Some days, I grab my copy of Julia Child’s My Life in France and carry it around with me, the way a child carries a blankey or a beloved stuffed animal. Certain passages, which have been marked since the first time I read the book many years ago, speak to me over and over again, still. I have taken cooking classes in Italy and France; I have studied garden design with designers from England; I’ve enjoyed an endless stream of course work with American professors and teachers. But when I’m alone in my home or studio, experimenting and failing, wondering what I’m doing or why–Julia laughs with me. Even she was ignored and disregarded. Even she felt insecure and unfulfilled. Best of all, even she loved the world and her husband–rapturously.

I remember a journey to Normandy, France. We had arrived from Paris, exhausted. Our luggage had been lost, and our attempts to find our way out of the city and onto a roadway toward Normandy had been disastrous. Desperate, we tossed our son and his rudimentary high-school French into a bar with orders to get help. It worked. Finally, we landed at our French-style B&B, well past midnight. After settling the kids into their bedrooms, we asked Francoise, our host, if by any chance there was somewhere to get something to eat. We probably should have gone to bed, but we were in France! And we were in love! And our children were safe and sound.

Francoise said to drive down the road, count past two villages, and at the third village, there might be a small restaurant still open. We traveled out into the dark, unfamiliar land and were so surprised to find that, indeed, there were three villages to count. At the third one–a tiny, lighted restaurant awaited. Never in my life have I tasted such savory escargot.

Julia Child called France her spiritual homeland. I read her writings and though they are not what one might call literary masterpieces, who could ever care? She writes from the heart, and to the heart, with passion. She uses accessible language. Here follows a random collage of Julia’s writings from My Life in France–one of my favorite storybooks on the art of living. 

*****

“I knew I didn’t want to be a standard housewife, or a corporate woman, but I wasn’t sure what I DID want to be.”

“In preparation for living with a new husband, I’d decided I better learn how to cook. Before our wedding, I took a bride-to-be’s cooking course from two Englishwomen in Los Angeles, who taught me to make things like pancakes. But the first meal I ever cooked for Paul was a bit more ambitious: brains simmered in red wine! I’m not quite sure why I picked that particular dish, other than that it sounded exotic and would be a fun way to impress my new husband. The results were, alas, messy to look at and not very good to eat. In fact, the dinner was a disaster. Deep down, I was annoyed with myself, and I grew more determined than ever to learn how to cook well.”

“France was a misty abstraction for me, a land I had long imagined but had no real sense of. I had reason to be suspicious of it. In Pasadena, California, where I was raised, the idea of France was that of a nation of icky-picky people where the women were all dainty, exquisitely coiffed, nasty little creatures and the men dandies who twirled their mustaches, pinched girls, and schemed against American rubes. I was a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian.”

“Our ship entered Le Havre Harbor slowly. We could see giant cranes, piles of brick, bombed-out empty spaces left over from the war….We went ashore….The Norman countryside struck me…each little town had a distinct character, though many were still scarred from the war…hundreds of bicycles…old men driving horses-and-buggies…little boys wearing wooden shoes…fields intensely cultivated…Oh, la belle France–without knowing it, I was already falling in love!”

“The Guide Michelin directed us to Restaurant La Couronne, in Rouen, which had been built in 1345 in a medieval quarter-timbered house. I wondered if I looked chic enough, or if I would be able to communicate, and that the waiters would look down their long Gallic noses at us Yankee tourists…It was warm inside…Neither humble nor luxurious…The other customers were all French and I noticed that they were treated with exactly the same courtesy as we were….I heard businessmen speaking with waiters…I asked Paul what they were saying…He said, ‘The waiter is telling them about the chicken. How it was raised, how it will be cooked, which wines go best with it.’ Wine? I said. At lunch? Paul explained to me that in France, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner.”

