At King’s Cross Sta­tion on Mon­day, cold and damp from the per­sis­tent driz­zle, we said good­bye to Avery and off she went for a week in York­shire at the Arvon Foun­da­tion writ­ing course.  Today we picked up a poet.

Left Hand

It was used well before, like a mould-mottle book

hastily writ­ten notes tast­ing of ink

bluish-green dye of a near for­got­ten Easter

recall­ing the stark white and red nurses’ uniforms

the coarse wool of a soldier’s coat

the flimsy paper of cig­a­rettes and yel­lowed tobacco stains

a tum­bler of whiskey, the weight of the glass

cres­cents of nails press­ing into its palm

not quite an entity in itself,

not quite enough on its own,

con­tent in its inferiority –

an under­study, unprepared.

********

I can­not extol enough the bril­liance of the Arvon way of life.  Sev­eral years ago I spent a week in the wilds of Devon on a course designed to teach us “food writ­ing.”  Morn­ings of work­shops with fel­low writ­ers and tutors — pub­lished food writ­ers — lunches spent dis­cussing whose work had been the star that morn­ing, then after­noons in pri­vate tuto­ri­als and mas­sive edit­ing after hear­ing what they had to say!  Then din­ners cooked in teams and evenings spent read­ing aloud.  An inten­sity I can’t really describe, but now Avery understands.

Almost bet­ter than the writ­ing are the friend­ships forged.  I don’t want to think about life with­out the dear, dear friends I made dur­ing that week.  We will have our annual reunion in May, bring­ing masses of ingre­di­ents together to spend end­less hours in the kitchen cook­ing our favorite dishes, laugh­ing and catch­ing up.  Oh, the pork crack­ling, the 15-ingredient leg of lamb, the celes­tial choco­late pud­ding…  In the after­noons we will read aloud what­ever we’ve been writ­ing lately.  A life-changing expe­ri­ence.  I am thrilled for Avery that she has had the same joy­ous week, never to be forgotten.

How we missed her!  But we were out in the coun­try­side hav­ing our own adven­tures.  Over 20 years ago John and I, together with his fab­u­lous par­ents, dis­cov­ered the clever­est of Eng­lish orga­ni­za­tions: The Land­mark Trust.  It calls itself a “build­ing preser­va­tion char­ity,” but in real­ity it’s a com­pletely quirky and quixotic group of peo­ple obsessed with sav­ing the past and bring­ing it into the present.

They find aban­doned barns, churches, mills, and that most eccen­tric of British build­ings, the “folly.” (pic­ture a giant stone pineap­ple with beds and bath­rooms inside!)  They chase away birds in res­i­dence, tear away plas­ter walls to reveal 18th cen­tury paint­ings, fres­coed ceil­ings, ancient floors and doors.

Every­thing that can be pre­served is pre­served, and fur­nished with blue wil­low china, pris­tine white bed­li­nens, price­less ori­en­tal rugs and antique fur­ni­ture, puz­zles, books and oh… the views.

Since our early days liv­ing in Eng­land in the 1990s right through to this week, we’ve stayed in per­haps 20 Land­mark Trust build­ings — in Eng­land, Scot­land, Flo­rence, Ver­mont, Ire­land… sim­ply heav­enly.  And I can cook!  This time it was the West Ban­quet­ing House in Chip­ping Cam­p­den, the Cotswolds.  There is no more gor­geous place on earth, to my mind.

Nat­u­rally, when it’s April in Eng­land, a great deal of time must be spent pur­su­ing the local live­stock, namely… lambs.

We took end­less long walks across the fields of stun­ning rape­seed, soon to be har­vested and made into the pre­cious elixir, rape­seed oil.

We vis­ited another of our old favorite places from many years ago, Buck­land Manor.  Images of a long-ago visit with my par­ents filled my mind, my young and healthy dad emerg­ing drip­ping from the swim­ming pool, look­ing for­ward to the hotel’s lux­ury cream tea and a walk in the beau­ti­ful gardens.

We vis­ited church after church, admir­ing the ancient floors with their inset gravestones.

Of course, you can’t always have deadly seri­ous grave­yards.  This par­tic­u­lar spec­i­men from our local church­yard had us shak­ing our heads.  Either Alice Mabel was an awfully under­stand­ing wife, or there’s some strife in the afterlife.

We vis­ited the lovely mar­ket town of Stow-on-the-Wold for a lit­tle cheese — Stowe Soft, a very nicely smelly goat cheese — and organic salmon, and the incom­pa­ra­bly posh and styl­ish Dayles­ford Organic, where I picked up a head of cele­riac and a bun­dle of wild gar­lic for the stun­ningly delicious:

Cele­riac Puree with Wild Gar­lic and Sour Cream

(serves 4)

small head cele­riac, peeled and cut into cubes

skim milk nearly (but not quite) to cover

2 tbsps sour cream

2 tbsps butter

hand­ful wild gar­lic leaves, chiffonade-chopped

salt and pep­per to taste

In a medium saucepan, place the cele­riac and pour on skim milk, per­haps 1 1/2 cups depend­ing on the size of the cele­riac head.  Do not cover cele­riac com­pletely or you will end up with cele­riac soup (still gor­geous but not this recipe!).  Cook over medium heat, tak­ing care not to burn on the bot­tom, until the cele­riac is soft, per­haps 25 min­utes.  Puree with hand blender, then beat in sour cream and but­ter, then add wild gar­lic.  Sea­son to taste.

