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Today was my day off. It was also cold and stormy and dark. I woke up late and drank a big cup of coffee and tried and failed to catch up with my emails, my to-do list, and my business stuff.

In the early afternoon, chilled and sleepy, I gave up and spent a few happy hours in a hot bath full of scented bath salts. I read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, which several of my workshop students have commanded me to read; I discovered, to my delight, that it’s dedicated to Brendan’s grandfather, who was his close friend. Time went by and the sky went from dark to black; hard rain fell against the windows. I was too absorbed in the book to think about anything else. When Brendan got home and fed and walked Dingo, I got out of the bath, opened some wine, and, in my bathrobe and pajamas, threw together a quick, easy vegetable coconut curry with brown basmati rice.

This was a much-needed, very quiet day. Last Friday, we took the Megabus to Chicago to visit our friend Gretchen. We arrived near Union Station at 2:30. Gretchen whisked us to the French Market for lobster and coleslaw, then took us on the El through the Loop and back to her top-floor apartment, whose building abuts the Graceland Cemetery.  Sitting around a table in her cozy treehouse of a windowed porch, we ate four different kinds of cheese and drank autumnal Templeton rye-pumpkin hard cider cocktails we invented and dubbed Leaf Rakers, to the tune of “Goldfinger,” with the intent of “Moonraker.”

Later, with Gretchen’s friends Betsy and Rob, we walked through the cold, windy night to Mixteca, where I ordered the cochinita pibil and ate every bite of it. At Carol’s, the neighborhood bar, we drank nightcaps and danced off our dinner to the live country house band whose “girl” singer, Reba, is 60 if she’s a day and glamorously sultry, showing off her amazing legs in a short skirt and cowgirl boots. I requested “Crazy,” and she crooned it while I burped gently against Brendan’s shoulder like an overfed baby and closed my eyes and let him shuffle me around the dance floor.

The next day, Gretchen took us to Angel Food Bakery for hangover brunch, which gave us the wherewithal to explore the architectural salvage museum, or rather emporium, for a couple of wide-eyed hours–we saw, among 4,000 other wonders, an old autopsy table, prison desks, a papier-mache but convincing human skeleton, a confession booth, an old, rickety Argentinean wooden farm bed whose slats were hairy cowhide and which was obviously haunted by childbirths and consummations and deaths galore, plus a vintage plastic hamburger from an old McDonald’s, eerily lifelike. Then, on a hot tip from the owner’s sister, who just bought a house there, we took a fast drive for several miles down Lakeshore Drive to Jackson Park, home of Jesse Jackson, just to check it out. We gawped at the beautiful houses for a while, driving slowly up and down the quiet streets. Then we took a long, windy walk around the lake and harbor at Montrose Beach, winding up at the Magic Hedge, a former gay pickup hotspot and now a bird sanctuary. Walking back to the car, we passed a dinghy in the harbor called the Flounder Pounder, which sent us all into paroxysms of smutty punning.

After aperitifs at Gretchen’s friend Jeff’s artist pad in the former fruit market, we went to the Honky Tonk for Memphis-style dry-rub racks of ribs (it was a weekend of pork) with black-eyed peas, greens, coleslaw, and sweet potatoes. We drank whisky-lemonade cocktails called Lonely Presbyterians and listened to a terrific, louche band of four young men in zombie face paint (it was Halloween weekend, after all). When the burlesque began, we cut our losses and moved along to the amazing and beautiful Green Mill Jazz Club for a nightcap. We sat in one of the plush little semicircular booths under a mural in the dim light of the torch lamps overhead and listened to a Midwestern jazz band that included two dueling male sax players and an elderly, zaftig, strident female singer in a bright yellow fright wig. As she warbled “My Funny Valentine,” Gretchen showed me the booth where Al Capone used to sit; he could see the front entrance and the back exit at the same time, so from whatever direction trouble came, he could scurry out the other way. No doubt, there was also a secret passage behind the bar.

The next day, we went to church with Gretchen. The 4th Presbyterian Church’s Reformation Sunday service was stellar: the scriptural reading featured apocalypse and damnation; the sermon was about fighting a hard battle; there was a bagpipe player in a kilt who played “Scotland the Brave;” plus we sang “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” with the church’s chorus, who were up in the loft, including a divaesque, statuesque, flamingly redheaded soprano whose voice was blisteringly radiant.

After that, starving and righteous, we repaired to Mojo Spa for mani-pedis and a decadent brunch of egg-and-bacon on a roll (mine was gluten-free and baked in-house) and cranberry vodka cocktails. Then, laden with the vintage black Italian widow dress Gretchen gave me, a beautiful painting Jeff made of Montrose Beach and gave us, and our new spa products, plus a bag of leftover ribs and sides that we ate on the way home, we burbled back to Iowa City on the Megabus, and a new working week began.

