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The other evening, I was upstairs, reading John Crowley’s “Little, Big” in the bathtub with a glass of wine. Brendan was downstairs, making basil pesto.  I thought this was a fine arrangement, all around.

After a few pages, I put the book down, because it’s too big and heavy to read in a bath and I was feeling lazy. I stared out the window at the trees. I was just thinking how nice it is to look into lush green tree branches from a second-story window when a series of strange noises came up from the kitchen. First, a whirring of some machine I didn’t recognize. Then, a clanking stop to the whirring. And then, immediately, a strangled yell that could only have come from Brendan, because Dingo was lying right next to the bathtub.

“Are you all right?” I shouted down into the sudden silence.

“No,” he shouted back. In his voice was complete certainty.

I leapt from the tub and ran downstairs as fast as I could with wet feet.

Brendan was standing with his hand under the running water of the sink. Then he pressed a wad of paper towel to it and lifted it above his head.

“I don’t want to lose my fucking finger,” he said. “This is bad.”

“What did you do?”

“Stuck my finger in the immersion blender to clear it. Like a total fucking idiot. I accidentally turned it on while my finger was in it.”

“We’re going to the emergency room,” I said. “I’ll be right back, I’m getting dressed.”

“I can’t believe I just did that,” he said.

We went out to the car. I was shaking but trying to stay calm.

“I’ll drive,” I said.

I have a learner’s permit but no license. It’s the fourth permit I’ve had, and I’ve never taken a driving test although I do, in theory, know how to drive.

Brendan drove us the four blocks to the hospital. He got out at the doors to the ER and I got into the driver’s seat and carefully, slowly drove the car into the parking garage and put it into a slot. I left it there, with Dingo in the back seat, and joined Brendan in the ER, where the triage nurse took his vitals (fine) and insurance information (none), asked him how much pain he was in on a scale of 1 to 10 (6 1/2) and then sent him back out to the waiting room to await an X-ray and stitches.

“You don’t have to wait,” he told me. “Go home and order some pizza. I don’t think we’re having pesto tonight. I’ve lost my appetite for it.”

We both laughed.

I went out to the parking garage and got into the car. Dingo sat bolt upright in the back seat; I could see his wide eyes staring at me in the rear view mirror.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I know what I’m doing here.”

I’d had a full glass of wine earlier in the bath, and I was still shaking from the shock of Brendan’s accident. Even so, I managed to get the car out of the parking spot and began spiraling around the parking garage, looking for the exit. I was going the wrong way, it dawned on me, so I executed a three-point turn without hitting anyone’s bumper and took us down and out of there. I crept onto the quiet hospital lane. It was raining. The windshield was fogged. I turned on the thing I hoped was the wiper: it was. Brendan’s legs are much longer than mine; his chair was so far back I had to extend both arms and legs to drive, and I couldn’t find the thing that moved it forward. Dingo stared at me the entire time I drove, as if willing me not to screw it up.

Wishing for a movie soundtrack, something both heroic and suspenseful, I muscled that Subaru through empty quiet streets, four blocks, all the way home, without getting lost or getting into an accident. And I managed to turn into the alley and park it in the garage. At a slight angle, but I got the job done.

The kitchen looked like the scene of a vegetal crime: dark green pesto was spattered everywhere. I took a picture of the immersion blender on my cell phone and sent it to Brendan: its round blade guard was caked in green sludge. It looked evil.

“Throw that fucking thing away,” he wrote back.

I threw it out instantly. I covered the bowl of half-made pesto with plastic wrap and stuck it into the fridge. Then I called the pizza place on the corner.

Three hours later, he came home with seven stitches in his finger. He hadn’t cut through to the bone, luckily, but he was in a lot of pain and ready for cold pizza and a lot of wine.

“Look at the cupboards,” he said.  “They’re splattered in blood.”