“November, 1949, marked our one-year anniversary in Paris…I was bothered by my lack of emotional and intellectual development. I was not as quick and confident and verbally adept as I aspired to be….When we got into discussions about the global economy, I got my foot in my backside and ended up feeling confused and defensive. My positions on important questions–Is the Marshall Plan effectively reviving France? Should there be a European Union? Will socialism take hold in Britain? were revealed to be emotions masquerading as ideas. This would not do!”

“Upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses: I was confused (evidenced by lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which caused me to back down from forcefully stated positions; and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, “scientific” thought. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.”

“Of course, I made many boo-boos. At first this broke my heart, but then I came to understand that learning how to fix one’s mistakes, or live with them, was an important part of becoming a cook. I was beginning to feel la cuisine bourgeoise in my hands, my stomach, my soul.”

“When I wasn’t at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on how to make mayonnaise, for instance, and although no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating….the mayo suddenly became a terrible struggle…it wouldn’t behave…I finally got the upper hand by studying each step from the beginning and writing it all down. By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history. I made so much mayonnaise that Paul and I could hardly bear to eat it anymore, and I took to dumping my test batches down the toilet. What a shame. But in this way I had finally discovered a foolproof recipe, which was a glory!”

“I proudly typed it up and sent it off to friends and family in the States, and asked them to test it and send me their comments. ALL I RECEIVED IN RESPONSE WAS A YAWNING SILENCE. Hm! I had a great many things to say about sauces as well, but if no one cared to hear my insights, then what was the use of throwing perfectly good bernaise and gribiche down a well?”

“I was miffed, but not deterred. Onward I plunged.”

“And so began the Great French Bread Experiment, one of the most difficult, elaborate, frustrating, and satisfying challenges I have ever undertaken…It would eventually take us two years and something like 284 pounds of flour to try out all the home-style recipes for French bread we could find…I didn’t care if anyone else was interested…I was simply fascinated by bread and was determined to learn how to bake it for myself. You have to do it and do it, until you get it right.”

*****

And here is a picture of Julia, from the book, having a smoke:

Alone at home for a long weekend with nothing but dreadful chores to complete, I received a text message from a nephew.

Hey Aunt Theresa. I’m in your area today, and I thought I’d see if you were around.

A nice surprise! I texted him back and said I was in the basement painting stairs. I typed BORING as part of my text and asked where he was and what his plans were. He said he’d been visiting colleges, visiting a friend, and now that the day was coming to a close, he was looking for his car—which had disappeared under a fresh coating of snow. As soon as he found his car, he planned to come over.

I had tried to make the job of painting the basement stairs more fun for myself by using leftover paint in the bright colors of sunflower yellow and pumpkin orange, but it wasn’t fun at all. Basements are dreary and I am not a subterranean dweller. We have never “finished off” our basement. I can only think of a few underground excursions I like: Wine caves. And—Kartchner Caverns—south of Tucson. (An astonishing underground world.) So I was happy to have the distraction of a traveler in search of pleasant company.

The painting of the basement stairs came about because I didn’t want to look at the plywood anymore. Of course, I thought it would be easy to slap a few coats of paint over the stairs and call it a day, but there were nail holes to fill and other preparations to make in the confines of a stairwell that closed in on me as I worked, becoming a hotbox of paint and spackle fumes in vaporous blends of dank, basement-y, hits with no mind-altering benefits.

When my nephew arrived, he breezed in and told me, with all his heart, how much he loved my house. He said it was a cool place. I have a do-it-yourself kind of house and most of the projects were fun. That’s what shines through.

We went out for sushi. Then we watched free-style skiing competitions. Then I asked him to show me Minecraft.

Then I set him up in a guest room—(the room that used to be my son’s room, but is now painted with sunflower yellow and pumpkin orange, a tribute to his birth close to Halloween)—and my nephew looked out the window and said, with all his heart, how much he loved my gardens. Even buried under the snow he loved them! It grew my heart to know that memories of my gardens were a cherished part of his developing soul.