Easy Coconut-Vegetable Curry

Put a cup of brown basmati rice and 2 cups of chicken broth into a pot, bring to a boil, cover, and turn down to simmer.

Mince 4 garlic cloves and a tablespoon of ginger and one large yellow onion and add to a heated tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet. Turn to low and let it all soften, stirring often, for about 5 minutes. Add a can of coconut milk, 1-2 tablespoons of curry powder, 1 tablespoon honey, 1 tablespoon tamari, and ½-1 teaspoon salt (to taste). While the sauce simmers, cut up 2 carrots, one large stalk of broccoli, a small yellow pepper, and a handful of button mushrooms, or any other vegetables of your choice, about 3 cups in all. Add these to the pot, stir well, cover, and simmer. If you need more liquid, add a little chicken broth. Stir frequently and adjust seasonings when the vegetables soften. Toward the end of cooking, add a big handful each of minced cilantro and basil.  Stir well and serve over rice with Major Grey’s chutney.

It’s getting cold in Iowa. The other day, wet snowflakes fell. Yesterday, we walked around Lake MacBride in a lowering, gloomy, chilly dusk. The lily pads have all withered to dark thin stalks with pods at the top; they looked like a spooky, abandoned miniature sci-fi city floating on the surface. Geese flapped over the becalmed lake. Smaller birds flew up from the weeds at the water’s edge in an eerie rush of beating wings. The grasses and leaves blazed bright white-gold, orange, and russet. Dingo frisked along, flushing a deer, chasing squirrels, grinning up at us as he barreled by. He loves cold weather. It makes him a puppy again. We hunched in our coats with our hands in our pockets to keep them warm until we’d walked far and fast enough to get our blood going.

After our walk, we fed Dingo his dinner—kibble, a squirt of fish oil, his chondroitin/glucosamine/MSM tablet, and some cut-up apple in lieu of the canned stuff he usually gets—on the ground by the car, followed by a bowl of water. He fell on his piquenique sur l’herbe grunting—with joy, we presumed. Then we drove to Mount Vernon for our Wednesday night dinner at the Lincoln Café. We were both starving; we’d been working all day and had both forgotten to eat lunch. We ordered the prawn appetizer; five big shrimp came with their heads on, eyes broiled red, tiny arms and all, drenched in miso butter with pickled daikon radish and cayenne-puffed rice. We grunted like Dingo as we ate them. Five minutes later the plate was practically licked clean.

Then came the trout salads: fresh green lettuce with carrot and cucumber slices, capers, chunks of smoked trout, and a trout paté. This is our current favorite thing, anywhere. After we demolished those, we got huge plates of chicken breasts wrapped in bacon over “heirloom buckwheat” polenta with chanterelles and cheddar and horseradish-apple salad. Given that combination of ingredients, plus the fact that the people cooking back there really know what they’re doing, of course it was fantastic, but I could barely eat mine; the trout salad is filling. So we had it boxed up and brought it home.

This morning, I cut up the chicken and bacon while a pot of corn polenta simmered, then added the cubed meat to the pot with the leftover buckwheat polenta and chanterelles, then dished it up in bowls. We needed a warming breakfast. The polenta was as creamy as hot cereal, which it arguably is. And what doesn’t go with chicken and bacon?

Warm silkiness not something I generally think much about, but lately it’s the quality in food I’ve been craving most, without realizing it until just now. I’m in the mood for food with the texture of Al Green’s voice. The other day, I made a rich, light avgolemono, an easy fast Greek egg-chicken lemon-rice soup. A couple of days before that, we made a tagliatelle alla carbonara (Brendan found a really good gluten-free pasta, imported from Italy, made of brown rice, salt, and egg) with twice the eggs and cheese and bacon the recipe called for. We used uncured English bacon, which was lean, chewy, and full of porky flavor.

I’m also hankering after zabaglione, the Italian egg custard made with vin santo or Marsala and very little sugar.

All of these dishes are made with barely-cooked beaten eggs, which provide the sexiest texture I know of. Raw beaten eggs are tossed with piping-hot pasta and sautéed chopped bacon for carbonara. For avgolemono, Arborio rice and chicken are simmered in chicken stock, then some of the hot broth is drizzled into beaten eggs and lemon juice while whisking, then that mixture is, in turn, folded back into the pot after the heat’s been turned off. For zabaglione, beaten eggs, sugar, and dessert wine are stirred over a double boiler until they thicken, then served immediately. In each case, the eggs turn delicate, satiny, decadent, sheeny, the texture of nursery pap—Cream of Wheat, pillowy tapioca pudding. All three of these savory egg dishes are a yolky, buttery yellow-gold.