So they were. It looked as if someone had been quickly and deftly murdered there. With a wet sponge, I wiped it off. Because our cupboards are made of a space-age substance called melamite, the blood came off with a single swipe. It was the first time I hadn’t cursed this yuppie kitchen we inherited from the previous owners.

Blood Pesto

With a mezzaluna, not an immersion blender, chop several large handfuls of fresh basil as finely as you can. Do the same with a medium handful of pine nuts. Crush two cloves of garlic and mince. Stir together, add salt and a lot of grated pecorino romano cheese and generous amounts of olive oil. Mix well, and toss with hot spaghetti.  Blood optional.

Yesterday on our walk, the tide was as high as I’ve ever seen it here, churning at the stone seawall. The beaches had disappeared. We walked through driving rain and a hard wind, glad we’d worn knit hats and sweaters and raincoats. Dingo, who is always energized by cold weather and sapped by heat, scampered around like a hyperactive puppy. We kept up with him, both to warm ourselves and to get the daily constitutional over with as fast as possible.

Small branches had blown onto the path along the cliff, bright green. The underbrush was sodden and vivid. We saw no one except a couple of diehard runners trundling along with their heads down. Raindrops dripped off our noses. Our knuckles were numb. Dingo’s huge ears protruded from his little wet head, making him look even more like a bat than usual.

As we headed down along the paved bike path, looking out at the blurred green islands and heaving brown ocean, there was a sudden gleam ahead and a whir of an engine, and then a car appeared out of the rain, a beige, nondescript sedan, coming at us, very fast. Before we could fully register the fact that a car was somehow on the bike path or jump out of the way, it raced past us, grazing our raincoats. Luckily, Dingo wasn’t in its path or it would have hit him.

We stared after it as it barreled off.

“What was that?” I said.

“Crazy woman,” said Brendan.

The car stopped, down the path. Its taillights glowed red, and then it backed up, fast, right toward us.

“She’s trying to hit us maybe,” I said.

This time, we had the presence of mind to get out of the way. We retreated to the dirt footpath behind a bush, feeling silly, while I called 911. I felt even sillier doing this, because we couldn’t make out her license plate number, but I wanted to take some sort of action. She sat there, her car idling, while I described the car to the dispatcher, and then she took off again, forward this time. She would be gone by the time any cops could come to investigate.

On the way home, we stopped at the seafood market on Commercial Street. Back at home, warm in dry clothes, we sat at the kitchen counter and ate tender little silver boquerones on hot toast with mayonnaise, along with potato chips and small bottles of cold sake, solely for the purpose of restorative warmth, of course. We considered heating up the sake but decided that cold would warm the cockles just as well.

After he was toweled off, Dingo got some apple with peanut butter, which he accepted as his due, but delicately, not unlike a pasha being offered, on a silken pillow, a sweet pastry made of beaten gold, spun sugar, and the flour of a rare and precious grain brought from lands far off.

Rainy-day Dumplings

When the time came to cook dinner, as it always does around dusk, we reconvened in the kitchen. Brendan opened a bottle of rioja, better than the usual one we drink, and poured two glasses while I took from the vegetable bin the ingredients for tonight’s planned supper: boy choy and shiitake stir fry with peanut sauce and bean threads.

We looked at the vegetables for a while without much interest.  We drank some wine.

I reached into the freezer and took out the package of ground pork we’d bought last fall at a farmstand. After I stuck it into the microwave to thaw, I minced mounds of garlic, cilantro, ginger, a Serrano pepper, and half a red onion.  In a medium-sized glass bowl, I put dollops of rice vinegar, toasted sesame oil, chili-garlic sauce, gluten-free oyster sauce, tamari, and lemon juice, to make about 1 1/2 cups of sauce. I whisked it all around, added plenty of garlic and ginger, and whisked some more. In a smaller bowl, I poured an equal part of boiling water over a big wad of peanut butter and stirred till it was smooth, then added that to the sauce.