As always when we are with­out Avery, I cook madly a whole host of dishes she doesn’t like.  Among them this week was roasted pork belly from Check­etts butch­ers in Bourton-on-the-Water.

Is there any more savory, rich dish?

And the sim­plest of all pos­si­ble side dishes, an onion with its cen­ter spooned out and filled with Robi­ola cheese, then sprin­kled with Fox Point Sea­son­ing and baked for 30 minutes.

With a visit to his­toric Chastle­ton House…

And our tra­di­tional walk across the fields between Lower Slaugh­ter and Upper Slaugh­ter to gaze upon Lords of the Manor Hotel, another favorite from over the years…

Home again, and reunited with our newly minted poet, life is very peace­ful indeed.

I can’t believe it.  It’s hap­pened again.  A whole month between posts.

I keep think­ing life will slow down and that “tomor­row” will be quiet enough for me to sit down and rel­ish all the activ­ity.  But every day brings more, more, more.  So I have ran­domly cho­sen “today” so I can finally tell you what’s been going on in our busy lives.

Lots of writ­ing!  I am ter­ri­bly excited to be the Lon­don cor­re­spon­dent for an up-and-coming foodie web­site, “Hand­picked Nation.”  This arti­cle is the result of what my fam­ily will report are many, many eggs being eaten in taste tests, much can­vass­ing of my friends.  Do you refrig­er­ate your eggs?  Why or why not?  Do you buy free range, organic?  Eggs every­where, in a nutshell.

Next up is a piece on pork belly, a won­der­ful ingre­di­ent very pop­u­lar here in Eng­land, and in Asia, and just mak­ing its way around Amer­i­can kitchens and restaurants.

And the­atre!  We’ve been to a mar­vel­lous pro­duc­tion of “A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream”, at the Lyric the­atre in Ham­mer­smith. I hate to tell you that it’s closed now, but if you ever get a chance to see the Fil­ter The­atre Group do any­thing, RUN don’t walk.  Avery’s been strug­gling to write what is ulti­mately a bril­liant essay, ana­lyz­ing the pro­duc­tion.  A play within a play within a play, etc.  Fourth wall?  For­get it.

And then it was “Being Shake­speare” with Avery and a school friend, and whilst it was impres­sive, I must warn you that you’ll have to go pre­pared to care a LOT about the Bard.   I might not be quite enough of a devoted fan to have appre­ci­ated it as much as oth­ers might.  A one-man show, almost no props!  All about Will.

The most impres­sive thing about the play was — as is any­thing to do with Shake­speare here in Eng­land — is the alive-ness of the man him­self.  We feel he is quite here, with us, judg­ing the pro­duc­tion.  “Wouldn’t he love that ‘Mid­sum­mer’?” we ask, and we all feel he has an opinion.

And Simon Cal­low is a national trea­sure, in the role or in any other role.  Love that man.  Once, 20 years ago, John and I were com­ing out of a Lon­don restau­rant and John hid around the cor­ner of the entrance, to jump out at me com­ing along behind him and shout BOO!  Only some­how Simon Cal­low had got between him and me, so poor Simon got the shock!

And then we had Amer­i­can vis­i­tors, as we so often do, and I took them to see “Out of Sync,” a vastly impres­sive art instal­la­tion at Som­er­set House.

And the cook­ing that has been going on!  Even more exit­ing to me than the actual cook­ing is the new col­lab­o­ra­tion that has grown up between me and Avery.

As you all know, I strug­gle with the evo­lu­tion from little-girl Avery to growing-up Avery.  There are so many lit­tle mile­stones that some­how knock me side­ways: the first trip home from school alone (no more fun hang­ing out­side the school to walk home with her), of course no more read­ing aloud (she reads ten books now to my one, and my dears, the dystopia!).  The first time she got her­self home from see­ing a play.  Tomor­row in fact, she goes off with a school group to spend five days in York­shire, writ­ing poetry.  I have never in my life writ­ten a poem!  She is grow­ing up.

And so it has been an absolute joy for us to find some­thing we like to do together, some­thing that points out the utter won­der­ful­ness of hav­ing a nearly grown per­son to share our lives.  She can ele­vate the hum­blest dish to emerge from my kitchen, into a work of art.  I give you: cele­riac remoulade, inspired by my lunch with my friend Caz at La Fro­magerie in Marylebone.