Sometimes on winter mornings Brendan makes “coddled” eggs; but his version doesn’t involve whole eggs in a bain-marie. He beats four very fresh eggs with a little salt and sugar and a dollop of half and half. After melting plenty of butter in a simmering double boiler, he gently coaxes the eggs along in the warm butter until they form big, creamy, barely coalescent curds. We eat them with buttered toast, like little kids, wriggling our toes.

Double-Your-Pleasure Carbonara

The carbonari are the charcoal burners in Italy who, according to some, were the original inventors of this dish, which could be tossed together on a cold night in the hills as they tended their charcoal fires. (In the States, it’s sometimes called “coal miner’s spaghetti.”)

In Italy, it’s usually made with Guanciale, unsmoked cheek bacon, the closest American approximation of which is “jowl bacon,” a staple of soul food. Some day when I find both, I want to make cheek-by-jowl carbonara, but for now, plain old bacon works fine.

Cook a pound of long, thin pasta; spaghetti is best, but linguine or tagliatelle are good, too.

While the pasta is cooking, chop 8 ounces of slab bacon or pancetta and slice 4 garlic cloves and sauté it all in 4 tablespoons of olive oil until crisp.

In a large mixing bowl, beat 4 eggs and add a cup (or two) of grated parmigiano-reggiano and plenty of black pepper.

When the pasta is done, drain it well (this recipe requires no reserved cooking liquid) and toss it in the pan with the bacon and garlic until it’s soaked up the fat and flavors, then add the whole shebang to the egg-cheese mixture and toss it fast and lightly until the strands of pasta are coated with barely-cooked, silky egg and melted cheese. Serve immediately with more grated cheese and chopped flat-leaf parsley.

Whenever we drive out to Lake MacBride, we remark on the quantity of dead, car-struck animals at the side of the road. Most of them are raccoons. In certain macabre moods, I wonder whether there’s a suicide pact among a faction of the coon population of Iowa. These are intelligent creatures, after all.

High above the dead animals are buzzards and carrion crows, slowly circling on updrafts, waiting for a cessation of traffic to swoop in for a feed.  They, at least, seem to understand the danger of cars.

Wild animals coexist with humans in an increasingly uneasy imbalance. The animals generally lose the ongoing struggle for territory, resources, and survival. For every deer who wanders into a house and makes itself at home, coyote who poaches domesticated chickens, or bear who snuggles up in a car, snacking on leftover McDonald’s, there are exponentially more tales of woe: thousands of geese killed to protect airplanes, mysterious massive die-offs of honeybees and now moose, the total disappearance of sardines from Pacific waters.

And road kill is everywhere. In New Hampshire, it’s usually deer, 1500 a year or so. It’s legal there to eat the deer you hit with your car. In fact, over a dozen states have passed pro-roadkill laws, including Georgia, where bear is often on the menu. You just have to call the authorities after you hit the thing and have them okay it, and then you’re free to take home your bumper game, or flat meat, as it’s called.

Road kill has become so popular in certain parts of rural New Hampshire that there is growing suspicion that these deer are not killed by accident, but are “car hunted,” in typical DIY Yankee derring-do fashion, due to new restrictions on traditional hunting. “Live free or die,” indeed.

PETA approves of eating road kill; it’s healthier than factory-raised meat. “It is also more humane,” their website reads, “in that animals killed on the road were not castrated, dehorned, or debeaked without anesthesia, did not suffer the trauma and misery of transportation in a crowded truck in all weather extremes, and did not hear the screams and smell the fear of the animals ahead of them on the slaughter line.” In other words, the free-range, hormone-free, cage-free animal never knew what hit it.

A very helpful and informative Wiki website called “How to Eat Road Kill” advises that the following are edible: “Badger, hedgehog, otter, rabbit, pheasant, fox, beaver, squirrel, deer (venison), moose, bear, raccoon, opossum, kangaroo, wallaby, possum, rabbit, etc. Reptiles can also be eaten, but they might be fairly squashed. Rats may carry Weil’s disease and are therefore best avoided.”

Down at the bottom, there is this comforting reassurance: “Rabies virus dies fast once the host is dead. Cooking destroys the virus.”

Okay then!

Anyway, so as we were driving along the highway the other day, staring out at the motionless furry critters by the side of the road, one after another after another, we started talking about the idea of eating road kill, not for the first time, and not in any actual or intentional way, just in that speculative musing mood that often besets motorists staring idly out at cornfields and sky, daydreaming aloud. In other words, we have no plans ever to eat road kill, but it’s an interesting thing to contemplate.

That night, my independent-study student, Vanessa, came over for dinner and a “work sesh,” bearing a gift: Iowa’s Road Kill Cookbook by Bruce Carlson, published in 1989 by Quixote Press. It’s a small grey paperback with a silhouette of a squashed rabbit in a tire track on the cover.