To the thawed pork, I added the red onion, Serrano pepper, the rest of the garlic and ginger, the cilantro, and enough of the dipping sauce to moisten it well, about half a cup. I stirred the pork mixture as lightly and quickly as I could till it was all mixed together.

From the very bottom of the fridge, where they’ve been sitting untouched for months, I pulled out a package of the rice wrappers I’d ordered online from a Thai import company last spring, when we had a yen for shrimp spring rolls with peanuts, scallions, and mint. Evidently, they keep for a very long time in the fridge.

I soaked each one for a few seconds in warm water until it melted a bit, then wrapped a rectangular wad of pork mixture in it, burrito style. When there were 8 of them and the pork was all gone, I heated a layer of peanut oil in the nonstick wok and fried them in two batches for a good long time, until they were cooked through and chewy-crisp on both sides.

We sat at the counter and devoured all of the pork dumplings. The dipping sauce was spicy and full of different flavors, as dipping sauce should be; there was none of that left, either.

When our plates were empty, we drank more rioja and contemplated the vegetables on the counter one more time, and then I put them away for another meal.

Portland, Maine is the kind of place that sneaks up on you. Or maybe it’s a self-selecting town where the people who live here all really want to be here; I’ve never heard any resident say a negative thing about the place, it’s all passionately understated joy with an undertone that says, “We get it.” If you’re not Portland’s type, it lets you move on down the road without a twinge. If you are its type, it gets its hooks in you so gently, so gradually, you don’t know it until you find yourself as happy here as everyone else.

We spent two years house hunting – first in Brooklyn, then in Cold Spring, then in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, near Brendan’s family’s farmhouse – until one day we realized with a eureka ping that Portland had been there all along. All along, we’d been flying in and out of its easygoing little airport with the lobster “Welcome Home” signs, eating at its restaurants, admiring Casco Bay on the Eastern Prom, and then one day the gentle hooks had sunk in enough and we got it.

And so we spent a lot of last summer looking at various old houses all over the peninsula – this one was the 13^th. It wasn’t for sale. Brendan saw the “for rent” ad and called about it, on a hunch. We both wanted this house, wildly, the instant we walked in, and although I was sure it would cost far too much and didn’t even want to ask, Brendan had another strong hunch and called the owners in Salt Lake City. Within two days, they had agreed on a price that we could pay. The sale was conducted over the phone, without realtors, with civility and honesty on both sides.

The woman who had lived here before us, Madeleine, turned out to be my former classmate at Reed, and has become our friend. The tenants we inherited are so interesting and responsible and great, we never want them to leave. Our contractors are excellent, kickass, scrupulously honest; they try to save us money. I love the hardworking, funny, dedicated women at the soup kitchen. I love the wisecracking, game women I take Pilates with, especially our instructor. I love the dark, wry, understated sense of humor and the fierce work ethic that manages somehow not to be puritanical or self-righteous – I get it.

On Saturday, after our headlands walk, Brendan and Dingo and I went to the Farmers’ Market down in the park, by the fountains, under the trees. There was the usual bounteous array of food, as well as a tightrope walker, a bluegrass band, and many calm and friendly dogs (as are all the dogs here; Portland has none of that weird Brooklyn neuroticism of both animals and owners). It felt like a 19^th century country fair, matter of fact, here we are. We bought organic chorizo, 5 big stalks of rhubarb, 4 beautiful lettuces, a soft cheese dusted with spices, and big ripe tomatoes, and then we were out of cash.

At home, I washed and trimmed the rhubarb and cut it into four-inch pieces. I mixed 2 cups total of apple cider vinegar and rice vinegar with maple syrup, honey, salt, peppercorns, fresh sliced ginger, cardamom pods, sliced Serrano peppers, and cloves. I let this mixture boil for five minutes, then turned off the flame and added the rhubarb. When it had cooled, I packed the rhubarb into a container and poured over it as much of the liquid as it would hold. The pickles taste spicy and exotic and fantastic with cheese.