Cele­riac Remoulade

(serves lots of peo­ple at a picnic)

1  head cele­riac (cel­ery root), peeled

dress­ing: olive oil, may­on­naise, whole­grain mus­tard, lemon juice (in pro­por­tions to suit your taste)

Here is where any obsessive-compulsive ten­den­cies will come in handy.  Juli­enne the cele­riac by cut­ting VERY thin slices and then cut­ting those slices into VERY thin slices.  Toss with the dress­ing and serve straightaway.

******************

You can see what I mean about her tal­ent.  She takes any dish and finds the most excit­ing pre­sen­ta­tion, the most unex­pected and inspir­ing angle.  Look at our Easter ham, our feast with Daisy and her family.

And my lat­est exper­i­ments with aubergine/eggplant.  Lus­cious with olive oil, gar­lic, toma­toes and onions, chick­peas and Parmesan.

We have had such a good time together.  We envi­sion a cook­book in fact!  A col­lab­o­ra­tion between the two of us.  In July she will go off to Brook­lyn for a two-week pho­tog­ra­phy camp and after that I can only IMAG­INE the bril­liance.  What can they pos­si­bly teach her?  It has all been a tremen­dous com­fort and com­pen­sa­tion for the dis­ap­pear­ance of a sticky lit­tle hand to hold, a tod­dler on my lap.

And the evening she popped her head round the bed­room door, around 11:30.  “So, what’s your opin­ion on Niet­zsche?”  You don’t get that sort of dis­cus­sion with a kinder­gart­ner.  At least not one I’d want to live with.  So we discuss.

More vis­i­tors arrived!  John’s sis­ter and her adorable fam­ily, fresh from Min­nesota and on their way to Paris, spent four bliss­ful days with us.  The de rigeuer open-top bus tour!

And the ensu­ing boat ride back up the Thames.  Home for a rich dish of mac­a­roni and cheese and a huge casse­role of spinach, and the first of many book talks between Avery and Cathy, the only per­son I know who reads even more than Avery does!  The books piled up on the din­ing room table and they com­pared, “You HAVE to read this!  WHAT?  you haven’t read THIS?”

Up the next day for a trip to the Globe The­atre, where believe it or not, we encoun­tered the Fil­ter Group’s head actor, Ed Gaughan from “A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream”!

We’ll have to keep our eyes peeled for what project he might be bring­ing to the Globe.  We dis­cussed this and many other issues of Eng­lish life over a superb fish and chips lunch at the Swan Cafe, linked to the Globe.  Twice-cooked chips, gar­lic may­on­naise… heaven.  What fun to have fam­ily to eat with, laugh with, and be tourists with.

From the Globe we saun­tered over to the Tate Mod­ern where we all fell in love with Do Ho Suh’s superb instal­la­tion, a meta­phys­i­cal poly­ester stair­way to heaven.

And the Ger­man artist we had encoun­tered in the Bun­destag in Berlin!  The nail man, Gun­ther Uecker, whose work reminds me so much of Eva Hesse.  Here is Uecker:

And here is Hesse:

There is some­thing to dis­cover on every trip to the Tate, and thank good­ness for our vis­i­tors who get us out of the house, away from our com­put­ers, and dash­ing about the city remem­ber­ing how much fun it is to live here.

Then it was to see “Matilda: The Musi­cal,” I think the best musi­cal I have ever seen.  Clever, accom­plished, and anchored by a per­for­mance by Cleo Demetriou, one of the four lit­tle girls play­ing the title role.  How does she man­age to carry an entire cast and audi­ence with her so mas­ter­fully?  Go, if you get the chance.

Sun­day found me nurs­ing a mis­er­able cold I had been try­ing to ignore, so after early bell­ring­ing I begged off going to the British Museum and curled up on the sofa, pop­ping up only to pre­pare din­ner for the return­ing tourists.  Here is our lovely chicken dish, shred­ded the next day for “every­thing on a pancake.”

Vine­gar Chicken

(serves about 6)

1 whole chicken, cut into legs and breasts

2 cups malt vinegar

2 sprigs each fresh rose­mary and thyme

salt and pepper

1/2 cup flour

2 tsps each: dried basil, dried oregano, onion pow­der, gar­lic pow­der, smoked paprika

3 tbsps sun­flower or other veg­etable oil

Soak the chicken pieces in the vine­gar and herbs, salt and pep­per for at least four hours, refrig­er­ated.  Com­bine flour with spices in a seal­able plas­tic bag and shake chicken pieces in the mix­ture.  Lay chicken pieces skin-side down in an oven­proof dish in which you’ve poured the oil.  Bake at 425F/220C for half an hour, then turn over skin-side up and bake another half hour.  Tangy, crunchy and deli­cious!  Many thanks to my old friend Jerry for this recipe.

And our vis­i­tors heart­lessly aban­doned us for their adven­tures in the City of Light.  Our March mad­ness was over, and what a won­der­ful adven­ture it was.

