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Winter in New England is full of unforeseen challenges. The New Hampshire farmhouse furnace, which is about three decades old and has been limping along for the past five or more years on replacement belts and magic, has been officially pronounced dead today, or rather, it’s cracked, and the carbon monoxide it’s probably giving off would be dangerous, if the house were better insulated, or insulated at all.

And our house in Portland is home to four humans, two dogs, a cat, and an indeterminate number of squirrels. These past few weeks, according to our tenants, who live upstairs, the squirrel population has exploded and expanded. Before, according to Abby, they could hear a family of squirrels talking, fighting, having sex, giving birth, celebrating, and dying, leaving their excretions and carcasses within the walls of the house, and that was bad enough. But this winter, the squirrels seem to have quadrupled in number and expanded from the walls into the ceiling. And now, she and Tom can also hear their vigorous chewing, of the house itself.

A dangerous, dead furnace, a rapacious infestation of squirrels: both are problematic, potentially expensive, and time-consuming to deal with. A new furnace costs a small fortune. Exterminators charge as much as $75 per squirrel; who knows how many are up there? More are born every day, evidently.

The guy from White Mountain Oil & Propane is downstairs in the cellar right now, testing the carbon monoxide levels. By law, he had to shut the furnace off, which leaves us completely without heat in the middle of February. There is a Yotul woodstove in the middle downstairs room, but we’re low on wood; we weren’t here this fall to buy another cord, so we’ve only got a few sticks left. It’s a balmy 35 degrees today, but next week is going to bring another polar blast. We won’t be here, fortunately, so we can shut off the pipes and skedaddle out of here, but we’re coming back in mid-March, and it will still be full-on winter then. So we’ll have to figure something out, soon.

When we go back to Portland, we’ve got the squirrel problem. I’d consider camping out in a lawn chair with my .22 (I do not own a .22 but would happily buy one for this purpose) and picking the squirrels off one by one as they came down the fire escape. I have no ethical problem with this, because I would then dress, cook, and eat them. Friends who’ve done so assure me that aside from having to pick buckshot out of your teeth, they’re delicious. Squirrel pot pie, braised squirrel stew, deep-fried squirrels with cream gravy, we could eat free-range, organic meat for weeks…. But too bad, it’s illegal to shoot a gun within city limits. And catch-and-release in the dead of winter is cruel; they would freeze and starve to death. So we’ll have to have them killed somehow.

Ah, the joys of life in the far north! At least we have plenty of water and food. At least this house is nicely porous, so we didn’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning while the old furnace was exhaling its toxic last breaths. And at least those squirrels haven’t chewed through any electrical wiring and set our Portland house on fire. Yet.

My older sister Caddie is the one who pointed out that the oil smell from the furnace was probably not all that healthy. She lives over in Vermont, and she had a week’s vacation, so she motored across northern New England on Monday afternoon and parked her Subaru next to ours in front of the barn. She brought a big bag filled with delicacies from her part of the world: apple butter, cider jelly, a round of soft, mild goat cheese, boiled cider, apple cider syrup, two bottles of French wine, butternut squash seed oil, tea, and a tin of almond thumbprint cookies she’d baked for us.

Caddie and I sat by the fire while the sky got dark, talking away, while Brendan made dinner: a leg of lamb, roasted with rosemary and garlic, with his grandmother’s Italian curry – two each of yellow onions, green peppers, and peeled red apples, minced and sautéed in plenty of olive oil, then simmered in 2 1/2 cups whole milk, with 2 heaping teaspoons of curry powder and 2 tablespoons of flour, whisked in until it thickens – along with broccoli rabe and Arborio rice. This meal, one of my top three death-row choices, is always served with Major Grey’s chutney. This time, it was perfect: the lamb was tender and perfectly flavored; the curry was delicate and sweet and luscious with the soft rice and vinegary chutney; and the broccoli rabe was bitter and garlicky. We sat at the candlelit table and feasted, talking and drinking wine.

Afterwards, we watched the Olympics, suffering and kvetching through the bobsled races to get to the ice dancing, which we all three loved. While we watched, the furnace blew its evil oil smell upstairs. It’s been doing that for a while, and we’ve just sort of ignored it, since we don’t have any of the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, headaches or nausea or dizziness, and Dingo is fine, too. But there’s something about an older sister. She is indeed the boss of me. When Caddie pointed out the potential dangers of this situation and told a story about her own long-ago brush with carbon monoxide poisoning, driving a rusted-out car that she finally fell out of, unconscious, all my denial disappeared.

So we’re without heat for now. And when we go back to town, we’ll see those squirrels sitting outside the kitchen window, staring in at us. They look like they’d taste delicious in écureuil au vin.

Caddie’s Almond Meal Thumbprint Cookies

Those cookies were so good, the entire tin was gone by the next afternoon. We’re not sweets eaters, but these were sublime, so I made her give us the recipe, and here it is.