“How did you know?” I sputtered excitedly. (As a side note, a phrase like “sputtered excitedly” evidently breaks one of the MFA-program rules for dialogue writing, which only makes me want to use it all the goddamned time from now on.) “We’ve been obsessed with eating road kill lately!”

“Dude, I just found it at Haunted Books. I must be psychic.”

We sat out on the porch and discussed her project and ate wild Alaskan salmon filets with a simple but delicious chipotle sauce I invented a couple of years ago and never get tired of (into the blender go a small can of chipotles in adobo sauce, a big dollop of mayonnaise, the juice of one lemon, and three garlic cloves; whizz into a smooth creamy sauce, pour over the fish, and bake). Alongside, as usual, I served wild rice and garlicky baby spinach. The salmon was, presumably, not killed on any road, anywhere.

Folded and tucked into the book was a menu, mimeographed on cheap paper, from Nebraska’s Roadkill Cafe: “You Kill It… We Grill It!” Inside, Chef “Wheels” Pierre offers such delicacies as Chunk of Skunk, Smidgen of Pigeon, Awesome Possum, and Rigor Mortis Tortoise. For the more adventurous, there’s Pit Bull Pot Pie, Poodles ‘N Noodles, and Shar-Pei Filet. The Shake ‘N Bake Snake looks especially tempting. However, I might be inclined to skip the Daily Special, “Guess That Mess:” “If you can guess what it is… you eat it for FREE.”

The book itself is dedicated to Iowa Ventre Montanters, a French term for those who salvage animals who are “Belly-up.” Ventre Montant cuisine, according to the author, is eco-conscious, sensible, and budget-friendly.  However, the tone of the book is irreverent and cheeky and not for the squeamish, and the recipes are improbably disgusting. Still, it has added a level of connoisseurship to our daily drives to and from the lake. Very freshly killed raccoons have begun to strike me as acceptable candidates for certain of the more playful dishes.

Crunchy Coon Gizzards

COMBINE:

2 C. coon innerds

1 C. rye flour

2 duck eggs (if unavailable, use chicken eggs)

2 C. Rice Krispies

Spread in greased 9 x 13-inch pan. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes

FROSTING:

1 C. chopped coon gizzards

5 large Hershey bars

Mix in blender till smooth. Spread on baked innards and season to taste. Serves 4.

For me, autumn is always a season of smoky nostalgia and lucid reckoning as well as new beginnings and optimism. This time around, I’m constantly verklempt, amazed at the richness, primarily the intense energy and brilliance and flat-out loveliness of my students, but also the way the past is resolving itself while I’m here in Iowa City.

Last week, Connie Brothers, who has been the heart and soul and prime mover of the Writers’ Workshop for as long as anyone can remember (yet still looks exactly the same), appeared in my office doorway. “Who in your family cooks?” she asked. “We both do,” I said. She handed me a big butternut squash from her garden with the warning that she couldn’t vouch for it; “It might be a little wan.”

I took it home and cut it open. It was not wan: it was a deep gold-orange. I peeled it and cut it up and roasted it in the oven with a lot of garlic, a cut-up onion, and three stalks of rosemary for perfume, then ran it through the blender with chicken broth and a bit of buttermilk, salt and pepper and cumin, until it became a rich, smooth, incredibly flavorful soup. While we ate big bowls of it, I reminisced about how Connie used to sit with some of us in the student lounge before workshop, the scariest, most nerve-jangling time of every week, and how comforting her presence always was for me.

Back then, as an aspiring MFA student in my mid-twenties, a quarter of a century ago, I lived 2 blocks from where we’re living now. I remember myself as intimidated, lovelorn, uncertain of my literary aims, and painfully shy. My friend Gretchen, an exuberant, intrepid, generous poet, whisked me off to country auctions, late-night truck-stop breakfasts, and a George Strait concert in Cedar Rapids.

Gretchen came to visit two weekends ago. Some of my Workshop students invited us to go bowling with them and their friends on Friday night. They were a stellar bunch of interesting people. Thanks to Gretchen, there were Jello shots (only half ironic) all around, and the jukebox played “Shoop” more than once, and everything felt sparkly and festive. “You’re great, too,” one of them said kindly to me, “but she’s amazing.” The next night, we played pool at the Fox Head, the old fiction writers’ bar. Afterwards, we came home and stayed up late, talking, on the porch. On Sunday before she left, we had a John’s deli picnic of salami, cheese, potato chips, grapes, sardines, and iced tea in the little park near our house. Having her here brought me back in a significant way to that real past, the one I actually experienced. When she drove off toward Chicago, I got a little misty-eyed. It’s a lucky thing to have a close, lifelong friend.

