Sharing stories of food stories we love.
When was the last time you felt shy, or nervous, around someone?
For weeks now, I’ve been experiencing a niggling sensation around bedtime—a voice whispers to me, “Put down your phone and read a book!”
I, of course, disregard the voice. Every night tell myself that I’ll start reading the next night; every night that passes makes it harder to start. I’ve convinced myself that it’s good for me, so naturally I fight doing it entirely.
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My sisters and I all went to summer camp in Vermont in the little town of Fairlee. The camp—on the shore of Lake Morey—was all shades of green and white: white buildings with green roofs and green trim; uniforms of green cotton shorts and white shirts; green pine trees and the jaunty white triangular sails of Sunfish skimming the surface of the water. Clusters of open-air tents—nothing more than wooden platforms with khaki-colored canvas sides that we rolled up during the day and dropped at night—were half-hidden among the verdant hills that sloped down to the main camp buildings and, across a small road, the lake itself.
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One of my sisters likes to tease me about my ever-present need to elaborate, particularly with regards to cooking. “What did you make for dinner?” she’d ask. And instead of saying, “lasagna” and leaving it at that, I’d have to describe that I made the noodles with half semolina and half 00 flour, and that I cooked butternut squash with a little sage and brown butter and layered that with garlicky sautéed kale and a béchamel sauce with ricotta and Gruyere.
“Po,” she’ll stop me. “I didn’t need to know of all of that.”
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On Wednesday the snow started in mid-afternoon, coming down in fat, fluffy white flakes the size of quarters. I stood in the kitchen, looking out at the farm, and watched the world turn whiter and whiter, like standing inside the glass of a snow globe that was being shaken slowly.
Walking outside in the height of the snowstorm was beautiful, to put it lightly. Although the farm is always quiet by most people’s standards, I’m attuned to its noises: the tittering of cardinals and white-breasted nuthatches at the bird feeder, the snuffling of our Yorkshire pig Elliot as he ambles around the edge of the stream, the heavy breathing of the four Jersey cows plodding from the upper pasture, the lonely echoing call of geese high overhead.
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I have a trick I use when I’m sad or scared or anxious. (Actually, I hesitate to call it a “trick” because it comes to me entirely unbidden—I don’t perform it as an exercise, but I slip into it reflexively and without intention.)
Here’s what I do: I imagine myself inside a children’s book. Not just any book though: the sort that has a little town in it, beautifully rendered in images. There’s a library, full of shelves of books in jewel tones, and a friendly librarian who peeks over her half-moon glasses at you. There’s a candy shop with glass jars of brightly colored gumdrops and jumbo swirled lollipops and baskets of taffy twisted up in waxy pastel paper.
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