April has only been more insane, so far, with din­ner dates (sushi!), a lunch date at the Cor­ner Room in Beth­nal Green (sea trout, squid, chorizo crumbs and veni­son in ash, any­one?), a con­cert and… did you all hear about the drama yes­ter­day in the 158th Oxford and Cam­bridge Boat Race, pass­ing down the Thames just across the road from our house?

 “There’s a swim­mer in the water!” we sud­denly noticed.  “He’ll be cut to rib­bons by the motor­boats, if he isn’t decap­i­tated by an oar first!”  And the race was stopped, right before our eyes, whilst the crazy guy — protest­ing the elite nature of the race! —  was fished out and arrested.

How amaz­ing that the first time we paid atten­tion to this his­toric race, cross­ing the street to walk along the path and gaze out at the river, such drama happens!

Happy Easter to you all, and a huge thank you to my friend Lucy for this mag­nif­i­cent Easter dessert of a choco­late bas­ket, filled with straw­ber­ries (photo cour­tesy of Avery, nat­u­rally).  May your April be as sweet as ours has been, so far.

I promise not to leave it so long next time to keep you posted on our fun.

What a whirl­wind the last month has been.  I am sorry to have been so quiet, but it’s been a mad­house here.

This is eas­ily explained.  I’ve been so focused on get­ting myself a real life — as opposed to a life spent watch­ing Avery grow up, as sweet as that has been — that I didn’t com­pletely under­stand how the seeds of my ideas would sprout.  It all started with bell­ring­ing, of course, and being new Tower Sec­re­tary has been a lot of fun.  Part of my new job has been to set up a blog for us to report on our out­ings, spe­cial ser­vices, record­ings and par­ties.  It’s all a bla­tant attempt to keep our four teenage ringers inter­ested.  They bring so much laugh­ter and energy to the atmos­phere at Sat­ur­day practices!

Then there is my train­ing for social work with Home-Start, the social work vol­un­teer project.  Every Thurs­day finds me spend­ing all day in a rather bleak office build­ing in a nearby vil­lage, sit­ting in a cir­cle with about 15 other vol­un­teers, lis­ten­ing to hour after hour of intense lec­tures and exer­cises on the most depress­ing sit­u­a­tions fac­ing fam­i­lies in our bor­ough.  Spe­cial­ists come in to teach us about encoun­ter­ing mul­ti­ple births, birth defects, every sort of abuse you can imag­ine, alco­hol and drug, emo­tional and sex­ual, and last week, post-natal (or post-partum as we say in Amer­ica) depres­sion.  We brain­storm, take notes, gather in groups and share our reac­tions to pos­si­ble scenarios.

Some­day in April, I will finally be ready to turn up at my des­ig­nated clients’ fam­ily home, to do what­ever is required of me.  “We make it clear that you are not babysit­ters, or house­clean­ers,” our train­ers repeat.  But then they smile.  “And yet a lot of times you’ll find that just to pitch in and do a load of laun­dry is what an exhausted mum needs, while she feeds her twins, or you’ll take a baby to the park so the mum has a moment to sit down and play doll’s houses with her tod­dler.  Some­times you will just sit and lis­ten, while she talks, or cries.”

And I’ve had a spate of writ­ing assign­ments!  Soon there will be a new issue of the bril­liant Vin­tage Mag­a­zine out of New York, and it will con­tain a piece by me about the joys and won­ders of the AGA stove.

I’ve been hard at work writ­ing for a new web­site, Hand­Picked Nation, the brain­child of Staci Strauss and Craig McCord, two artists who used to show in my Tribeca Gallery.   They are pas­sion­ate about food — and very funny — and it’s excit­ing to con­tribute.  Lastly, I’ve been hired to con­tribute a piece to my beloved EXTREMELY spe­cial­ist mag­a­zine, “The Ring­ing World.”

I’ve been busily cook­ing, of course.  In this blus­tery, winter/spring grey­ness that is Lon­don in Feb­ru­ary and March, I’d be per­fectly happy eat­ing noth­ing but meat­balls and mashed pota­toes every night, but I do real­ize it’s my job to pro­vide some health­ier, more var­ied fare as well.  Hence, my newest offering.

Super­Food Salad

(serves 2)

1 bunch small beets

3 tbsps olive oil

fresh black pepper

1 avo­cado, sliced and driz­zled with lemon juice

2 arti­chokes, trimmed down to the heart, sliced very thin, driz­zled with lemon juice

4 ounces goat cheese, crumbled

hand­ful small toma­toes, quartered

hand­ful rocket leaves

dress­ing (optional): 1/3 cup olive oil, juice of 1 lemon, 1 tbsp Dijon mus­tard, 1 tbsp pre­pared horse­rad­ish, 1 tbsp mayonnaise

Cut the scrubbed, unpeeled beets in quar­ters and driz­zle with olive oil, then sprin­kle with fresh black pep­per and toss till beets are coated with oil.  Roast at 425F/220C for 30 min­utes.  Cool while you pre­pare the rest of the salad.

