rest with some spectacular cheeses, a soft mild cow cheese and an ash-veined goat.

I steamed persimmon pudding for two hours in a Bundt pan set into a big pot. Rosie stuffed the turkey with all the odds and ends in the pantry, part of an apple and part of an onion, other fruits, some herbs, and put it into the oven with a big knob of butter perched on its top. We savored the term “knob of butter” out loud to each other for a while.

While Rosie cooked, Jami, Brendan, and I walked Dingo down to the lake, through the dense woods to the dock and big rock we jump off to swim in the summertime. As he always does in that spot, for reasons that are wholly mysterious, Dingo went into paroxysms, there’s no other word for it, of joy, leaping about and grinning and panting and behaving like a humpy rabbit, curving his whole body into flying apostrophes of excitement.  He never falls off the dock into the lake, another mystery.

At home, Brendan and I wrestled a béchamel into existence with a lot of vigorous whisking and judiciously careful pouring of gluten-free flour into melted butter, then hot milk into the roux. Brendan added the boiled pearl onions. I steamed a heap of trimmed, halved Brussels sprouts, then set them face down into hot pork fat with a whisper of maple syrup to caramelize, then tossed them with crisp bits of pancetta. Rosie pulled the turkey out and we all admired its crackling, golden-brown doneness. Her stuffing was photographed and pronounced magnificent.

The meal was not mishap-free. Brendan was unhappy with his pumpkin pie with walnut crust. We turned the oven too high after the turkey came out, so my yam chunks burned, and so did Rosie’s japonica-liver-pomegranate stuffing. I put too many raisins in the kale salad and there was possibly a bit too much lemon vinaigrette. The turkey, a free-range Vermonter, was not as epically delicious this year as it was last year; the meat was a bit diffuse, or something.

But still, we had nothing at all to complain about. This year was one of intensely hard work for all four of us, and it seems to be paying off, all around. We sat around the table and toasted one another and gave thanks one by one and then feasted, our plates heaped and mounded and brimming to their edges, the kerosene lamp lit. Then, with plates of cakelike, moist persimmon pudding with whipped cream, we lounged on the couches and chairs in front of the fire with after-dinner wine, still talking. We talked and talked into the night, as if our words somehow repaid to the world the pleasure we’d just had in eating.

The next day, of course, we awoke to find leftovers to eat and so much more to say.  And that night, too, we sat by the fire all together, talking.

And now, back to real life, potato pancakes, and turkey soup.

Whether times are good or bad, happy or sad

A while ago, I woke up, bleary-eyed and generally unrested because my sleep patterns are irregular at best, to a golden fall morning, crisp and sweet as an apple. Dingo was, as usual, instantly wide-awake and raring to go out. While he pranced and downward-dogged and panted around me, licking my feet to hurry me along, I pulled a sweater and some jeans over whatever I wore to sleep in, plus my socks from yesterday, and shoved my feet into clogs. Hair unbrushed, glasses on, I put his leash and collar on him and a coat and scarf on me and took him out through the mudroom to the back alleyway and off we went.

I let Dingo trundle me around our block, jerking my arm as he suddenly stopped to pee, making me wait while he sniffed a drooping plant with full concentration. I scooped up his neat turds with a long-practiced swipe of the bag and carried it in the hand that didn’t have the leash. Never do I feel more clear about the power dynamic of our relationship than on the morning walk.

Back at home, I fed him his breakfast – grain-free salmon super-expensive kibble with homemade stew that contains more nutrients in one serving than the average human adolescent consumes in a month. Then for dessert I cut up part of an apple and threw each little tidbit at his head. He caught each piece in midair with a snap of his jaws like a piranha and chewed joyfully. In Dingo’s world, everything is always just fantastic, unless I’m packing a backpack to go somewhere and leave him behind, or there are scary noises outside, or he doesn’t get to come in the car with us, or he has to go to the vet. In Dingo’s world, that’s as bad as it gets.

A huge mug of coffee in hand, I came upstairs and subsided into my desk chair and checked the news. It’s Election Day. It’s a “razor close race.” How can it be that Romney has a single supporter, let alone half this country? How can that be? The gulf between us feels unbridgeable. I don’t even want to talk to them to try to understand them, although, like a five-year-old, I do wish they’d all be struck by lightning and suddenly agree wholly with my own views.

I would characterize my political stance as Pollyanna socialist libertarianism. Why the hell, my stuck-phonograph-needle political thinking-track goes, can’t we all marry whoever the hell we want as a matter of course, be treated and paid and respected equally no matter what our sex, color, or belief system, and get, among other things, a good free education, free medical care, decent jobs with excellent benefits, especially for parents, and GMO labels on food? Why the hell not? It makes no sense to me that we can’t. I am clearly naïve. I should move to Norway.

Anyway, tonight, as the election returns come in, booze and food will be my refuge and comfort and distraction from agonizing stress, as always.  We’re going to drink strong Dark and Stormys, and Brendan is making fettucine Bolognese, which is one of the best things I know of in the world. If Romney wins, I’ll have seconds, then thirds, and then I’ll move to Norway.