2 c. almond meal (Bob’s Red Mill can be kept in the freezer for quite awhile)

¼ tsp. baking soda

¼ tsp salt

2-3 Tbsp. date, maple, or brown sugar

(mix these dry ingredients together)

¼ cup honey  (or honey/maple syrup)

¼ cup coconut or organic corn oil or melted butter

2-3 T. whole or almond milk

½ tsp. vanilla

(mix these ingredients into dry ingredients…should be gooey…)

Roll into lovely little balls, dip the tops of balls into an extra bit of almond meal, place on greased baking sheet (thick one if possible…and/or line with parchment paper – these guys brown on the bottom easily)

Press down in middle with a thumb or the back of a coffee scoop.

Can be filled with jam before or after baking… I filled with plum jam…but the imagination can take over here… (chestnut spread?  chestnut/chocolate?  fig jam?  ooh, ooh.)

Anyway, I digress… Bake for about 10 minutes in a 375 degree oven.

Let them cool a little before taking off the rack… They’re very crumbly when hot, and stay together nicely when cooled off a bit.

By the second week of January, most of my resolutions for the Year of No seemed to have fallen by the proverbial wayside, which I envision as a grimy urban curb strewn with cigarette butts, used condoms, and good intentions, like the road to hell. I had kept exactly two of the many, and they happened to be the easiest: I had said no to blurbing books, and I hadn’t spent any unnecessary money. Also, I reminded myself, I had kept up my daily fast hard 4-mile walk, thanks to Dingo, who demands it; that hadn’t been a resolution, but it was something, at least. I reminded myself of this to keep from feeling like an abject slug. It helped, but only a little.

I’d embarked on my plan for 2014 with the sense that if I were going to give so much money to environmental causes, sign so many petitions, write so many letters, I should take care of myself as if I were the planet. Corny, I know, but “change begins at home” always sounded good to me, if only because “at home” is where I live, and I have no control over anywhere else.

The other self-care resolutions I promised myself I’d keep this year included brushing and flossing my teeth with stringent discipline, drinking less red wine and more green and nettle tea and water, eating less food, less meat, less often, doing Pilates again, starting my novel, and spending less time on the computer and more time reading, ideally great novels.

As of mid-January, these were all failures.

Oh well, I thought. Then I went to the dentist with dread and loathing borne of many prior traumatic dental experiences; this past semester of teaching took all my concentration, apparently, so I had none left over for flossing. I braced myself for a root canal, or a stern lecture at best. But the hygienist and dentist gave me heartening news: things weren’t so bad in there. I left with spanking-fresh teeth, tartar-free, no cavities. A fresh start is inspiring and symbolic. Good news can spur change better than bad sometimes, or maybe I just buy into the deal-with-the-devil cliché. Whatever the reason, I’ve brushed and flossed every day since, just about. Close enough for me.

A few days later, on a surge of inspiration perhaps borne of my dental triumph, I started my new novel. Wow, I thought, a novel again, how exciting, I have no idea what I’m doing, let’s go. I remember this. It’s the best feeling in the world. The novel is my true home, and it’s always good to be back, even though I always have to force myself to go there, stay there, face it.

I have always loved to make a pot of tea before I begin my writing day, usually at 3:00 in the afternoon, after my correspondence, errands, 4-mile walk. I reinstated this ritual, and then, maybe as a result, I found myself eating less food and drinking less wine as a matter of course, without trying. When I’m writing, I don’t want to cloud my brain with excess and indulgence.

Then February came around with its midwinter doldrums and cabin fever, but I didn’t lose heart: my head was clear, my novel was underway. In the first week of the month, I found myself hungry for books and bored by the Internet. A hot bath is my favorite place to read in the wintertime anyway, and this is a very cold winter.  When my writing was done for the day, I ran a hot bath, got in, and picked something from my stack of unread books. And thus, I spent hours away from my computer every day, not missing it at all.

Now it’s almost mid-February, and I have one more resolution to keep.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, I heard from my Pilates teacher yesterday. She asked where I’ve been. I told her I’m in and out of town and working and distracted. I told her, also, how woefully depleted my core strength is these days. She wrote back to tell me about an online 31-day challenge she’s going to run, starting March 1^st.

And then it hit me, with the simple beauty of an algorithm or a koan: not everything has to happen all at once.

Typing this, I have to laugh at the obviousness, but it’s nothing I’ve ever learned in any deep way. Does everyone else know this already except me? I’ve always been so impatient. Once I decide something, it’s got to be done NOW.  If it takes longer, I’m a failure. If I skip one thing, it’s all worthless. For as long as I can remember, I’ve gone into frenzies of reform, attacking my decisions with the rabidity of a zealot. Gradual, thoughtful change is nothing I understand.

This extends to my tooth-gnashing, wee-hour fretting about climate change and the planet: we have to stop using oil NOW, stop fracking NOW, right NOW, everything has to come to a screeching halt and CHANGE, presto, otherwise we’re lost. I know I sound like a five-year-old, but in many ways, I am a five-year-old. I don’t care how it sounds, if I can start doing Pilates on March 1^st without being a failure, then maybe there’s hope.