Last Sunday, a brand-new friend came to town, the musician Mary Chapin Carpenter, who is touring the Midwest right now with her friend Shawn Colvin. I was about to buy tickets when she emailed me and invited Brendan and me to the show as her guests; she asked us to come backstage to say hello beforehand. I had never met her before, but we’d written back and forth a bit. She read and praised my new book, which thrilled me no end; I am a lifelong fan of hers.

The instant I met her, I fell I love with her, the way you do with your real friends. She’s exactly the same person offstage as on: funny, thoughtful, filled with integrity, boundlessly generous of spirit. We hugged, and complimented each other’s work, and smiled at each other. She told us about the glamorous life on the tour bus (sleeping, eating, playing games on Iphones). I told her my sisters couldn’t believe she’d actually read my book. And then it was time to say goodbye, but next time she comes to Maine, I plan to cook her dinner.

Then we went out and sat in the audience and for the next two hours, we were enthralled and moved.  Mary Chapin’s voice sounds more strikingly beautiful now than ever before, rich with experience and striated with twined ropes of feeling and unbreakably strong. Between songs, she talked about her new album, “Ashes and Roses,” and what inspired it: the death of her father, the end of her marriage, and a pulmonary embolism that almost killed her. These songs are deeply sad, gritty, full of pain, but they’re also beautiful and hopeful. Watching her onstage with Shawn Colvin (whose lifelong fan I also am), I fell in love with her all over again.

She talked about “song walking” with her dogs on her land in the Blue Ridge Mountains, taking long, meditative walks to work on whatever she’s writing. Then, in the magic hour between dusk and darkness, she sits on her porch with all her cats and dogs, her “people.” When she sang a song inspired by these walks and the dusk-to-dark hour on the porch, Brendan and I both were moved to tears. We both knew exactly what she meant.

A few days later, my independent-study student, Vanessa, came over for our weekly meeting. She’s in the poetry workshop, but she’s doing a side project with me that we’re both excited about. Because I love to feed starving writers, or anyone for that matter, I made lunch for her: a mushroom-leek-carrot frittata with gruyere, chicken Andouille, and buckwheat-buttermilk apricot muffins. She brought me a book: “The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Cookbook,” published in 1986, the year before I got here. I opened it to the following recipe, which reads like a short, short story, an autumnal mediation on past, future, and resolution:

Soup

Grace Paley

Cook

¾ cup split peas

½ cup lentils

¼ cup barley

in a pot of water and add a couple onions and a couple stalks of celery with all the greens—cut into a couple pieces so you can eat it later. (When I was growing up we used to throw out the celery.)

Let it go for an hour till the peas and lentils are soft and mushy. Add 3 or 4 carrots and cook till done. Sometimes I add a whole can of tomatoes or fresh tomatoes.

When you serve it, add ½ cup peas or zucchini. It’s important never to let the carrots get too soft. Never.

Yesterday afternoon, after I taught my seminar, I came home and changed my shoes, and then Brendan, Dingo, and I drove out into the countryside past rolling hills and wooded farms to Lake MacBride. A well-tended gravel trail runs alongside the big, peaceful, many-fingered lake for miles, past an old farm, some big houses on the bluffs, through woods, past marinas whose docks are full of pontoon boats. While we walked, we saw several deer, a heron, flocks of geese, a pair of woodchucks, many red squirrels, a toad, butterflies, fish jumping (the man-made lake is stocked annually for fishermen), lilypads, wildflowers, and algae, and almost no other people or dogs. The air smelled cool and clean. The sun was slanting down, lighting the surface of the water, casting deep shadows. At the halfway point, we all lazed in the grass for a while, looking up through treetops at the blue sky.

Wednesday marks the end of my teaching week, which always gives me a Friday-night sense of jubilation and accomplishment.  And so it is that our routine these days is to have Wednesday night dinner at the locally famed Lincoln Café in Mount Vernon, half an hour’s drive north of Iowa City, about fifteen minutes from the lake.

After our walk, we drove to Mount Vernon and parked on the pretty, sleepy little main drag, gave Dingo his dinner and a bowl of water, then left him to snooze and went into the restaurant. Sitting in a booth, we drank pinot noir and ate salads of fresh lettuce with capers, smoked trout, and smoked-trout mousse. Then came the entrées: I had a roasted filet of Wild King salmon with black pepper beets, rich, salty salmon roe-egg salad, and horseradish creamed kale. Brendan ordered the Amish chicken, a roasted, juicy breast and leg that came on a schmear of spicy chili chevre with sautéed maitake mushrooms, a slab of braised bacon that melted in the mouth, and zucchini slaw.

We toasted the end of the workweek, even thought Brendan’s wasn’t over, and neither, technically, was mine. We toasted the fact that we’ve been here almost six weeks, and the time is whizzing by. We toasted my brilliant students, who are renewing my formerly flagging excitement about fiction. We toasted Brendan’s almost-finished screenplay. We thought we had run out of things to toast, but then we remembered the fact that our friend Gretchen is coming on Friday evening to visit us for the weekend.