On indi­vid­ual plates, arrange the other ingre­di­ents and driz­zle with dress­ing if wanted (this salad is per­fectly good with­out).  Arranged the beets on top and serve with a bit of baguette.

****************

As if this weren’t all enough to keep me busy, we’ve had end­less din­ner guests to enter­tain us.  Friends from Amer­ica, friends from Lon­don, friends from Cam­bridge, friends from Mexico…

AND I spent Mon­day of this week in… Paris!  Well, I say I spent the day there.  It would be fairer to say I spent the day in the train, with a brief inter­lude in the City of Lights.  A power fail­ure AND a track fire greatly delayed my arrival there, but it was all worth it to see Linda Mee­han, my beloved singing teacher from high school.  I haven’t seen her for 22 years!  But noth­ing had changed.  Her beau­ti­ful, gen­tle smile and voice were just the same.

We talked non­stop over an enor­mous plat­ter of pates, ril­lettes, hams and salamis.  Then we headed off to see the Eif­fel Tower, shiv­er­ing in the blowy early-spring weather.  Walk­ing back toward the train sta­tion — I had only three hours with them! — we encoun­tered some of Avery’s favorite street art.

A brief shop­ping trip down the achingly tempt­ing Rue Cler yielded cheeses from La Fro­magerie Cler, duck liver pate from a del­i­catessen filled with every deli­cious pre­pared food you could pos­si­bly want.  What a street.  What a city.

The jour­ney back to Lon­don that evening almost, but not quite, spoiled the fun of the day.  Eight hours!  Eight hours that was meant to be two!  Hun­gry babies cried, nicotine-deprived would-be smok­ers fumed, train con­duc­tors fended off fran­tic ques­tion­ing with remark­able calm.  I stood in the cor­ri­dor and chat­ted with fel­low pas­sen­gers, my col­lo­quial French explod­ing with new vocab­u­lary every minute!  And I met a lovely Swiss girl as my seat­mate, so at least I made a new friend.  But when the taxi pulled up at home at 3 a.m., I felt as if I’ve been put through a mincer.

Travel!  Peo­ple say it is broad­en­ing.  Cer­tainly it is an adven­ture, and an exhaust­ing invest­ment in the mem­o­ries that have to last us a life­time.  This was our expe­ri­ence on our recent trip to Berlin, with­out a doubt.

The three of us swept up Avery’s chum Daisy and headed off one Sun­day evening, to visit a city none of us has ever seen.  I can’t remem­ber the time that was the case.  Nor­mally one of us knows what’s going on!  But it was new to all of us.

It was a jour­ney more than a hol­i­day, with Berlin’s des­per­ate, lonely, tragic char­ac­ter larger than life on the world stage.  It is really an unsual atmos­phere: a city rooted in the past, but not in the way of any place I have been before.  Berlin is rooted in a sad, shame­ful past that every­one is simul­ta­ne­ously memo­ri­al­iz­ing on every street cor­ner, and also try­ing to for­get, to put away in a drawer and move on with the future.

At the same time, there is a youth­ful buoy­ancy to the cul­ture, a joy in cul­tural expres­sion that raises graf­fiti to an art form.

I’m not sure I would have rec­og­nized that with­out our two teenagers to appre­ci­ate it, and record it with their cameras.

We decided to rent an apart­ment rather than stay in a hotel, as is our habit ever since we went to Venice sev­eral years ago and I was in a fever of frus­tra­tion at not being able to cook.  Hav­ing to fig­ure out where to shop for ingre­di­ents, how to express what and how many of some­thing you want in a lan­guage you’re not flu­ent in, gets you right under the tourist expe­ri­ence and gives you a glimpse of what it’s like to be a Berliner.

We arrived late at night and stood shiv­er­ing out­side our apart­ment build­ing, wait­ing for the owner to bring the key.  “Let’s go explor­ing, girls,” I said.  “John can wait for the key”  So we saun­tered down the street in the for­mer East Berlin neigh­bour­hood of Mitte, pass­ing seedy shops and dusty sushi bars, peer­ing into dark­ened phar­ma­cies and “lebens­mit­te­len,” which are the Ger­man equiv­a­lent of con­ve­nience stores.

We popped into one shop, shabby and piled high with shelves full of boxes and jars in a lan­guage we could not under­stand.  In the increas­ingly Starbucks-ized mod­ern world, I love find­ing myself in a place that is truly of its own cul­ture.  We picked up the essen­tials: a loaf of white bread I would never nor­mally buy in Lon­don or Amer­ica, but it was “brot”, it was Ger­man, it was local.  It had to be good.  I felt just the same about a pack­age of what looked like Kraft Amer­i­can cheese, not some­thing I would ordi­nar­ily suc­cumb to, but it was “Kase” which sounded exotic, so into the bas­ket it went.  A box of “Eier,” eggs, a pack­age of “Speck,” a Ger­man bacony sort of meat, and a car­ton of what I could trans­late as “super high in Vit­a­min C orange juice,” and I could project tomorrow’s break­fast.  The girls, of course, bought Ger­man chocolate.