The next morning, I made a grand New England breakfast for the two of us—waffles with real maple syrup, eggs, homemade hash browns, coffee, orange juice, toast with jam my daughter and I made during the summer.

We sat in the dining room, bright with morning light reflected on snow in the gardens outside the window. We talked about the finishing up of high school and the moving on to college.

My nephew was home schooled until he went to private high school for his last couple of years. He wanted ideas for what to do at his graduation because he had the option of participating in the ceremony with a performance of some kind.

He considered that he might like to write a poem for the occasion. I told him to consult his mother, (my sister), for guidance on the recitation. She is not only an accomplished writer and reader, but she is talented at the lost art and pleasures of reciting and performing all forms of literature.

I often refer to the dining room where my nephew and I were sitting together, as the family chapel. It’s a room adorned with my collection of churchy tchotchkes and cherubs painted on the walls with peace doves, and madonnas with babies, and rosaries, and blessed oils, crucifixes, hearts, candles, wine. It was in this very chapel that I found myself, on that Sunday morning with my nephew, listening to him recall that as a boy, he had memorized poetry. I watched his eyes drift away into the soul of his childhood and then, he began to recite from memory Emily Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death–He kindly stopped for me–The Carriage held but just Ourselves–And Immortality.

What a prayer his recitation was—a prayer to the joy of remembrance and performance art and the power of the written word. To listen to my nephew in the setting of my chapel was a blessing all my own, and one that enchanted me. I told him how terrified I used to become trying to memorize literature and trying to prepare myself to recite it when I was a school girl. Listening to him, I was sorry I had never found pleasure in recitation and memorization.

It has become a lost art–the memorization, recitation, and the listening to the sound of literature. Some cultures so revered the spoken word and the powers of storytelling, that they never invented a written language. Indeed, the Egyptian gods feared the creation and use of writing might soften the soulful exercise of keeping the mind and the heart so closely linked—these personal and protected caves where we store our most original memories and unrealized dreams. And yet here we are—at a time in history, standing on a precipice where we are tossing over the cliff the acts of physically writing, and the practices of reading, to the rhythms of turned pages, scribbled marginalia, and tasted pages.

It was, at last, time for my nephew to drive home. I bid him a fond farewell, then glared at the stairs that needed a few more coats of paint. I wasn’t motivated to move back and forth with the brush while squatting and twisting my crickety legs and arms and shoulders inside that corridor of unimportant passages.

So of course you know what I did! The morning’s church service in my chapel, with my special and unexpected guest, had set my soul on fire. There, in a bookshelf in my chapel, (filled with collections of verse and poetry, both adult and childhood styles), I found a book another sister had given me seventeen years ago. The book is called Committed to Memory and it is edited by John Hollander as part of an advisory committee comprised of several rock-star poets weighing in on the “100 best poems to memorize.” I had asked for the book at a time when my mind raced with obsessions over personal grief and I wanted to try putting something else inside my head.

After finding the book, I couldn’t wait to get back to the task of painting. I still had several hours of work before me, but now, when the job was completed, I would have a poem recited from memory, too. And cheerful stairs.

No one was home. I began memorizing by reading, then speaking out loud. Up and down the stairs I went. Painting to the left. Painting to the right. Stopping to think. Being careful not to smear sunflower yellow-orange paint on the book. Every stair became a little stage, every cobweb a theater curtain, and every basement ghost, my silent audience. 

I chose to memorize Snow-Flakes, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because I like snow and the poem seemed short and simple with a supportive rhyming scheme. But as I painted and practiced and tried to remember the order of the words, the poem started to fill me up with its sad meanings. The pace of my work responded.

And what was my chore now? Was I painting? Was I memorizing a poem? Was I performing? Or was I gone, taking an excursion into the soul of another human being?

Upon completion of my work, upon standing on the bright, sunflowery-orange-yellow of every stair’s surface, I thought that the next thing I would like to do is paint snowflakes here and there on the stairs, too. When I have more time.