Chinese-ish Japanese-ish Soup

The other night, after a good afternoon of writing and reading, I simmered two 6-inch sheets of kombu, dried seaweed, for 20 minutes in about 2 quarts of water, then removed them and cut them into strips and put them back into the water along with a sweet potato and 2 carrots cut up into tiny cubes, a big handful of chopped shiitake mushrooms, a chopped jalapeno, plenty of minced ginger and garlic, 4 star anise, a hefty shot of Bragg’s liquid amino acids (use soy sauce instead if you like) and another of hot chili sesame oil. After 7 minutes, I added one cubed chicken breast and a chopped bunch or two of scallions.

Separately, I made half a package of Maifun, those delicate little rice noodles, according to the package directions.

When it was all done, I put a handful of noodles into 2 bowls and ladled scoops of soup on top plus extra broth. I served it with hot chili sauce. We devoured this supper, finished it with mint tea, and slept deeply and well.

There was enough soup, with noodles, left over for the next night’s evening meal, as well.

Mae West said, “To err is human, but it feels divine.” How right she was, to a certain extent.

It’s been quite a while since I did anything really bad, dammit. The errors I make these days are modest in scope, caused largely by unintended social klutziness: rushing forth in my enthusiasm to speak and depriving someone else of the spotlight; inflicting my will on others without thinking and then realizing how unpopular my unilateral decision was; or blithely assuming people are more comfortable socially than they are and making a blunder in judgment.

But when I was younger, and not even that much younger, my life was spinning off like a revved-up racecar without a driver. Back then, for years and even decades, I made colossal errors, life-changing ones, errors so big, they set me on a different course.

It did not feel “divine,” exactly, to err so dramatically, it felt stressful and strange, nightmarish even, as if I were going against the high standards I generally like to hold myself to, acting out of loneliness and hunger rather than generosity and thoughtfulness. However, these mistakes I made set off a chain of events that caused me to act decisively in order to stop making them. If I hadn’t made them, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, I’m sure of that, so regret is useless.

If anything, making mistakes teaches you things you can’t learn any other way. Besides the usual residual rewards of a life fully lived, such as wisdom and hindsight and forgiveness of others and the knowledge of what an incredible asshole you’re actually capable of being, big mistakes teach you who your true friends are and who’s been judging you, sniping behind your back, and slitting their eyes at you all along. This is useful information, as any Shakespearean tragedy proves: naïve belief in the high opinion of others can be deadly. Mistakes make you humble, cure you of arrogant superiority. At least, they did me. And they made me appreciate the people who love me in a whole new way. I can’t take anything for granted anymore, not ever. To err is very human, I think.

I’m sitting in front of a hot fire on a zero-degree night in the White Mountains. It’s a tough world out there, beyond the walls of this farmhouse. Tonight, outside, the sky is dark and clear, mad with stars. The eaves are hung with icicles sharp as shards of glass. We saw a very thin coyote at the bottom of the field the other morning. He was trolling the edge of the field, for what food, I didn’t know. He didn’t bother coming up to root for fallen apples in the snow in the orchard, so maybe there weren’t any. Compared to the portly old velvet-furred pasha of a canine dozing at my feet, the coyote looked truly wild and on the verge of starvation. There’s no supermarket for him to go to.

In the woods, the dark, shaggy branches of the hemlocks are heaped in pillows of white snow.  On our walks, we stop to look at the brooks, whose surfaces are iced over in ornate layers and hummocks.  The snowy, frozen lake is bluish in the shade. The air has been so cold, so dry, that once we warm up from the hard exercise, I’m weirdly reminded of hot days in Arizona, of that desert air that scalds the skin with its parched aridity. The absolute lack of moisture makes our skin crackle. The hard packed beige-brown sand on the road over the ice also feels desert-like, as does the sunlight, which, although it lacks warmth, is intensely bright.

We come into the warm house after our walk with our skin flushed, our scarves frozen from our exhalations, noses dripping, blood pumping. We shed everything as fast as we can, gulp big glasses of cold well water, and then, within twenty minutes, we’re chilly again, and the layers gradually go back on.

When we went to the barn earlier to get more wood, we bundled up as if we were heading out into the Siberian steppe. Our boots creaked in the snow as we walked in the tire tracks across the yard to the driveway and across it to the barn. We had to go through the stable to the woodpile because the side entrance is buried by the towering pile of snow that slid from the roof last week, when it warmed up enough to melt it slightly. We shoe-skated over the ice on the floor to the nearly-depleted woodpile, loaded up and staggered back to the house with our armloads.

In here, in front of the fire, it’s warm and safe. Dingo’s on the window seat snoozing. Brendan’s making veal cutlets, dredging them in beaten egg, then bread crumbs, and then he’ll fry them in hot oil. Sweet potatoes are in the oven; peas are simmering in a pot.