Our break­fast next day exceeded all our greedy expec­ta­tions.  There is noth­ing like a Euro­pean egg, its yolk a bright improb­a­ble orange, its flavour incom­pa­ra­bly rich.  And the “Speck”!  Glossy with a per­fect fat­ti­ness, salty and crisp.  The bread and cheese glowed with preser­v­a­tives and roman­ti­cism.  We were shored up for our day of tourism.

Our first adven­ture was a spon­ta­neous visit to the Berlin­is­che Galerie.  What a sub­lime col­lec­tion of mod­ern art, so much of it polit­i­cal, tragic, as so much of every­thing is in Berlin.

From there we found our­selves in the Jew­ish Museum, whose instal­la­tions by Daniel Lieb­skind were over­whelm­ingly sad, hope­less, tragic.  Here is a detail from the Holo­caust Tower: end­less con­crete walls, freez­ing cold, almost no light.  A place with­out hope.

This was a lad­der whose low­est rung was just, tan­ta­liz­ingly, too high for the tallest human being to reach.  It stretched up into total dark­ness in the ceiling.

There was an instal­la­tion of cast-iron faces, 10,000 of them, each an expres­sion of loss and hor­ror, some tiny like a baby’s.

We were over­whelmed, emo­tional, tired and hun­gry.  Just the sort of state in which peo­ple make impul­sive deci­sions like pop­ping in for lunch at the nearby Yezda’s Diner.

I do not know who Yezda is, so I can­not blame her for what was a ter­ri­ble meal.  “How can food be this shiny and hard?” Avery won­dered rhetor­i­cally as she poked at the cheese­burger she and Daisy had each ordered.

We escaped into the street and walked along feel­ing we’d swal­lowed a tire, and promptly came upon this gem, Soup Kul­tur.  Oh, I want to go back to Berlin right now, just remem­ber­ing the menu in the win­dow.   Creamy tomato soup, leek and “Kartof­feln,” potato soup, and best of all, “Rosi’s Häh­nchen Peni­cillin,” which at first puz­zled us and made me doubt my abil­ity to read menu German.

Sud­denly I remem­bered the clichéd New York expres­sion that chicken soup is Jew­ish peni­cillin.  “Häh­nchen,” chicken.  Please promise me that if you go to Berlin, you will visit “Soup Kul­tur” and report back.

We did not let our scary lunch scare us.  We wan­dered past Check­point Char­lie, which was an anti­cli­max.  It was impos­si­ble to believe in the his­tor­i­cal stand­offs that took place here.

The girls posed by the wall, again, stripped of its menace.

We vis­ited a museum that housed the Stasi papers, and stopped to take in the bronze plates in the ground that indi­cated where the wall had stood.

From there we walked, end­lessly, to the Bran­den­burg Gate which stopped us all in our tracks with its majesty.

And onto our tour of the Bun­destag, the Ger­man Par­lia­ment, with its Russ­ian graf­fiti inside, uncov­ered as evi­dence of the lib­er­at­ing Russ­ian sol­diers’ pres­ence in 1945.

Oh, the dome of that Par­lia­ment!  Surely one would make more intel­li­gent deci­sions in such an atmosphere.

After  that exhaust­ing day, we dropped into a super­mar­ket on our way home and, leav­ing the girls to peruse the shelves of for­eign tooth­paste and sham­poo, I bought ingre­di­ents for spaghetti car­bonara, tak­ing advan­tage of a pos­i­tive SLAB of “Speck” which lent its smoky magic to the sauce, along with the grated “Kaiserkase,” a hard Ger­man cheese sim­i­lar to Gruyere.

The next day we made our way across town, pass­ing the incred­i­ble Berlin Cathe­dral which sim­ply did not look real, and dropped intto the fas­ci­nat­ing time cap­sule that is the DDR Museum.  We all agreed to have lunch first at the well-reviewed museum cafe, so as not to be dis­tracted in the museum by hunger pangs.  It is true: we were no longer hun­gry.  But not in a good way.

We decided each to order some­thing dif­fer­ent, so as to have a vari­ety of things to try.  It was not a suc­cess.  Four dif­fer­ent types of “Fleisch,” meat, in var­i­ous unpleas­ant sauces.  “At least my dish is listed on the menu as being Erik Honecker’s favourite,” John said, lead­ing us all to have a new the­ory of why the Berlin wall fell.  Honecker was too hun­gry to object.  The best thing we had at lunch was Vita-Cola, East Germany’s 1957 answer to Pepsi and Coke.  You can order it in reg­u­lar flavour, or “black” (they taste exactly the same).