Yesterday at 3:00, after working all morning and into the afternoon, we had a Memorial Day picnic on the Eastern Prom. I made deviled eggs with capers, mustard, mayonnaise, smoked paprika, and chopped dill pickles, and packed three kinds of cheese and gluten-free crackers to eat with the rhubarb pickles, a bottle of chilled rose, an apple for Dingo, and chocolate-covered strawberries. We sat on a picnic table overlooking Casco Bay. We had that corner of the world almost to ourselves, although it was a bright, warm, sunny holiday; everyone no doubt had decamped for the beaches north and south of town. Sheltered by the trees, out of the wind, warm in the sun, we three sat in a row and feasted together, looking out at the sailboats trundling over the blue water and the shaggy green islands beyond.

Later, at home, we fell instantly into a triple coma of a nap. I regained consciousness at 7:30 to find Dingo fed and walked and Brendan hard at work again. Down in the kitchen, I hauled out the farmer’s market chorizo and a string bag of littleneck clams and opened a bottle of cold orvieto. In olive oil, I sautéed a lot of garlic, two medium leeks, two tomatoes, a jalapeno, and a red pepper. I stirred in 2 diced potatoes and the chopped chorizo, then added a cup of the white wine and a cup of chicken broth and 2 bay leaves, and simmered it until the potatoes were soft. Then I squeezed in the juice of one lemon and stirred, arranged the clams on top, covered the pot, and let it simmer till the clamshells opened. I added a big handful of minced Italian parsley, and we feasted for the second time that day.

Very early this morning, our bedroom flashed and banged with thunder and lightning, an intense electrical storm. Dingo crept in and we all huddled together, feeling safe in our house. At about 8, when I walked Dingo, the air was humid, cool, dark, and sweet-smelling. The soaked dark sidewalks were strewn with vivid pollen and petals.

The first draft of the new book I’m writing, whose working title is Blue Plate Special: the Autobiography of an Eater, is halfway done as of this week. It’s emerging so quickly, I think, because it’s something I’ve been writing in one form or another for many years, in pieces, in essays, in my own head, here on this blog, and now in book form — everything is tumbling into place, interlocking and coming to rest, finally.  I feel hyperfocused, turbocharged, like a wind-up toy, charging over or bumping into and richocheting off anything that happens to be in my way.

Consequently, I am rather difficult to live with these days, especially for myself, but also, I imagine, for everyone else.

Our friend Jami is living here with us for the month; she and Brendan are both working as hard as I am. Dingo is busy lying on a chair near me, protecting me from any possible attackers or nogoodniks, growling deep in his throat whenever anyone walks by the window. As far as he’s concerned, that’s his job, and he’s hard at it. Jami is writing upstairs at the desk in the guest room. Brendan works at the dining room table. I’m in the second living room at a small table in one corner; I have a great view of the old Victrola we just got for $200, a Craigslist find, from a bald German gentleman in Falmouth named Mannfred who kept it in his garage for years next to his gleaming new BMW. It’s our new prize possession: a mint-condition 78 record of Marlene Dietrich singing “Lili Marlene” recently arrived from an ebay seller.

The two activities (besides drinking wine, playing fiddle tunes, reading in a bath, and, of course, sex) that most effectively loosen and ease my tightly-wound brain are cooking and walking. Every day, Brendan and I take Dingo over to the Eastern Prom for an hour-long, fast walk across the headlands, down on the bike path, up around the water treatment plant, along a wooded trail, back down the hill to Dog Beach, where we let Dingo say hello to all the other dogs and run along the sand to the rocky outcropping — then we walk the path on the other side and climb the stairs to the monument, and then we tramp back to the car. Dingo can be off-leash for most of it, which we all love. We have a view out over Casco Bay the entire time. The weather has been clear and sunny and cool all week – scintillating, sparkling Maine spring days. Today it’s rainy and cool… but we’re going anyway. Sanity demands it.