It’s a Blue Plate Special night. This is always an occasion for contemplation and gratitude, especially in light of the flood of bad news that crowds into my sphere of attention, constantly, with no hope of improvement or change. Today’s haul was typical: the southern leg of the Keystone Pipeline is open for business as of today, thank to our President; the rare albino baby dolphin who was caught in Japan the other day in their latest mass haul has been shipped off to a life of captivity, and its mother has committed suicide; Chevron, who has dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste into the once-pristine river system of the Ecuadorean Amazon over the years, is suing an Ecuadorian man who claims the poisons caused the cancer that killed his father and wife; and so forth, on and on, day after day. It’s too much to believe, the scope of our environmental ruin. My own individual death feels totally insignificant to me now. What a strange species we are.

So we turn up the heat, put another log on the fire, and tuck into our plates of food. Everything feels hard-won, provisional, and fragile, and I love it all the more for that.

Sometimes my brain goes offline. It puts itself in Idle. This happens after periods of intense thought and writing and reading, but at other times, it happens for no apparent reason. I wake up stupider than usual, and I have a hard time making conversation, and I can’t write anything at all, and reading anything more challenging than a glossy magazine is an effort. So I sit in the bath with a glossy magazine and drool gently and stare into space and let my thoughts bump around like bears in the dark. That’s been my general state these past couple of weeks. Three or four weeks, actually. It’s been going on for so long, I’m starting to suspect it’s my natural state, and my occasional bursts of sustained writing and reading are the anomaly, artificially induced by deadlines.

The one thing I can still do when my brain is in sleep mode is cook. Thank God, because I still have to eat. Lately, I’ve even been having dreams about cooking. One night, I made linguine, over and over, all night long. I cracked an egg into a mound of fine-milled buckwheat flour, threw in some salt, mixed it into a dough, rolled it out, and cut it in long, fine strips and hung them on a rack. During the course of that night, I must have made enough fresh buckwheat linguine to feed the homeless population of Portland, Maine.

Anyway, a couple of nights after the linguine dream, I had a dream about a cucumber and tomato salad. It was very simple—summery, juicy, crunchy, and fresh. In my dream, I was so excited to eat it, I couldn’t stop banging on about how good it was and how much I’d been craving it.

When I woke up, it seemed obvious that I needed to make and eat this salad as soon as possible. Later that morning, after a fast hike through the slushy snow and ice on the Casco Bay trails at the Eastern Prom, we stopped at the small market on Munjoy Hill and bought a basketful of groceries. I love this little market. It’s tiny, but it’s full of everything we want and need, all of it beautiful, most of it locally grown.

We bought vegetables, herbs, tahini, chickpeas, lemons, feta, wild rice, and wine. Just before suppertime, I put a cup of wild rice on to cook in two cups of chicken broth. Then I made a batch of hummus in the little Cuisinart: first a quarter of a cup each of lemon juice and tahini, then when that was all smooth, a couple of cloves of garlic, a teaspoon of salt, two tablespoons of olive oil and a 15 ounce can of chickpeas, well rinsed, in two batches, with a dash of water. I dumped the creamy, rich hummus into a bowl, smoothed it out, then sprinkled cayenne and paprika and poured olive oil on top. It tasted better than any store-bought hummus I’d ever had. I’d never made it from scratch before, and now I couldn’t fathom why not.

Then I peeled, cored, and chopped two cucumbers along with two ripe tomatoes, diced a red onion, and minced a big bunch each of mint, cilantro, and parsley. I diced two red peppers, squeezed half a cup of fresh lemon juice, and then I was ready to throw together a tabbouleh and a salad.

I stuck the cooked rice in the freezer for a while to cool, then took it out and added half the chopped herbs, half the red onion, and a red pepper. I poured half the lemon juice into it, doused it with olive oil, added black pepper and cumin, mixed it well, tasted it, and lo, it was done.

The cucumbers and tomatoes, the second red pepper and other half of the red onion, and the rest of the herbs and lemon juice went into a separate bowl with more olive oil, cumin, and black pepper. I crumbled the entire block of feta over it, considered and decided against olives, mixed it well, and then that was done, too.

We heaped our plates high, piling the salad on top of a bed of baby arugula and the hummus on top of the tabbouleh. We sat at the counter, crunching away. The cucumber and tomato salad was as good as the one in my dream, or maybe even better, since I hadn’t thought to add feta in my dream. Sometimes real life is better.

We ate the leftovers for dinner the next night; the salad had marinated in the olive oil and lemon juice, and the wild rice tabbouleh had steeped in its own flavors, too, so everything was even more delicious the second time around.

My brain is still offline. But it’s a bit clearer; that influx of fresh raw vegetables seems to have given it a sort of boost, along with the “Israeli sandwiches” we’ve been eating for breakfast. I call them that because they remind me of the breakfast buffet at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where I had the luxury of staying when I was in Israel for my cousin-in-law’s wedding, many years ago. In the hotel dining room were tables filled with platters mounded with smoked fish and creamy cheese and sliced raw vegetables and bagels and rye breads and fruit salad and olives and hummus and babaganoush and tabbouleh. I’ve been to Israel three times, and Jerusalem is an amazing, awe-inspiring city, of course, but that breakfast was memorable.