Our plates were empty, the bottle of wine had been mysteriously drained, and we were tired and happy. We drove home and went to sleep.

I woke up this morning with the bleak knowledge that the cold had won our battle. It had finally got me, this cold that’s been dogging me all week, the one Brendan just got over after ten miserable days, and the one he likely gave to me, if we’re going to get all finger-pointy about it, which of course we’re not.

I had meetings today with students. During the first one, at 11:00 this morning, I managed to complete my sentences, for the most part, or so I hoped. During the second, I found myself struggling to hold on to a thought, let alone articulate it. Just before my last meeting at 2:00, I realized that I was wallowing in a miasma of stupidity, a bubbling sinkhole into which I could feel my I.Q. descending. My sinuses were pressing against my brain. My ability to speak was compromised by a dry throat, a rattling cough, and a severe diminishment of vocabulary.

There was a dinner for a visiting novelist at 5:00, before his reading, to which I had agreed to go, along with a few other faculty members and students. I sat at my desk looking out at the golden, dry, bright fall day, and I weighed the prospect of a free meal in a good restaurant with interesting people, having thoughtful conversations, drinking a glass of cold white wine, against the idea of going home and putting on my pajamas. I was so hungry my stomach was growling.  I was wearing a skirt and boots. It would have been so easy to go to the dinner instead of backing out, which I always hate doing, even when I’m sick.

I emailed Brendan, torn.

“I’m on deadline,” he wrote back within 45 seconds. “I can’t go anywhere till I hand in this script. So I’m out.”

Dingo lay sacked out at my feet, setting a stellar example of mindless, unapologetic, necessary sloth.

Caving in to familial pressure, I sent an email begging out of the dinner.

After my meeting with my last student, which lasted an entertaining hour and a half, I plodded home through wide, quiet streets with Dingo. I came in the door and shucked everything. By 4:00, I was in my pajamas, collapsed on the couch with my laptop and book. By 5:00, Brendan had made pasta with pea sauce and a simple salad.  We ate out on the porch. As I write this, at 5:30, my plate is empty, my stomach is full, and in this state of sated repletion, my drooling stupidity no longer matters at all.

Pasta with pea sauce is the chicken soup of pasta. It has curative powers. It’s nothing but a sofrito—onions, carrots, and celery, minced small—sautéed in olive oil. Then you add a bag of frozen peas and vegetable broth, then most of a box of Pomi chopped tomatoes with a dab of tomato paste and lots of crushed red pepper. As it bubbles on the stove, the alchemy of ingredients fills the house with a sweet-savory fragrance that’s restorative and nourishing in itself. When it’s cooked down, the sauce is tossed with hot fettuccine and served with grated cheese, and that’s it, but the flavor is rich and complex.  And you can shove it in your mouth as fast as you want; it hardly needs chewing. It’s divine comfort food.

As we drove straight up north through Iowa last weekend in the shimmering heat, we started to feel depressed by the miles and miles and miles of cornfields, stalks packed tightly together, leaves looking a little brown around the edges. We talked about ethanol and the cattle industry and Monsanto and drought and the hard, unhappy life of the modern farmer. The air in the car was tinged blue with air conditioning and sadness.

Then we crossed the border into Minnesota, and immediately, the landscape changed. We were in bluff country, otherwise known as the Driftless Area, so called because the glaciers that shaped the Great Plains somehow missed this corner of the world and left a corrugated topography of tall, green, beautiful bluffs.

We twisted down and around on a curved highway into Lanesboro, population 734. We drove down the main street of old buildings past the Sons of Norway Hall and an Amish store and an old diner to our hotel, the Marquee Suites, so called because it’s above the old theater. Our suite of rooms (including a full kitchen) was big and dim and cool and shabby and comfortable. We plunked Dingo’s sheepskin on the couch and unloaded our backpacks and shucked off the desolation of the road.

My half-sister, Thea, and her husband, Pop, had just arrived in town ten minutes before, from St. Paul, where they live. They headed over to our room and we all sat around and had some wine, and then we piled into Pop’s van and drove out of town to a place called Dreamacres Farm for dinner.

Within minutes of our arrival, Dingo got a hole bitten in the scruff of his neck by the resident feisty redheaded girl dog who didn’t think he should sniff her, or be on her property at all. We washed the bite off and slathered bacitracin on it, and then we all settled down at a long table outside by the pizza oven with friends of Pop and Thea’s. As the sun went down and the air cooled a bit, we talked and ate pizza and drank wine while Pop and his old friend Bob played and sang old-time music on fiddle and guitar. (We joked that their band should be called the Palindrome Boys.) After dinner, we four, with poor Dingo, drove back to Lanesboro for a nightcap at a great old bar, outside on the porch.