But cooking is the best tension-reliever I know of, bar none. When my brain is too full of ideas and images, loaded so full it churns around like a cement mixer, I go into the kitchen and start chopping things. I have a sturdy-handled, big-bladed knife and a big heavy wood chopping board my ex-husband made years ago from leftover ipe when he was making our shelves. Last night, my skull crammed to bursting with words, I stood at the counter and chopped and minced until there was nothing left to cut up for the meal: a big piece of ginger, Serrano peppers, a big white onion. I smashed and chopped so many garlic cloves I lost track, and as I did so, I felt the cement mixer slow down, rock gently back and forth, come to a settled point at which its heavy weight lay in its belly and was still.

I devised a spicy basmati rice, cooked in the shimmering rich and golden chicken broth I had made the night before, with saffron, Serrano peppers, ginger, garlic, and a dash of garam masala. I stewed the leftover chicken from the cacciatore I’d made the other night, pulled from the bones, in a sauce of tomato, spices, lemon, and ginger.  Brendan made spinach minced and cooked in butter, garlic, ginger, and onion. With this warm, spicy meal, we drank cold rose and listened to bluegrass; somehow, it all went together.

Sweet-Savory Applesauce

The other day at the soup kitchen, Monica asked me to make an applesauce to go alongside some pork chops for a later dinner. I filled a small red crate with a variety of red and green apples from the big fridge in the pantry, washed them in the small sink, took off the little stickers, then set up a big cutting board with a wet cloth underneath to keep it from slipping. All through my shift, whenever I had a spare several minutes, I stood at my little workstation, happily and steadily reducing that big box of apples to a smallish dice. I prefer to leave the peels on. Cutting them small makes the applesauce smooth and palatable. I also like dicing; I’ll take any excuse to do it.

By the time my shift was almost over, I had filled a deep steam-table pan. I added a big handful of brown sugar, 3 bay leaves, some minced fresh rosemary from the plant in Monica’s office, a good pouring of cinnamon, and another of salt. After I mixed it all together, I poured 2 cups of water over the pan, covered it in parchment paper and then foil, and stuck it into a moderately hot oven to bake for the next hour or two.

I left not knowing how it turned out; it didn’t matter. I was so soothed and refreshed by chopping all those apples over the past couple of hours, I came home energized, smiling, almost euphoric, and managed to sail through a whole chunk of the chapter about my wretched adolescence.

Last Thursday, I started working in the soup kitchen at the women’s shelter, Florence House, here in Portland, Maine. I arrived 15 minutes early, at 10:15 in the morning, feeling nervous but glad to be there; I’d been meaning to do this for months, and here I was. A staff member led me back into a clean, well-appointed kitchen. As I signed my name in the register in the little office, I heard Nick Drake on the CD player, saw a Julia Child quote on a banner (“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients”), and smelled something good cooking on the stove. I almost burst into tears.

After I introduced myself to Monica, the kitchen supervisor, she put me to work. I assembled about 60 cheese sandwiches and toasted them in butter on the grill and set the container into the steam table, loosely covered, to await lunch service. Then I peeled and diced a box of carrots and stored them in the refrigerator. Local supermarkets had donated all the ingredients in the kitchen – Hannaford, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods.

From 12 to 1, I stood by the steam table and served two kinds of soup, both made from scratch (broccoli cheddar and tomato basil), along with the sandwiches I’d made, while Kim, my fellow new volunteer, served the salad she’d made, and Monica started the prep work for that night’s dinner.

Monica told us that the other volunteer on that day’s lunch shift, Diane, had just been given the Volunteer of the Year award. Diane spent the whole shift washing dishes in the corner. Every time I needed more, there she was, restocking soup bowls and sandwich plates by my elbow. She did this with immense cheer, unobtrusively; it was not hard to guess why she’d been awarded the honor. The soup kitchen, I could tell right away without having it spelled out for me, has a strong ethic of service, or “mission,” as they call it; it’s not religious, it’s not didactic, but it is humble and without ego or judgment.