The easily distracted apprentice inside of me never knows, whether I am working, or making art. Every distraction is an opportunity.

That’s what shines through.

The mid-winter doldrums, drabby-crabbies, and grumpy frumpies have you all dressed up in bulky sweaters and chewed-up mittens.

You look in the mirror and say, I look like a catfish. 

You pull out your whiskers and throw back a shot of Emergen-C.

You eat a bag of chocolate chips.

You chase the shot of Emergen-C with the last servings of motor oil out in the garage.

There’s more snow coming and you’re primed, pumped, and psyched to blow it out of the driveway, heave it off the deck, and fling it from all the walkways leading to your ice castle.

You are belting out Let it Go, but your soul is frozen. The snow isn’t white, it’s a slush pile of stone-cold gray and steely blue.

You just want to go away and turn your frown upside down. You are desiring Happiness-is-a-Warm-Puppy kind of happiness. Please-Don’t-Make-Me-Read-Subtitles kind of relaxation. I-Really-Can’t-Deal-With-Anymore-Violence-and-Dark-Existence kind of escape.

Go to New York City and view Matisse: The Cut-Outs at MoMA. The show is big color, juicy fruits, humorous and happy, with a bright finish. You only need your eyes and your heart to enjoy the show. You can let your brain keep taking a long winter’s nap.

February 6th, 7th, and 8th–is the last chance to see the show and MoMA will be open 24-7. Become a member so you don’t need a timed ticket, then go see the show over and over again all night long. If you bring a friend or friends, they get in for $5.00 with your membership. See the show when you first arrive in the city. Go to dinner. Discuss. Go see the show again. Go have a drink. Go see the show again, late at night before you go to sleep. Get up early, go see the show first thing in the morning. If you did all of that, you would only be a fraction as obsessive as Matisse was with his scissors and paper. Take notes, draw pictures. Try to remember all the color combinations. Watch the movie about how they restored The Swimming Pool. Wrap your head around that kind of obsessive devotion. Go have a drink. Make plans to cut out pictures, pin them to your walls, and wear pajamas and large hats while you are at work.

Don’t worry about what people say about why you do it, what it all means, or how history is affecting you.

Let it go. Let your frozen soul spiral out of control.

Here’s Henri’s version of Oceania, The Sky–A work of art that blossomed from one scrap of paper pinned over a stain on his wall:

After I saw Henri’s wall art, I found window art, by Jack Frost, in a cabin in the woods in Vermont. Inspired, I thought about making a cut-out composition for my walls at home. Maybe I’d call it: Winter Sky, Chilled to the Bone, Stiff-Feathered Flight. Drilling that down, maybe I’ll elevate my work with an even better name, Heaveania, The Cold Dance.

There’s my coping mechanism–The Cold Dance–I’ll keep it up all winter, while finding doses of warm happiness and dreaming about hot color combinations.

No snakes, no apples, no verdant paradise surrounded us. We were fully swathed in mod weavings of microfibers, which we donned in layers to protect our warm-blooded bodies from the cold. There were no strategically-placed leaves to hide behind. It was deepest, coldest wintertime.

Our Eden in Woodstock, Vermont, was aglow–lit from more than 238,000 miles away by an off-the-grid celestial power source, hard at work shining up the snow for our excursion into midnight lunacy. It was the moon, flashing in and out of the black branches of trees, casting criss-crossed shadows onto the snowpack of our trails. Four of us walked over the webbed patterns of branches, like black spiders in the silent night.