Israeli Breakfast Sandwich

Spread soft mild goat cheese on two pieces of hot toast. Add plenty of smoked fish (I used bluefish), ripe tomato and peeled cucumber, and a small handful of arugula. Clap the pieces together and eat it right away.

2014 is going to be the Year of No: no blurbing books, no reading anything I don’t want to read, no writing anything I don’t want to write, no drinking and eating too much, no spending so much time on the computer, no spending money on anything but necessities, the most important of which are Dingo, our house, the car, groceries, and books. NO NO NO. It’s also going to be a year of writing a new novel, a novel I’m starting to feel excited about, something new and different.

On December 14^th, after two long, grueling days of driving back home from Iowa City, we crossed the Maine border well after dark (“Welcome to Maine: The Way Life Should Be”). We pulled into our garage that night at 8:00. Laden with stuff, we unlocked the door and walked into our house. I staggered around, my jaw agape: I couldn’t believe it. While we were in Iowa, I focused anxiously on all our house’s problems.  I had forgotten how beautiful it is.

When the car was unloaded, Dingo walked and tucked away in his bed, we went straight to our favorite corner bistro and ordered the meal we’d been dreaming of for 1,000 miles: cocktails and lobster tail salad, then green salads and steak frites with a bottle of robust red wine. It was heavenly to be back there, eating our favorite meal; all the waitstaff remembered us and said welcome back. Walking home through the icy, snowy night, we had a silly fight, because we were as tired and cranky as two-year-olds after a birthday party. We laughed at ourselves, collapsed in our big comfortable bed, and corked off to the best sleep we’d had in months.

And then, in the week that followed, while Brendan got right back to work without missing a beat, I crashed into mornings and afternoons of long baths and spaced-out daydreaming. However, in a deeper sense, I also felt recharged, inspired, reconnected to my literary roots by my time in Iowa. I missed my students, the profound camaraderie we shared all those months. But it was good to be back in this ocean town with its briny winter air, softer somehow than the Midwestern bone-dry Arctic chill.

We spent Christmas in New Hampshire with Brendan’s parents, brothers, and grandmother, cooking feasts and playing games and walking in the icy snow. There was a tall, festooned pine tree in the library. On Christmas day, Brendan and his father made an Italian bolito, beef roast simmered with carrots and potatoes, then the fragrant broth used for tortellini soup and the tender meat served sliced with the vegetables alongside and a salsa verde of minced capers, anchovies, parsley, garlic, hard-boiled eggs, vinegar, and olive oil.  We drank wine at the long table by candlelight as the sun went down and toasted one another – “To family.” This was Brendan’s and my fifth Christmas together and my third with his family. It was the best one we’ve ever had.

On the 28^th, this past Saturday night, we threw a small cocktail party. It started at 5:30, as most evenings do in this town, and was over well before 10.  About twenty of us drank two and a half bottles of whiskey, six bottles of wine, and three bottles of cava. We also ate a heap of food, a good-luck southern New Year’s spread: pulled pork (for health and forward motion), hoppin’ John (for luck), macaroni and cheese (for gold), and collard greens (for money) simmered with smoked ham hocks (for even more health and forward motion), plus doughnuts (for continuity, coming full circle) for dessert. We had decked the living rooms with pine wreaths and boughs (which we got for free because it was after Christmas, so the guy at the flower shop down the street was about to throw them all out), plus lots of lit candles and strings of old-fashioned colored Christmas lights, the 1970s bulb kind. The rooms were aglow and gorgeous, but of course everyone congregated around the food and booze in the undecorated, brightly lit kitchen and didn’t budge. And so it always goes… but it didn’t matter. It was so good to see our friends again.

We spent last night, New Year’s Eve, with more friends. My paperback editor and her husband, who are in town for the holidays, came over for a glass of wine and a couple of hours of bubbly, convivial conversation, and then we drove to South Portland to a dinner party with one of our favorite couples, Michael and Jeffrey, and some old, dear friends of theirs. First, there was smoked fish with flash-pickled carrots and beets along with Japanese roast pork wrapped in lettuce with hot pepper sauce. For dinner, they had made a Boston boiled dinner, corned beef with cabbage and potatoes, another variation of the good-luck traditional humble New Year’s meal – “Eat poor on New Year’s, and eat fat the rest of the year.” 

We all laughed and talked all night on gusts of warmth and happiness. Our hosts’ charming, gamine seven-year-old daughter, Phoebe, performed magic tricks with aplomb, then brought out her whoopee cushion and remote-controlled flying sphere, to endless hilarity. The two dogs and lovely little tabby cat were charming and gamine, as well. We got home by midnight, went to bed shortly after that, and awoke to a bright new year, ready to let go of the old one.

Hoppin’ John

Sauté in plenty of olive oil 1 chopped onion, 2 ribs celery, 1 green and 1 red pepper, and 8 cloves of chopped garlic. Add very generous dashes of cumin, paprika, salt, pepper, thyme, as well as 2-3 minced jalapeno peppers and a bay leaf. Add 1 package chopped turkey andouille (4 sausages) and sauté until everything is fragrant and soft. Add 2 cups of chicken broth, a can of diced tomatoes, several shots of Tabasco, 2-3 cans of lightly rinsed blackeyed peas, and ½ cup long-grained white rice. Simmer, covered and stirring every now and then, for 30-40 minutes. Add more broth if needed. Taste — adjust seasonings — cook until rice is soft.