I stood in my apron and dished up lunch for all the women who came shuffling up to the service window. Many of them didn’t make eye contact. Many of them looked as if they had been through terrible things, formidable struggles. Even so, they knew what they wanted in their lunch, and they were not shy about demanding it. Some of them said, “Not that sandwich, I want one that’s not so burned.” Some of them asked for seconds, even thirds. They all loved the broccoli cheddar soup.

One of the rules of the place that I agreed to observe when I volunteered was not to reveal identifying details about anyone there. This is not a writer’s favorite promise to make, especially because the singular details and specificity of people are a novelist’s bread and butter. Even so, I can see the usefulness of protecting the anonymity of women in a shelter. But as I stood there dishing up their lunches, I wanted to know all their stories, their histories. I would be lying if I pretended otherwise.

Soup Kitchen Three-Bean Chili

After lunch had been cleaned up, before my shift was over, Monica had me assemble what she called a “three-bean chili” (“It sounds more exciting than ‘vegetarian chili,’” she said. “They complain sometimes when there’s no meat”), for the next day’s lunch, in order to use up various assorted cans of beans she had rattling around the pantry. This chili turned out to be similar to the one I make myself on a cold night when I haven’t bought groceries and want something quick, easy, good, and nourishing.

Saute a chopped onion, a celery rib, and a bell pepper in olive oil with plenty of garlic, cumin, paprika, oregano, black pepper, and chili powder. Add a rinsed can of one each of the following beans: dark kidney, pinto, and black. Add a can of diced tomatoes, a bay leaf, and chicken broth as needed. Simmer for 15 minutes and dish into shallow bowls with plenty of grated cheddar, chopped raw onion, and sour cream.

It’s been a long time since I last posted here. For the past month, I’ve been turning this blog into a full-blown book, which has been taking all my time and concentration. I want my editor to be happy. But the call of the blog is a tempting siren song, or maybe I should say a lure to the light, and I can’t stay away.

Brendan’s little brother Aidan lives in West Hollywood just off Sunset Boulevard with his friend Noah. He’s an actor and screenwriter, and Noah works for a big producer. Last night, when Brendan called Aidan to wish him a happy 24^th birthday, Aidan expressed, in the course of their conversation, his consternation at the loss of his vicarious source of food envy.

“Reading her blog used to make our frozen pizza dinners taste so much better,” he said. “We’re dying here. We’re jonesing for more.”

Happy belated birthday, Aidan, but I’m not sure I have anything exciting to report, foodwise.

Tonight’s dinner, for example, was aggressively healthy and Whole Foods-inspired, and not likely to cause any drooling deviation from pizza: kale salad with buttermilk dressing. Chopped brussels sprouts tossed in balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, smoked paprika, and cumin, and steamed till soft. And then, the hippie-food piece de résistance, which means most kids would rather die than eat it: a cup of rinsed quinoa sautéed in olive oil and butter with an onion, a whole head of garlic, 2 hot peppers, smoked cardamom, paprika, and tarragon, salt and pepper, then steamed in 2 cups of broth. When it’s a nice hot wet mass, the general color and texture of wood pulp, stir in half a cup of toasted chopped almonds, a quarter cup of mixed olives, and lemon zest. Serve with hot sauce…

It was good, and we gobbled it up avidly, as we do everything, but it had a quality of over-achieving to it; if you ate like this every day, you might plausibly never die, except maybe of boredom, or an excess of fiber and antioxidants and cancer-fighting compounds, which studies will no doubt soon reveal are toxic.

The other night, when our friend Madeleine, one of the few friends we’ve made so far in Portland, came over for dinner, I made a similarly health-on-steroids kind of meal: very fresh local haddock broiled in lemon and capers and olive oil; “forbidden” japonica rice steamed in chicken broth with shallots, garlic, whole cardamom pods, sesame oil, and chili-garlic hot sauce, and a salad of herb mix and avocado in a mustard vinaigrette.