*****

Earlier in the day, my husband and I had ventured out to this White Garden of Eden on Mt. Tom for a cross-country ski adventure. The trails are carefully maintained for civilized pursuits like trail running, walking, snowshoeing, and skiing. We were skiing before midday and passed only two other people–one of them a speed skier who blasted past us like a low-flying dragonfly that was either early for summer, or failed to notice it had ended several months ago. He was dressed in black, with red sleeves on his jacket. He bent his body at the waist as his powerful legs propelled him forth over the slick surface. We stopped to watch the graceful motions of his style–the way his red wings flapped, the way his body hovered over Earth. “What a machine.” We thought at first. Then reconsidered. “That’s human-powered flight.”

My sister had taken me to Mt. Tom for a summertime stroll many years ago, and she showed me a cabin in the woods there. The cabin is open to all who use the trails. There’s a wood stove to make a fire, a porch with benches, there are picnic tables and there are some chairs. It’s a church–without locked doors, or schedules, or a hierarchy of leaders, or established prayers, or rules that no one follows. In this church, most are inspired to honor the few rules. There is also a makeshift altar upon which are scattered a collection of holy bibles containing the works of contemporary prophets, wild partiers, happy people, sad people, children, lost souls, lonely hearts, and all kinds of other wayfarers and wanderers and daytrippers. My husband and I took a break from our super-easy ski tour to sit at the cabin and decided to come back later in the day with our nephew, who would be arriving to stay with us in Vermont that afternoon. Our nephew is almost 19. We camped with him all the years of his youth. He is blessed with one of the greatest football throwing arms on any dude who still enjoys playing the game just for fun. He is also a talented artist, a foodie, an accomplished fisherman, and he can sing. Right now, he is trying to make some difficult decisions about whether or not to enlist in the armed forces.

While my husband and I took our short break at the cabin, I sat on a cold wooden bench, reading through the cabin-bible writings. The sentiments, proclamations, and reportage, were not so different from what might have been carved into the walls of caves and cliff dwellings, painted onto the stones of abandoned cathedrals, scribbled over the metal and wooden confines of bathroom stalls, or committed to cyberspace on the world-wide accessible networks of social media, since the beginnings of human history.

Yet how alone so many people in the world feel, when the world presses in on them. How different we think we are. How much more troubling are the ways our paths seem to ramble–tearing us up with briar patches, blocking our way by avalanche, drowning us out in the river, choking us off by the thick gunk of dirty, shameful, smog. Here are some of the cabin-bible writings: My favorite part of this Found Poem is the last line: “I walked all the way up here and I never walked this far.” I have said a version of that prayer of gratitude to myself so many times in my life–I never thought I’d be able to walk this far. 

*****

By the time my husband and I returned to the car after our early-morning ski excursion, the parking lot was full. (If you want the trails to yourself, go early.) We decided, at the last minute, to abandon the civilized carriage-road trails and head into the woods for our descent back to the car. Hills, ditches, sharp-banked turns and briar patches, booby-trapped the route. I am happy to say I never fell, but my husband did. Whenever I saw him drop from sight in front of me, I knew to downshift.

After our nephew arrived with his mom, we had a nice afternoon of cocktails, dinner, and dessert. The sun set, the moon rose, and it was getting late. We told them about the cabin in the woods and invited them to take a midnight snowshoeing excursion. Everyone began leaping into snow pants, coats, and boots.

*****

The wide, snowy trails had been trampled all afternoon–we didn’t even need our snowshoes. We used ski poles, though, for balance and to get us warmed up as soon as possible. The dense cold stiffened our shoulders and slowed the escape of our dreams, which might have sought escape routes back to the cozy, warm pillows of our country house.

By the time we arrived at the cabin, past midnight, and stoked a fire, the night was all ours. We’d noticed the stars, the moon, the clouds coming in. We had listened to one lone hymn–performed by the rhythm of our boots–singing over the path laid down in front of us by the heavens: a trail of fallen snowflakes, every one of them from never-to-be-known origins all over the world.

Moonshine madness.

Our own Midnight Mass.