My workshop met every Tuesday afternoon this fall from 4:30 until about 7. It always felt like the high point of the week to me, when all ten of us emerged from our lairs to sit together around the long table in my office, talking intently and passionately about writing.

My office was inhabited by other visiting writers before me. It’s filled with the sediment of their tenure at the Workshop: boxes of abandoned kitchen stuff, personal letters and photos in the desk drawers; someone’s books on the shelves; a stale pack of American Spirits. (I’ve left some things of my own there, to join the archives.)

As the semester went on, it got dark earlier and earlier, of course. Maybe to combat the encroaching darkness, a collection of small toys appeared in the middle of the table. People liked to fiddle with them. Jamie contorted the skeletons. Nana and Ashley wore the rubbery starburst rings. Jonathan had his own helicopter, until it broke. Others poked the plastic turkey and pumpkin.

The two writers who were “up” were responsible for bringing snacks. After class, we stored the rolled-up bags of chips and popcorn, the rest of the cookies and pretzels, on a shelf in the back of the room. Our snack collection grew as the weeks went on. Sometimes, during my office hours, a hungry student came in to raid it and, incidentally, to talk to me.

Despite the snacks and toys, the laughter and chatting for the first 20 minutes or so of every meeting, we all worked very, very hard together. It was an intense, lively collaboration, in which everyone was engaged, everyone had things to say. No matter whose work was under discussion, what we were really talking about was writing itself, the discipline we’ve all committed ourselves to for life. Some of us tended to be more visceral, others more cerebral, but we were all working toward the same end. Each workshop meeting ended, somehow, with a sense of resolution, clarity, and accord.

After workshop, we went out somewhere together, the Bluebird or Clinton Street, to sit at yet another long table, talking and drinking and eating, the ten of us a diverse and varied group that somehow always seemed to cohere into a whole. Avro is Indian, from Mumbai; Okezie is Nigerian-American, Nana is Cameroonian-American, Tom is Vietnamese-American, Jonathan is Iranian-British. Josh is from Arizona, Jamie is from Florida. Ashley is from No Cal, Casey is from So Cal.  I’ve lived all over the country. We’ve all moved around a lot, we’re all gypsies of one kind of another. And here we were, in Iowa City, a temporary tribe.

Like every tribe, we developed our own catch phrases, shorthand for a concept. Everyone got a nickname, gradually; Smash, Alpha, Uncle Queso, Saucy Eggplant, Spicy Mango, Sterno. Sometimes it felt like camp, in the best way.  And always, every week, we put our hearts and souls into our shared work.

At the first workshop meeting, I was informed, quietly but firmly, that the workshop would be having Thanksgiving together. The implication was that this would happen at my house. So in the weeks before Thanksgiving, I ordered a 24-pound turkey and researched corn bread-sausage stuffing recipes and dug up the cranberry relish recipe from my former mother-in-law. I developed a cocktail for the occasion with the input of my friend Rosie Schaap. And I sent out a list of all the sides we needed: mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, Brussels sprouts, kale salad, pies, appetizers.

On Thanksgiving Day, Brendan and I set up the rented tables and put the extra leaf in the dining room table. We draped tablecloths. I arranged the centerpieces: clementines, small gourds, pomegranates; tea lights on decorative fall leaves. The turkey, rubbed with fresh minced herbs and oil, stuffed with cut-up green apples, lemons, and onions, and sprigs of thyme, rosemary, and sage, went into the oven at 10:30. I assembled the stuffing so it would be ready to bake when the turkey came out: buttermilk corn bread baked the day before, cubed and left out overnight; two pounds of fresh, spicy chorizo; minced onions and celery; toasted walnuts; dried cranberries I’d made the day before.

People started arriving, twenty-one guests in all – my workshop plus their friends and mates, all of them dressed elegantly, laden with food and wine. I made a round of Cranberry Criminals: bourbon with cranberry-orange puree and ginger beer, garnished with a slice of orange.  We set out the cheese plate and Lauren’s rosemary-olive-fig tart. The kitchen counters were crowded with baking dishes and bowls. Jamie assembled her kale salad, which had taken her two hours to make. Casey brought the mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts, as planned, but he also brought a “surprise” – gorgeous handmade Jello shots with bourbon-soaked cherries inside, set into halved orange peels and sliced. Okezie and Jonathan had both baked bread. There were spicy quinoa and macaroni-and-cheese casseroles and Nana’s amazing sweet potatoes that melted in your mouth.

The turkey emerged at 4:00, golden and crackling and tender, its meat perfumed with herbs and aromatics. I whisked fine-milled buckwheat flour into the drippings, then thinned the gravy with the giblet broth that had simmered for hours on the back of the stove. Wine bottles and wineglasses migrated to the long tables; the tea candles were lit. It was just dusk.