Madeleine used to live in our house. She was the tenant in the downstairs apartment, where we now live, and, because she was moving out, we were able to buy it. We phoned her during the sale to ask her some questions about the place – why was she moving out, was there was anything we needed to know, that sort of thing (she had some stories to tell, most notably about a flood, but luckily, they didn’t deter us). It turned out that she and I had gone to Reed together – in fact, we graduated the same year. We used to play bridge together in the Student Union one summer. We had friends in common. But we’d barely known each other there – I’d always thought she was far too cool for me, which, frankly, she was. But now that we’re middle-aged, these distinctions are evidently moot and have smoothed themselves out.

We’ve been gradually settling into this house. We’ve augmented our furniture with stuff from Brendan’s parents’ barn, his grandmother Sally Fitzgerald’s furniture – a Queen Anne couch with matching armchairs, a secretary desk, a glassed-in bookcase, and Brendan’s grandfather’s old desk. I love the fact that this furniture has deep literary history embedded in its molecular structure: Flannery O’Connor was Sally’s best friend, so I’m sure she sat on the couch and chairs that are in our parlor. Brendan’s grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, translated The Odyssey and The Iliad, and I love to think that he did so on the desk we’re using, temporarily, as a dining room table. Eating on it, I’m reminded of my freshman year at Reed, when I was held hostage to those books. The other night, when Madeleine found herself at this table, she heard the story of its provenance, and we remembered Humanities 110 – did either of us actually ever read them? The Odyssey, maybe.

This house has its own stories. Brendan has been researching its previous owners at the Registry of Deeds in the Cumberland Courthouse. They are legion, by which I mean it’s changed hands at least 20 times in its nearly 150-year life. Previous owners include an ex-governor of Maine in the late 19^th century, as well as members of illustrious old New England families — Coffins, Libbys, Knights, Meserves, and McQuillans. For much of the latter half of the 20^th century, the house was an institute — for 30 years, it was a Goodwill Industries home for Down syndrome adults and, before that, it was an old age home owned by a doctor associated with Maine Medical. A sprinkler system and wheelchair-accessible bathroom doorways attest to its institutional history; plaster moldings, high ceilings, and bay windows are evidence of its more distant, elegant past.

Evidently, we’ve taken possession of an old, much-altered, interesting, beautiful structure. Now we’re imposing our own ideas on it, as no doubt others will do after we leave it behind.

Breakfast smoothie

In a blender, put a cup of frozen mixed berries, a cup of orange juice, a banana, and as much yogurt as fits in the rest of the blender before it explodes. Blend. Serves 3.

There’s a certain time of day, sometime after sunset, when people generally seem to feel the urge to gather together by a fire or a stove or a Hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. People I know who live alone have told me that they’re perfectly fine all day until shortly after the sun goes down. In that hour of oncoming darkness, they feel a sudden awareness of loneliness and a desire to break bread, as it were, with other people. When I’ve lived alone, I’ve felt it, too.

Of course it’s wonderful to eat with other people, but cooking for one, that one being your own damn self, is a useful skill to have for those nights when you’re the only person around. After my husband and I separated, I moved into my friend Jami’s loft, which I sublet for three months while she was out West, and then, when she came back to town, I got my own apartment. I found that when I lived alone, I looked out the window a lot more often than I had when there was someone else in the house with me, as if looking at the outside world were some instinctive way of feeling connected to other people.  I became much neater living alone than I’d been when I was married. My husband’s and my house was generally messy and cluttered, dishes in the sink, laundry not put away, stuff covering the dining room table, and I didn’t care, and neither did he. In my own place, I kept everything neat and shipshape. There was no clutter at all.

I thought of the hour after sunset as a hump I had to get over, a period of restless bleakness during which I yearned for company. I wanted to go out and eat in a restaurant just to be around other people. Suddenly I missed my husband, missed being married. On some especially blue evenings, I almost, but never actually, wished I had a roommate. And I regretted the solitary nature of the writer’s life – other people, normal working people, spent their days with coworkers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, and here I was. Of course, I had Dingo, but a dog just doesn’t cut it in the blue hour.