We huddled close around the fire. My husband and I shared one beer. We’d come to this church along a familiar migratory route–the one that soothes your soul because the rules require that you keep everything just so for anyone else who wants to come too. Anyone else. You have to pick up your trash, walk without destroying the trails, keep dogs under control, and make sure you don’t burn the place down. The church keeps the wood pile stocked and a flashlight on the altar. There’s a fee, too, for using the ski trails in the wintertime–because they are groomed.

In our close circle of heat around the fire, in the first hours of a Sunday morning in Vermont, I thought about the migratory routes we all take throughout our lives. All migrations are driven by hunger and soul food isn’t easy to find. I thought about the routes I’ve found on my own, the ones that friends have led me to, and the ones I have invited others to share.

My favorite and most memorable migrations are marked by churches and church gardens–Edens–where none of us are ever cast out, but invited, instead, to share the heat of the fire–whether it’s the fire of the moon, the fire of the night, the fire of a confusing dream, the fire of bright, sun-shining fear, the fire of joy.

You just sit there, together, feeling the heat. Trying to make sense of it.

Sometimes we do. And sometimes we don’t.

But no matter what, we promise to keep walking. At the end of our excursion that night, my husband’s sister said she was never so happy to see her car in a parking lot.

But I’ll bet she was even more happy to see her bed.

I was happy to have a memory–a touchstone in my heart–of leading our nephew to a church where we all found warmth, even in the dead of what’s been feeling like a long, lonely winter–not only for him, but for those of us who love him, too.

At the end of our journey from NYC to Vermont, we stopped in at a restaurant to pick up dinner. We sat down at the bar.

Where you driving from? The man next to us asked.

We said New York City.

Is that where you’re from? He grinned, from inside a deep, dark, long beard.

No. We’re from a small town west of Boston, we said.

I just want to let you know, he said, I’ve been wearing the same pair of pants for three weeks.

His friends at the bar rolled off their chairs laughing at him and quickly resumed a conversation they were having about plans for next Tuesday’s sushi night.

Have you ever been to Vermont before? Ol Dirty Pants said.

I’ve camped in every state park. Skied every mountain. Hiked every trail. Dunked my kids under every waterfall. Watched every river carry winter into spring. Inhaled the dying breath of every leaf that has ever performed a fainting spell for leaf-peeping tourists. Stuck my tongue out to catch the best of every winter’s snowflake vintages. Swallowed the entire run of maple syrup from the sweetest sugar bushes. Been lost, been found–in the dewy webs of every spider that ever decorated every meadow on the shores of Lake Champlain. Handed over all my dreams upon every island in the northern reaches of the state. Touched every gravestone, of every baby, in every forlorn, forgotten grove alongside hiking trails, biking trails, and snowshoe trails.

Pour me a beer. I’ll cry a cheerful river about how I’ve been to Vermont before.

*****

We gathered up our “to-go” dinner order and left the restaurant after some more good conversation with the folks at the bar.

We only had five more miles to go on the long road cruise from New York City.

Eight years had passed since our last stay in this part of Vermont and I felt my heart start bubbling up into my throat. Our kids were little, then. My sister and her husband and their two children, had created a gracious, country home for their family. No cell service. No Internet.

A babbling brook. Horse-drawn sleighs that glided over the snow as one stared out the windows into the forests. Stars.

*****

I’m huddled in the car outside the South Woodstock General Store. It is a bitterly cold night–8 degrees–but this is the hot spot for free wifi.

When I walked into the house, I stood at the doorway of the kids’ room. The beds were neat and tidy. The little desks near the beds didn’t have any books on them. The old wood floors weren’t splashed with the lively brush strokes of mismatched socks, shirts, underwear, wet towels. I knew I had to get out of there.

I was saved by three little paintings on the walls here and there that all of us used to love.

Birds. Wearing shoes.

Thank goodness there’s a little tree outside the country store, where I sit at work in my car. It still has colored Christmas lights on it. They are the ones that twinkle. As soon as I finish this post, I’ll head down the road back to the house.

