Today my husband is fifty-five years old. He has all of his hair and, maybe, three or four gray ones. He is the same weight he was in high school. (Thin.) He has the same eye-brain coordinated connections he had in college. So, for instance, when he looks at me, he sees my eighteen-year-old self. (We met when we were eighteen.) He is still a lot of fun and gorgeous.

However you look when Cupid first shoots that arrow–that is the way your love will always remember you.

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To celebrate my husband’s birthday we are starting out heading southwest to Manhattan to watch our son perform with his band at the Bowery Electric in the Map Room in Manhattan.  The next morning, we are going to view the Matisse exhibit at MoMA because I just know it’ll be a happy thing to see. Once, we walked to the Musee Matisse in Nice, France. And we were happy. I think the exhibit will look the way a fun birthday party feels. It will look like our daughter all dressed up to go fishing. My husband always loved the way she would put a dress on and a bright, summery hat and then go fishing with him–capable of baiting the hook and slipping around in her bare feet in the mud on the banks of the rivers or the ponds or the lakes. We will be missing her as part of all the celebrations. After Manhattan, we’ll get into the car and cruise north to Vermont.

I asked my sister if I could use her most charming house in South Woodstock for the weekend. The house is within walking distance to the Kedron Valley Inn which has a perfect tavern and more perfect than that, is the South Woodstock General Store next to it. It’s the best general store in Vermont. I have prepared homemade chicken salad and shrimp salad for sandwiches, but I don’t know why I did it, because my husband will only want to walk to the general store to see if they’ll make him a meatloaf sandwich. My husband’s sister is coming for the weekend and she is bringing one of our nephews. My husband’s mother is coming with her special friend–the man who took care of her heart after her husband, my husband’s beloved father, died.

We had planned to ski, but the forecast predicts temps below zero. Last year, my husband and my son raced down Wolverine Bowl at Alpine Meadows in North Lake Tahoe at the top speed of 69 miles per hour, as I decorated the edge of that headwall with a pretty trim of skier’s rickrack–my zigzagged turns so tightly formed together—my toes digging through my ski boots, clinging to the mountain. Neither my husband, nor my son, made a single turn down that steep wall of smooth and fast, packed powder. Those kinds of speeds create dangerous wind chill. And for skiers like me, who cruise along at the speed of dial-up, we are at risk for being exposed too long in the cold. There aren’t any headwalls like the one at Alpine Meadows in New England, but Vermont is no slouch when it comes to creating cold that really hurts.

We plan to snowshoe or cross-country ski instead.

A long time ago, we used to ski with a big group of friends. My husband asked me to resurrect one of those long-ago crowd sustaining meals for his birthday celebration in Vermont. I went into the archives and found tattered notes for the recipe. After a day of skiing, snowshoeing, and/or cross country skiing–this meal sends everyone off to sleepy time, feeling full of satisfaction and ready to do it all again the next day.

Here’s the scatter-brain, tattered-notes version of the recipe:

PENNE IN CREAM SAUCE WITH SAUSAGE AND CHICKEN:

1 large sweet onion and three garlics sautéed in olive oil with a pound of sweet or mild sausage (casings removed and sausage broken into small pieces). Transfer the cooked sausage and onions to a 5qt. casserole pot, pour a cup of white (not sweet) wine over it and cook it down. While you’re cooking it down, sauté a pound of chicken breast cut up. By the time you’ve cut up and cooked the chicken, the wine should be cooked down enough. Add a big can (28 oz) of petite diced tomatoes to the sausage pot. (I used a can labeled “with garlic and olive oil” for fun.) Add 1 cup of light cream to the tomato sauce. Let thicken and simmer–about five minutes. Add kosher salt and pepper. Add one small can of tomato paste. Chop up a loose 1/4 cup of Italian parsley and throw that in. Stir in the chicken. Pack it to go. Take a box or two of skinny penne and an extra can of tomato sauce. When it comes time to have dinner, cook the pasta and mix it in. Add can of tomato sauce if you want to thin the sauce, or add a ladle-full of the water used to cook the pasta. Mix in a cup of grated parmesan to the dish before serving.

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Happy birthday to my true love.