To shake this sense of desolation, I went into the kitchen and started chopping things. I made just enough dinner for me, a simple and comforting and filling meal — one broiled chicken thigh, or even two, with a baked sweet potato and a side of garlicky red chard, for example, or cauliflower curry over basmati rice served with cashews, Sriracha hot sauce, and cilantro, or a puttanesca with gluten-free pasta and plenty of anchovies, capers, olives, and hot red pepper flakes. In those days, I ordered groceries weekly from Freshdirect. I always had plenty of food in the refrigerator and cupboard because I’d planned ahead; keeping my kitchen well-stocked was another effective bulwark against loneliness.

When the meal was ready, I heaped up a plate, sat at a table set for one, and feasted. I looked out the window at headlights and taillights streaming beneath the spangled struts of whatever bridge I was looking at; Jami’s loft in South Williamsburg had a view of the Williamsburg Bridge, and my apartment on Monitor Street in Greenpoint had a view of the Kosciusko Bridge. I daydreamed about falling in love again. Sometimes I put music on. Sometimes I lit a candle. Sometimes I wolfed down the food so I could get back to my email. I always drank wine.

These meals for one had a counterintuitive, resonant coziness. Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn’t have to make conversation, I got to focus on my food without thinking about anyone else’s needs at all, and that made it taste even better. I didn’t have to share my dinner or worry about taking too much food: it was all mine. I could sing along to the music and wear pajamas and eat with my hands and drink the whole bottle of wine and lick my plate clean. Who would know or care?

Dingo lay at my feet, and little by little, as the evening went on, his company became, once again, sufficient. When I was done with my food, if there was anything left and he was allowed to have it, I gave him a scrap or two. Then he and I went out into the now-dark evening and made our rounds together, ambling along the sidewalk. I waited while he sniffed intently at tree trunks, lampposts, and bushes and deposited a squirt of pee on everything, lifting his leg as high as he could get it and often missing the thing itself, unwittingly sending his little stream out into space to land on the sidewalk or street. He squatted; I hovered behind him with a bag at the ready, scanning for the nearest trash can.

Then we went home again and spent the rest of the evening together. I read a book or wrote emails; he lay nearby and watched me. He always turned in before I did.

Sleeping alone was another luxurious pleasure that should have been depressing but wasn’t. I got to hog the covers, sprawl across the whole mattress, use all the pillows, and move around as much as I wanted without worrying about disturbing anyone else. No one snored in my ear or talked in his sleep. No one woke me up. No one stole the covers or accidentally nudged me with his leg or got up and creaked the floorboards on the way to the bathroom. After my satisfying solitary dinner, I was the captain of my bed, the master of my sleep. But even so, I longed for a bedmate – the urge to fall in love again became stronger and stronger as the months went on.

Then, of course, I met Brendan, and that was the end of the blue hour, cooking for one, eating everything all by myself, watching the cars streaming over the bridge, and daydreaming about falling in love.

Corn and monkfish chowder for one

In a tablespoon of butter, sauté one chopped celery rib, half an onion, diced, 2 minced garlic cloves, and half a chopped green or red pepper till soft. Add 2 cups of fish stock or low-sodium chicken broth, a bay leaf, a pinch of thyme, a dash of cayenne, and plenty of black pepper. Add one good-sized potato, cubed. Simmer, and when the potato is soft, mash some of it in the pot to thicken the soup. Add ½ cup of corn and one medium-sized monkfish filet cut into bite-sized pieces. Simmer till the fish is cooked through, 5-10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings. When the chowder is done, take out the bay leaf, stir in ¼ cup of half and half, and dish into one large bowl. There should be enough in the pot for seconds. Avail yourself of  Tabasco and fresh parsley if you want to.