Brendan’s Election Night Bolognese

Make a soffrito: 1 large onion, 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks diced finely and sautéed in olive oil on low heat for about 15 minutes, until very soft. Turn up the heat and add a pound of ground beef or veal and sauté, stirring, until browned, about 5 minutes.  Add 1/3 cup red wine and cook for another minute or two until it cooks off. Then add a box of Pomi chopped tomatoes and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, and generous amounts of salt and pepper. Let cook on medium-low heat for 15-20 minutes.

Toss with 1 pound hot, freshly cooked gluten-free fettucine (Le Veneziane is the best brand we know of) and serve with grated parmesan and a crisp, lightly dressed salad.

Eat as slowly as you can, allowing this comforting, savory, luscious food to coat your esophagus. Works to alleviate biliousness and anxiety, at least temporarily.

And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn

It feels weird to have my innermost dread feel so manifest on Halloween, a day we usually enact symbolically and ritualistically from the safety of so-called normal life by wearing costumes to work or school or the grocery store, dressing up as figures of death or horror, fantasy, chaos, or satire, enjoying the shock of seeing a witch or a ghoul or a zombie or a vampire at a school desk, in the cereal aisle, in a cubicle on the phone. The mundane made terrifying is the nature of the deepest fears I have. Today, I imagine many people here on the East Coast won’t feel much like dressing up. It cuts too close to the bone.

I spent the night of the hurricane at my laptop, glued to updates from friends and news media in and around New York City, sending and reading emails, watching footage of the Atlantic City boardwalk washing away, a transformer at Con Ed exploding and terrible floods in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Meanwhile, I worried more than ever about the outcome of the next election, something I have no control over beyond my one New Hampshire vote. It matters who wins. I am terrified.

Brendan had to go out to L.A. this week for meetings, so it was just Dingo and me up here in my study together while the wind whipped around the house and glass broke down the street and metal clanged and things blew past. I kept reassuring Dingo, who stared at me wide-eyed every time he heard anything unusual, which was all night long. “It’s okay,” I told him. He clearly did not believe me and chose to believe his own ears instead. “It could be a lot worse.”  He stared at me, unblinking.

It was true, though. This was all the way up in Maine: how bad could it have been down in New York, I kept thinking, where the real storm was? Unlike thousands of other people up here, my power didn’t go out; no trees around me fell. I was lucky, but it’s an odd kind of guilt to realize your own damage is so minimal when other people lost so much, went through so much. It reminds me of post-tornado photos I’ve seen — an untouched house sitting on its lawn while next door is a gaping dirt pit where the neighbor’s house used to be. You never know when it’s going to be you. It could always be you. When it’s not you this time, it could be next time. No one is ever safe, and luck is really just freak chance.

When suppertime rolled around, as it always does, even during hurricanes, I went down to the kitchen, Dingo barreling down the stairs ahead of me, barking with the excitement he shows before every single meal of his life.  I doled out his kibble, his cup of homemade stew. He whimpered and mooed as I mixed them together, then set upon his dinner as ravenously as if he were still a skeletal, starving street dog instead of a well-fed elderly gentleman from a good home. He has no dignity where food is concerned. I feel much the same way.

On Saturday, before Brendan left, knowing this storm was coming, I had stocked the kitchen for the week with groceries – one small thing to be glad of. After I fed Dingo, I made myself a stiff Dark and Stormy: a slew of ice cubes, half a bottle of Maine Root ginger beer, a huge slug of Gosling’s, and the juice of half a lime. I looked out the kitchen windows at the gigantic, thick-trunked, very old ash tree, whose branches we had trimmed a month or two ago. It stood there, barely moving in the strong, hard gusts, and all its leaves were already down and raked and bagged, another small thing to be glad of.

To take my mind off everything going on in the world out there, I cooked myself a ridiculously huge dinner of mussels in coconut milk and chicken broth with onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, cayenne, coriander, Thai rice noodles, red pepper, and mushrooms. I dished myself up a big bowlful of this brothy, briny, warming stew, added lime juice and Sriracha, and ate it at the counter with my laptop. Too full for seconds, I emptied the remaining mussel shells and put the pot in the fridge for tomorrow.

It was time to take Dingo out.  We stood at the door of the mudroom together, his leash on, poop bags in my jacket pocket.

“Ready?” I asked him.

He was not ready, it appeared.

“Come on,” I said. “We can do it.”

I opened the door into a powerful gust of wind and pulled him outside. The wind was so strong it plastered his ears against his skull and lifted my hair in a swirl above my head. We went to the end of the alleyway driveway and turned onto the sidewalk, which had become a wind tunnel.

Instantly, he emptied himself of everything he had.

“Good boy,” I said, and we headed back for home.

I gave him a treat, then made another Dark and Stormy and took it upstairs with my laptop. I sat there all night long, reluctant to go to bed. My laptop screen felt like a window into reality – my way of feeling connected to the people I loved, the city I will always feel part of, the ongoing online conversations that so many of us participated in all night, those of us who could, as if that could somehow help something, someone. It was yet another small thing to be glad of, but I held onto it.