We filled our plates at the buffet table and found seats. I stood up and said, “Welcome, everyone, bon appetit, I’m so glad you’re all here,” and then we ate and drank and ate and drank some more. The food was the best Thanksgiving food any of us had ever had. All those months of working together had infused us with the habit of collaboration. The meal was a sort of outward expression of our teamwork, the manifestation of what a tight crew we’d become.

We ate some more. A couple of people went out to smoke cigars. I walked Dingo. A few people rinsed plates and put away the leftovers.

And then we had dessert, along with the best White Russians in the history of the cocktail. James, one of my seminar students, had made Momofuku cornflake milk. He brought small-batch vodka with a handmade label, and added fresh-brewed coffee to the Kahlua. And Lauren’s gluten-free pumpkin pie was perfect.

It was suddenly late, but no one felt like going home. “Let’s play Werewolf,” several of us said. It’s a game of teamwork as well as psychological nerves. The wine kept flowing. Jamie, although she was coming down with a deathly cold, hung on staunchly as our stellar God, and we went down rabbit holes of accusation, murder, and retribution. After working together for the common good all semester, it was good black fun to kill, accuse, and recriminate.

Maybe because I was their teacher, their leader, my students were initially reluctant to accuse me, even after I’d all but confessed. But they got me, in the end.

Cranberry Criminals

(So-called because they’re based on Cranberry Culprits,  swapping out amaretto for orange. And orange is the color of convicts.)

In a blender, put a cup each of tart cranberry sauce and orange juice and blend until smooth. Into each rocks glass, over a few cubes of ice, pour 2 ounces Elijah Craig 12-year bourbon, as suggested by the amazing Rosie Schaap. Add a glug of the puree and top with strong-tasting, spicy ginger beer; I like Maine Root. Stir and garnish with an orange slice. Make more puree as needed.

All quantities are slapdash and approximate.

Uncle Queso’s Old-Fashioned Jello Shots

Brandy-Soaked Cherries:

Wash and pit a pound of cherries. In a saucepan, combine ½ cup sugar, ½ cup water, 2 tsp. lemon juice, and 1 cinnamon stick. Bring to a rolling boil, then reduce the heat to medium. Add the cherries and simmer for 5–7 minutes. Remove from heat, add 1 cup of brandy and let cool. Refrigerate overnight.

Bitters Syrup:

Combine 1 ½ cups water, 1 cup sugar, and 9 tablespoons Angostura bitters in a medium saucepan. Heat over medium-high heat until mixture boils, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature.

Jello Shots:

Combine 2/3 cup soda water, 2/3 cup bitters syrup, and 2 tablespoons of the cherry liquid in a small saucepan and sprinkle with 2 envelopes Knox gelatin. Allow the gelatin to soak for a minute or two. Heat over very low heat until gelatin is dissolved, stirring constantly, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and add 2/3 cup bourbon, stirring well to blend. Casey says: “Can’t stress enough to add the whisky off the heat… don’t risk cooking out your booze!” (Reserve the rest of the cherry liquid and bitters syrup for the next batch.)

Halve 6 clementines. Carefully remove the fruit to preserve the peels intact. Stabilize each peel half-shell in a muffin tin. Pour liquid gelatin mixture into each half. Spike with the cherries. Chill until set, then slice into sections, garnish with lemon zest, and serve to a crowd of suddenly happy writers.

About a month ago, one of my seminar students, Tim, a first-year fiction writer, said to me, “You should come with Deb and me to a Hawkeye game. Deb tailgates. You’d love it.”

Deb West has run the office at the Workshop for twenty-five years. Her first year there was also mine, as well as Frank Conroy’s first year as director; I was in his first-ever workshop. So Deb and I have a bond. We’re old-timers. We remember back when the Workshop was in EPB, the dark English-Philosophy Building, back when it was male-dominated and scary.

I said, “Which game? When?”

This past Friday afternoon, Gretchen arrived on the Megabus from Chicago. She had packed all her warmest clothes, because it was supposed to be the coldest home game on record. Gretchen, who came to the Workshop the same year I did, was the obvious person to invite to be my date for the tailgate: She had never been to a Hawkeye game, either, but for different reasons from mine.

I grew up in a family that was only uneasily American; my mother was born in Switzerland, her father in Germany, and after the Pusches emigrated to America during WWII, she grew up in Rudolf Steiner communities and Waldorf boarding schools, which are little puddles of European elitism. In Berkeley in the 1960s, my parents protested the Vietnam War and marched against the government. My mother and sisters and I were outsiders, weirdoes, misfits in the Baptist, Republican Sun Valley of 1970s Arizona. We did not watch sports. We listened to Bach and sang rounds and went camping and made our own dolls and wrote plays and stories and looked askew, askance, at American culture, even as we yearned to be part of it. (Only recently have I realized that, of course, we were quintessentially American.)