It’s a route we used to walk with the kids, laughing and freezing all the way.

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.

*****

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.

*****

Happy birthday to my true love.

I locked myself out of the house. First I thought about breaking a window, then I moved on to set up the drill and try getting through the door that way, and–finally–I called a locksmith.

He said he’d be right over.

He started out trying to pick the lock and I watched how he listened for clicks so quiet, that the sound of the juncos using their beaks to get seeds from dried flowers still standing in my winter gardens, would seem ear splitting. He also tuned in with what he was feeling through the two metal instruments being jabbed into the keyhole. Then he made some diagnostic comments about how there was one pin inside the lock that wouldn’t let him get past it.

I said, “You must have an engineering mind, with a flair for visualizing intricate mechanical patterns.” He said he did and that he’d gone to Worcester Polytechnic Institute to study engineering.

“But my grandfather was a locksmith.” He said. “He taught me the trade.”

I asked him if he liked Minecraft. Yes, he said. But he made sure to let me know that he wasn’t a total freak about it.

We tried another lock on another door. No go. “I always thought our doors had kind of crappy locks on them.” I said. The locksmith told me that people buy fancy door handles and locks, but the lock configurations inside are often the same as the cheap handles, and most are pretty good. He got out his drill, and dismantled the stubborn lock for good.

We went into the house and he began to put together a new handle and lock for the door. He set up his tools, and opened a box divided into compartments containing teensy metal “pins” separated by sizes and colors. I thought the collection of pins, inside the box, was pretty. It was like a box of paints, or beads.

I said to the locksmith, “You must have broken through some cool locks.” He said the most difficult break-in was a bank vault. They are super duper secured, he said. Somehow, a toddler had escaped from his mother’s side at the bank, just as the vault was closing for the day. The child ended up trapped inside. No one could open the vault–the security system had been set up to shut the vault, and lock it electronically, at a specific time every day. The mother of the trapped child became frantic. It took the locksmith more than two hours to break in. He said, “I don’t know how a mother loses her kid like that.” I didn’t say anything. I’ve lost my kids plenty of times, but never inside a vault filled with money. I thought of all the possibilities and opportunities…an innocent child, wearing a coat, with big pockets, casually allowed to get trapped inside a bank vault.

Putting together the new lock for my door, and matching it up to my existing keys, took some time. Next, I asked the locksmith, “You must love stories of bank heists, or detective stories that solve complicated mysteries.” He said he did, but then he told me that what he really loved, were the stories of hidden treasures from shipwrecks.

“My grandfather left his boat to me when he died. It’s a 43 footer. My cousin and I are going to use it to search for buried treasure from the pirate ship Whydah. Do you know about the Whydah?”

I said I’d been to the Whydah Museum in Provincetown when my kids were little.

He brought me further into his obsession: “The ship went down in a nor-easter off the coast of Cape Cod when the captain changed course to visit his girlfriend. It was loaded with stolen treasure. Barry Clifford discovered the wreck in 1984 and you can’t search within the claim areas. But we can search for treasure beyond the claim zone.”

“A nor’easter!” I said. “We’ve got a good one coming today.”

“Yes,” the locksmith said, “A lot of my calls during the winter are from people who lose their keys in the snow.”

I was going to ask him if he just uses a metal detector to find the buried key. But I didn’t.

Instead, I turned on my computer and looked up the Whydah.

The ship was originally a British slave trading ship. It was just over 100 feet long and, as was the design for slave ships, it was easy to maneuver, heavily armed, and fast–being able to reach speeds up to 13 knots. The Whydah set sail for the port of Ouidah, West Africa, (from which it might have gotten its name), and could handle trades of 700 slaves for gold, silver, sugar, indigo.

As the stories go, the pirate Black Sam Bellamy gave chase to the Whydah for three days, after its maiden voyage, and took it to be his flagship. It was February, 1717, during the Golden Age of Piracy which lasted from 1680 until 1725.