Is it pos­si­ble to feel nos­tal­gic for some­thing you’ve never had?  Wurst!  Real Ger­man Wurst and sauer­kraut, from a street cart.  We passed so many of these carts, and also lit­tle huts adver­tis­ing var­i­ous types of true Ger­man wurst, includ­ing “Cur­ry­wurst,” the notion of which obsessed me the whole of our hol­i­day.  What could it be?  A hot dog in a curry sauce?  A wurst made from a pig raised on curry pow­der?  The girls hus­tled me past all such carts, hav­ing a youth­ful dis­dain for weird-sounding food.  But the thought of what could have been haunts me now we’re home.

On a long walk through the East Berlin neigh­bor­hood of Mitte, the girls found end­less dis­plays of the city’s famous graf­fiti art to photograph.

(Won­der­fully, this graf­fiti says, “This is not a photo opportunity.”)

I, hap­pily, found Bio Com­pany.

This store was like a mini-Whole Foods, a pos­i­tive mecca for organic pro­duce, meat, cheeses and the inim­itable dis­play of cured meats that only Ger­many can pro­duce.  I bought more than I actu­ally needed because the atmos­phere was so beguil­ing.  I tried out my Ger­man on the dairy stock­ing lady because I sim­ply couldn’t stay silent.  “I LOVE your shop!”  She looked at me in total bewil­der­ment and then handed me a con­tainer of sheep’s milk yogurt, and then another in a dif­fer­ent fla­vor.  I was puz­zled, until I real­ized that Ger­man for yogurt is “Schaf.”  She must have thought I was some bizarre Amer­i­can cultured-milk fanatic.  “I LOVE your Schaf!”

I bought a pot of “Auberginen Pastete,” egg­plant pate, which proved to be gor­geous, gar­licky and salty with chunks of egg­plant.  I bought a pack­age of “Lieblings-Puffer,” a sort of potato pan­cakes described on the label as “thick and crispy.”  I fig­ured out what “Rinde” meant (beef) and picked up four gor­geous fil­lets, a head of gar­lic, a pile of mush­rooms and a quan­tity of thick Ger­man cream.  I had to be dragged out of the shop kick­ing and scream­ing.   That night I cooked hap­pily in our tiny Ikea kitchen, pro­duc­ing a deli­ciously savory, creamy mush­room sauce for our steaks.  The potato pancakes?

Well, I was ham­pered by not being able to read the instruc­tions, which it turned out involved fry­ing in a quan­tity of an oil I did not have.  They were a bit pecu­liar, just baked, but we were happy any­way, chew­ing and chat­ting and lis­ten­ing to the nightly news and pick­ing up the odd word or two.

In the morn­ing, on our last day, John took us to an absolute find, the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall.  Here artists from all over the world have been asked to con­tribute paint­ings and poems to this long, long frag­ment of the Wall, stretch­ing as far as the eye could see.

Finally we made our way back across town to our final lunch in Berlin. Oy vey.

This cafe was actu­ally a des­ti­na­tion, writ­ten up in the Ger­man Elle mag­a­zine I perused in a vin­tage cloth­ing store while Avery and Daisy tried on every gar­ment in the place.  It was also fea­tured in the cute “Wall­pa­per” guide to Berlin we’d brought along, as being the “best baked potato restau­rant in Berlin.”  “Surely it is the ONLY baked potato restau­rant in Berlin,” John said.  In any case, we made our way to Bixels, a charm­ing black-board-lined room fur­nished with a giant com­mu­nity farm­house table and redo­lent of the crunchy, brown, salty smell of baked pota­toes.  What could go wrong?

 We three ladies ordered the truf­fle oil/goat/cheese/spinach/yogurt ver­sion.  John went for the Argen­tine beef/carrot/apple/yogurt ver­sion.  “Unusual,” I vol­un­teered cheer­fully.  And COLD, as it turned out. We chewed in silence for a time, try­ing des­per­ately to think of some­thing pos­i­tive to say.  Finally the girls swept aside their top­pings and brought up tiny frag­ments of still-warm potato, gasp­ing for air from under the weight of cold yogurt.

Walk­ing back to the apart­ment, we passed Viet­namese restau­rants, Thai restau­rants, end­less sushi restau­rants.  I felt regret­ful that I had suc­cumbed to my desire to eat only Ger­man food while we were in Berlin.  Maybe eth­nic food is the way to go?  Or Rosi’s Penicillin.

We were exhausted.  Berlin had shown us many things, had stretched our imag­i­na­tion, had shown us a glimpse into the past and the present fused together.

It was time to go home.  At the air­port I suc­cumbed to a vacuum-packed trio of “cur­ry­wursts” which I put in my hand­bag.  In the flurry of unpack­ing at home, I left them there, in my bag, overnight.  In the morn­ing I thought, “Food poi­son­ing from an unre­frig­er­ated air­port snack would be such an igno­min­ious way to die,” and pitched them in the rubbish.