Gretchen, for her part, didn’t go to Hawkeye games when we were at the Workshop because, as a lifelong Oklahoma Sooners fan, she scorned Big 10 football. She grew up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the daughter of a petroleum engineer and a psychologist. She worshiped Jane Austen, wrote poetry, and was a math genius. Despite all this, she was always comfortable with her own Americanness, maybe because her family didn’t cast themselves as outliers. There was no cultural disconnect for her. When I first met her, I realized this about her and loved her for it, and I also, secretly, envied her.

“You do know the rules of football, right?” she asked me in the car on Saturday morning at 8:00, right before we picked up Tim.

As it happens, I do know the rules of football, because my ex-husband, who grew up in Pittsburgh, watched almost every Steeler game on TV during the fourteen years we were together, so thanks to him, I had absorbed the intricacies of downs, fumbles, and interceptions.

“Thank God,” said Gretchen. “Then I won’t have to explain it all during the game.”

We parked near Deb’s silver Caddy. She and her husband Mark and his brother were putting up the sides on the tent when we arrived. She greeted us with a big hug. It was the first time she’d seen Gretchen in twenty-five years.

I had been more excited about tailgating than going to the game, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was a propane heater going full blast by some folding armchairs. A huge pot of water had been set to boil on a burner, and they’d set up two tables and a grill. On the first table were plates, napkins, a pitcher of Bloody Marys, and a tray of strawberry confections, half of which were Jello shots. On the other table was an array of omelet fixings, a gallon jug of eggs beaten with milk, and a box of plastic bags. Evidently we were going to boil our omelets; I was dubious, but game.

“I learned it from fishermen,” said Mark.

“It’s Boy Scout omelets,” said Deb.

I added a pan of jalapeno-cheddar cornbread, a horseradish-heavy pitcher of Bloody Mary mix, and a jar of pickled asparagus to the first table. Gretchen plunked down a bottle of vodka.

It was eleven degrees Fahrenheit, and I had lost my hat the night before, so Gretchen and I went up to the Hawkeye-paraphernalia stand and picked me out an orange and black thermal cap with dangly ear flaps and a pom-pon on top. I put it on. Instantly, I was warmer. Also instantly, I was a Hawkeye fan. I could feel it. The whole time I’ve lived in Iowa City, I’ve been mystified by the amount of bumblebee-colored gear everyone wears. For the first time, I could understand the appeal, that warm sense of belonging to a tribe.

Back at the tent, we all poured ourselves breakfast cocktails and toasted, “Go Hawkeyes!”

Deb and Mark have been Hawkeye fans for many years; Tim, a transplanted New Yorker, is a recent convert; Gretchen had finally managed to add love for the Hawkeyes to her love for the Sooners; and I felt as if I were popping my football-fandom cherry then and there.

Just then, out of the blue, I remembered that my father used to be a Hawkeye fan. In the summer of 1988, when I was twenty-six, between my first and second years at the Writers’ Workshop, I spent the summer in the Bay Area. On a sort of whim, I called my father, whom I’d seen only sporadically since I was eight. One night, he took me to dinner; this was the last time I would ever see him, but I didn’t know it then. When he heard I was living in Iowa City, my cool customer of a father got eager and excited, like a kid.

“The Hawkeyes,” he said. “Great team. When I was at the University of Minnesota in the 1940s, my friends and I used to drive down to Iowa City for home games. We’d drive all the way back again that same night. Do you go to games?”

“No,” I said, startled.

And now, here I was, tailgating with my old Workshop pals, and just like that, everything came together, the past meeting the present and resolving itself. I belonged here as much as anyone, as much as I belonged anywhere. It was no big deal.

We assembled our omelets in plastic bags and boiled them. They came out fluffy and moist and better than just about any pan omelet I’ve had. We ate them with the cornbread, warmed on the grill in its baking pan, and Mark’s brother’s classic-seeming Midwestern casserole, “cheesy potatoes,” frozen hash browns mixed with a can of onion soup and a can of cheese soup and topped with grated cheese and baked. And we had chocolate-dipped strawberry Jello shots for dessert and Bloody Marys to keep us warm, and Deb’s homemade salsa with corn chips to snack on.

By kickoff at 11:00, it had warmed up to eighteen degrees. Gretchen and I put handwarmers in our toes. We made our way into the stadium with everyone else and stood in the stands with 70,000 fellow Hawkeye fans, jumping up and down, chanting, dancing, and yelling “Whoooo!”

Cheering, it turns out, keeps you warm. And it also works: the Hawkeyes fought their way from behind to win the game, 24-21, against their hated rival, the Michigan Wolverines.

Fisherman’s Omelet (or Boy Scout Omelet, depending who you ask)

Beat a dozen eggs with half a cup of milk and pour into a gallon jug. Assemble a cup or so each of various fillings, chopped or grated: bacon, sausage, onion, mushrooms, tomatoes, gruyere, Velveeta, and olives.

Put your choices of fillings into a tough plastic zip-lock Baggie, then pour enough egg mixture in so it fills about an inch and a half of the bag. Roll it up to get all the air out, then seal it well and write your name on it with a Sharpie. Boil it for 20 minutes, then open it and eat on a plate with salsa, cornbread, and cheesy potatoes.