The next morning, after Dingo’s walk and breakfast, we left him snoozing and met Pop and Thea for breakfast at the Spud Boy, a tiny, beautiful, meticulously renovated old diner on wheels tucked into a small vacant lot under an enormous spreading pine tree. Its owners, a tall, glamorous pair named Val and Gordie, rescued and renovated the place. It has a mahogany ceiling, vintage booths and stools, an old fridge, grill, stove, and sink. It’s like the shipshape galley of a small boat: everything has its place, and there’s not one square inch to spare. Val, serene and unflappable in a 1940s waitress dress and apron, washes dishes, takes orders, buses tables, and serves coffee and plates of hot food. Gordie, stooped slightly at the grill under the low ceiling, cracks eggs with one hand, grates potatoes with a box grater straight onto the grill, and flips strips of thick bacon.

That was one of the best breakfasts I’d ever eaten: over-easy eggs, crisp hash browns, and chewy, lean bacon. I felt great afterwards, ready to plow a field or milk a barnful of cows, but instead, Thea and I walked Dingo along the shady, paved Root River Bike Trail that runs 60 miles in all through the valley. We made it a mile or so and then had to turn back; the three of us were drooping from the heat. On the way back, Thea told me that the bluffs of southeastern Minnesota are in danger of being sand mined for fracking, dismantled and carted away. The blue sadness descended again. Oh, America, I thought.

But then I cheered up. We had been invited to dinner at the house where Pop and Thea were staying, with their friends Frank and Peggy, up the hill from Main Street, above Sylvan Park, an enormous, gabled Victorian house full of wonders and curiosities, hand-painted moldings downstairs, a Norwegian sleigh bed upstairs, old records and collections of dishes and aprons. Frank and Peggy, a charming, lively pair of talkers and doers, served food they’d grown themselves: Mollie Katzen’s gazpacho recipe to start, then polenta from their homegrown corn with leeks from their garden and black walnuts from their tree. Dessert was a rhubarb crumble; Lanesboro is famous for its rhubarb. Frank got out their grain mill to show how he makes breakfast cereal from the rye they grow. Peggy and I talked food writing (she reads and writes about food as passionately as I do).

When it was time to go to the barn dance, just as we were leaving, Peggy’s father, Ray, who has lost his memory but not a shred of his wits, recited from his armchair, “There was a little girl who had a little curl… and when she was bad, she was a naughty little bitch.” We all went out into the hot night laughing.

Pop was the caller for the  dance; his friend Bob played guitar and another friend played fiddle. The old Sons of Norway Hall, its air conditioners blasting for all they were worth, was full of people, old and young. Brendan and I landed in a square with some kids in their twenties. The tall, shy boys turned out to be bluegrass musicians and the pair of raving beauties they danced with were evidently their groupies. These kids knew all the dances. Pop called out, “Lady round the lady, the gent foll-low, lady round the gent but the gent don’t go.” We turned to our corner and allemanded left to a right left grand. We promenaded and do-si-do’ed and swung our partners, out of breath. Through my laughter, I had a lump in my throat. Oh, America.

Later that night, we walked Dingo along Main Street and sat on a stoop in front of an abandoned storefront across the street from the old bar. Country music wafted out. Drunk, laughing people walked by and admired Dingo. I leaned against Brendan and smiled at all of them.

The next morning, we drove up to Frank and Peggy’s for coffee before our second Spud Boy breakfast. Frank showed us the cardoons he’s growing, demonstrated how to cut and pare them, passed around pieces of the raw, artichoke-like, fibrous vegetable for us all to try. Peggy loaded us up with five boxes of old issues of Gourmet magazine going back to 1980, a sack of green eggplants and another of serrano peppers, plus a yogurt container of homegrown home-cured black walnuts.

We drove back to Iowa City with our stomachs full of another perfect breakfast and our ears full of old-time music and stories. When we got home, I chopped and then sautéed six of the long, thin eggplants in olive oil till they were brown and soft, then put them aside and sautéed a minced red onion and 4 minced garlic cloves with a lot of dried basil, black pepper and salt, and a whiff of cinnamon and a dash of cumin. Then I added 1 1/2 cups of Lundberg’s wild rice blend, just shy of 3 cups of chicken broth with a big dollop of tomato paste whisked in, plus a teaspoon of minced lemon zest. I served big platefuls of luscious, faintly exotic pilaf with toasted pine nuts and grated pecorino-romano cheese.

We poured some pinot noir and sat and feasted at our table in the air-conditioned dining room. Outside, the cicadas made their racket, and the frat boys across the street had a beer-bong party.