Bellamy had plundered more than 50 ships, gaining the still-standing record as the wealthiest pirate known upon the pages of written history. When he took command of the Whydah, it came stocked with gold and silver–all the riches earned through the sale of slaves. Bellamy began to sail north, from the waters near Cuba, bound for Cape Cod, where they say he wanted to see his girlfriend, Maria Hallett, who lived in Wellfleet. Maria was know as the Witch of Wellfleet because she had been cast from the town of Eastham after she bore Bellamy’s child out of wedlock. The child died. To this day, the legend of her hauntings along the coast of Wellfleet endure.

As Bellamy sailed north, a fleet of winds chased after him–the North-East gales. He floated forth, into a danger zone where all the mercy of slavers, combined with all the mercy of pirates, matched all the mercy of coastal storms. The sea beds between Chatham and Provincetown are vast graveyards, overflowing with the remains of more than 1000 shipwrecks. Wintertime was especially treacherous–on average, two ships per month were consumed by the violent rushes of winds and water. In fact, the regularity with which ships were smashed into the shifting sandbars near the coastlines, inspired the local populations to have on hand wagons and carts for the “finders keepers” looting that followed every tragedy at sea.

Pirate Black Sam Bellamy sailed into an ominous blend of thick fog and shifting winds. The fast-forming nor-easter flung 70 mph gusts throughout the air that licked with furious greediness at the surface of the Atlantic, lifting the water into 30′ peaks, with cavernous gullies that swallowed The Whydah. Tempest tossed, the ship was reduced to all the might of a child’s floaty toy, made of twigs. Trapped in the surf zone near Marconi Beach, off Wellfleet, the massive supply of cannons aided the gusty gales and lusty seas in breaking the ship apart. It split in two–the stern sinking one way, the bow sinking another. Its gluttonous belly–filled with blood treasures–spilled everything into the insatiable Atlantic.

All but two people lost their lives to the powers of the north-east gales. 143 men and one boy, who somehow talked his way into being a pirate. When the townspeople showed up after the storm to take whatever the sea tossed up, corpses littered the wrack line. The indifferent currents started the constant work of burying treasure troves into hidden, underwater sand vaults.

The Witch of Wellfleet never saw her bad-boy pirate again. Or did she? His body was never found.

But his pirate ship became known as the most authentic shipwreck in coastal New England lore.

Pirates lived by a surprisingly democratic form of unique governance aboard their ships. I found lists of the rules, one was entitled: The Articles of Gentlemen of Fortune: A Pirate Crew’s Constitution. And, often, when a ship was plundered by pirates, if there were slaves aboard, they were given the option to become a pirate, or take their chances as a slave.

To this day, nor-easter storms like the one we are about to get walloped, slammed, hammered, and buried by, arrive packed with curious combinations of romanticism, anxiety, dread, excitement. And the powers of these storms have not abated over the almost 300 years that have passed since the Whydah sailed right down the throat of a howling nor’easter

Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, is a favorite beach of the world. Each year, I embark on an excursion at the end of wintertime to have a look at how the storms have reshaped the beaches of Cape Cod. It is always dramatic. On dreamy summer days, I like walking at Marconi Beach and looking all the way to the horizon to imagine where I’d end up if I set sail and kept going. Now, I’ll look about 500 feet out to sea and think of the Whydah, going down in only 16 feet of water and having all its secrets buried under 5 feet of sand for about 266 years.

When the locksmith completed his artfully-crafted doorknob and new lock, he handed me his bill for the work of breaking into my house and sculpting the new doorknob. I gasped.

I wanted to say, “That’s a lot of pirate coin!” But he had also told me he planned to name his boat The Whydah and that his dream job would be to work as a gunsmith (designing, repairing, taking apart and putting back together, guns) and he also wouldn’t hesitate to become a mercenary, keeping the seas safe from modern pirates, using sophisticated machine guns.

So I let it go.