Maybe one reason dogs and people are so temperamentally compatible is that we share a craving for routine. It’s almost 10 in the morning. The house is calm. It’s calm because everyone knows what’s going to happen at 11: Brendan will come back from the cafe where he’s writing and we’ll take our long morning walk. That’s what always happens, no matter where we are.

As soon as we got to Iowa, we set about recreating our usual daily schedule, which is consistent in Maine, in New Hampshire, and wherever else we are, as exactly as possible. This is very important, it seems, to all three of us, although ostensibly we’re doing it for Dingo.

We’ve found an acceptable morning walk here, a loop around a lake outside of town.  After our walk, we often have lunch at the soup-and-sandwich place by the train tracks or the taco place by the pet store, and then we drive home. Brendan goes back to work at the cafe, and I go back to work at my desk, which in Iowa City seems to be the dining room table, and Dingo goes back to his workplace, a rotating series of floor positions from which he guards the house. If someone makes too much noise out there or comes a little too close to his carefully peed-upon turf that includes the sidewalk, the small front yard, and the driveway, a low growl bubbles in his throat. If that doesn’t scare them away quickly enough, he leaps up barking.  Once they’re gone, he subsides back into his high-alert half-snooze, most often twisted against the wall on his back with his limbs askew and his belly exposed. Occasionally, his toenails click against the molding. He rarely snores.

In the mid-afternoon, I go upstairs to do the day’s reading, which I keep stacked on a chair by the bathtub, which is my other office. Dingo leaps up and comes with me, all a-bustle. He’s staked out his upstairs station on the landing where he lies during reading hours, and he doesn’t budge from it. Tufts of fur have collected there from his strenuous afternoon labor, keeping intruders at bay.

Between 5 and 6, Brendan comes home and takes Dingo around the block. That’s the end of the workday for all of us. Dingo eats his dinner at 6. It’s always the same things, and now that he’s old, there are new items added to his kibble, glucosamine-chondroitin powder and half a doggy ibuprofen pill and a dollop of “senior” canned food that smells so tasty, I might be tempted to try some myself if there were nothing else about the larder.

After Dingo is fed, we go to the co-op if we need groceries, conscientiously toting our cloth bags. The co-op is a fun excursion because the food there is so beautiful; also, they have many of the things we usually like to buy, at home, which soothes our canine souls, as well as some local-only treats like Muscatine muskmelon and a dense, chewy, intensely flavorful Iowa-made prosciutto that has only two ingredients, pork and salt.

At home, we open a bottle of wine and cook and eat at the table on place mats, pushing to the side our laptops and papers and stacks of books. Later on, before bed, we all take a night walk together through the quiet, dark, leafy, unfamiliar streets. The household turns in before midnight.

When we wake up, the whole thing starts again, much to Dingo’s perennial excitement: his morning walk and breakfast, our coffee, the morning’s work, the 11:00 excursion to the lake.

It’s as close as we can get to our daily life at home, except here, I teach on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, and we don’t go out for dinner. We have found what may well be the two best restaurants in town, and they’re both lunch places.

The soup-and-sandwich place serves the most sublime sandwiches and soup in the kingdom. The first time we ate there, the owner came to our table to ask how we liked our food. We fluttered our eyelids at her swooningly. She explained that she makes her gazpacho from vegetables from her garden or her CSA. For the chicken sandwich with sweet avocado-lime sauce, which I could eat every day for the rest of my life, she buys bone-in breasts of “real” free-range chickens (“not the ones who get a slightly bigger cage underneath two windows, the ones that actually walk around outside”) and roasts and debones them herself. She told us that she searched long and hard to find good gluten-free bread. To drink, they serve pitchers of ice-cold “cucumber water” that’s more thirst-quenching even than lemonade, slightly slippery and vegetal with the infusion of cucumber from her garden.

The taco place is in a strip mall on Highway 1. It’s always jam-packed with Mexicans, the best advertisement. We’ve been there for the past two lunches. The al pastor tacos are flat-out thrilling, tender-chewy and spicy and porky. Yesterday we tried the cornmeal-fried fish and the beef cheek tacos; the day before, chorizo and steak. The fish tacos come with crema. Every taco has onion and cilantro on it. They use the little corn tortillas, just warmed so they’re floppy and soft. It’s all so authentic, we forget we’re in Iowa. They bring four different hot sauces to your table with your order, two very hot (avocado and habanero), two less hot (salsa roja and salsa verde). I like to squirt all four on every taco. I love to guzzle agua con gaz with my food; the bubbles intensify the heat and flavors and sensations. Afterwards, I’m high on endorphins and my mouth feels as if it’s having an orgasm. A mouthgasm.

Different place, same life. Coming to a new state, town, house, job, climate is a hard adjustment for those of us who are stuck in our ways. It’s very soothing to bring our ways with us wherever we go.