We’ve recov­ered from our trip and set­tled into real life.  For me this means Home-Start train­ing in the morn­ing.  Deep breath.  I’m ready.

The world is a dimin­ished place now, as my beloved grand­mother, Bet­tye Planque Wedek­ing Hor­rall, died last week, aged 98 years and 51 weeks.  She was our “Mamoo,” the matri­arch of our very close fam­ily, the moral com­pass of all our dis­parate gen­er­a­tions.  She was also just plain tremen­dous fun, always laugh­ing from the begin­ning of her long life to the end.

She was my mother’s mother, and as I get older, I see more resem­blance among the four gen­er­a­tions of our family’s lit­tle girls.  There is some­thing in the twin­kle of our eyes, I think.  Here is my mother, aged six.

Although my father’s Scan­di­na­vian genes turned both me and my daugh­ter blonde, we share that twin­kle, I think.  Here is lit­tle me, in the ubiq­ui­tous playpen of the 1960s.

Of course I believe Avery to be the best dis­til­la­tion of all our family’s won­der­ful qual­i­ties.  How proud Mamoo was of her, her first great-grandchild, daugh­ter of her first granddaughter.

Mamoo’s fam­ily name began as the Ger­manic “Planck” but the 1930s brought about a change to the more Frenchy spelling of “Planque.”  She was the adored baby of the fam­ily, lit­tle Betty, adding the “e” to the end of her name as a teenager want­ing to be just a lit­tle dif­fer­ent.  It didn’t take an extra let­ter on her name to achieve that.

She mar­ried my grand­fa­ther, Loyd Wedek­ing, as a very young woman and pro­ceeded to pro­duce a beau­ti­ful fam­ily with first my mother, Suzanne, then her lit­tle sis­ter Linda Jane, and finally a lit­tle brother, my uncle Ken­neth, named for my grandfather’s brother.  Here they all are, in bril­liant 1975 garb, in the sprawl­ing gar­den of their mag­i­cal south­ern Indi­ana home, Five Green Acres.

I loved that house more than any place in my child­hood: there was a rid­ing lawn­mower, end­less Big Wheel cars for us to roar around on, a bird­bath to mon­i­tor, woods to explore, and a com­pletely mag­i­cal rope swing from which my brother fell twice, break­ing the same wrist each time.  I never had such bad luck.

While Mamoo was not a very enthu­si­as­tic cook, she was a superbly wel­com­ing host­ess.  We chil­dren longed for the week­ends spent with Mamoo and Grandpa, and my par­ents felt much the same, since my father’s par­ents were far away in Ari­zona and in any case he felt much closer to my mother’s fam­ily.  Mamoo wel­comed the arrival of every one of her eight grand­chil­dren with sen­si­ble, unsen­ti­men­tal rejoic­ing.  She was not a hug­ger or a kisser, as befit­ted her gen­er­a­tion.  But she adored us all.  Here she is with tiny me, just hours old in a Feb­ru­ary snowstorm.

So many, many times we motored down to Wash­ing­ton to be together.  I don’t think any extended fam­ily ever had more fun than we all did.  Here we are in 1967, at Christ­mas, com­plete with my Aunt Linda’s hus­band Uncle Dick, Uncle Kenny’s lovely wife Aunt Mary Wayne (the bee­hive! and I think Tramp, their dog), my big cousin Steve, my big brother Andy, and lit­tle me, in my mom’s arms.

What did Mamoo do to make our time together so much fun?  She was rather plump in all the right cozy places, with softly curl­ing brown hair and eyes always laugh­ing.  She pro­vided my mother’s and aunt’s beloved china dolls com­plete with all the gor­geous 1950s clothes she had made for them: dresses in silky blue-flowered mate­r­ial, starched net pet­ti­coats peep­ing out from under lit­tle flan­nel skirts, hats and stock­ings and lit­tle shoes of real leather.  She sat us — my lit­tle cousin Amy and I — in the big dra­matic bath­tub sur­rounded with black shiny mar­ble walls, and sat with us as we splashed together, wash­ing the walls indus­tri­ously with sham­poo.  We were the “Naked Baked Club,” my cousin and I, invented under Mamoo’s watch­ful, lov­ing eye.  As we got older, she pro­duced even more inter­est­ing activ­i­ties like going through the boxes of let­ters my mother had writ­ten to her from col­lege, and her diaries.

She tied on half-aprons with ruf­fled edges and pro­duced large meals of sim­ple, deli­cious food around their big oval table, presided over by my large, laugh­ing grand­fa­ther.  There were copi­ous meat­loaves and mashed pota­toes with plenty of gravy, lit­tle glass and sil­ver dishes of olives and cel­ery sticks, big bowls of but­tery green beans and my grandfather’s tra­di­tional bas­ket of plain white bread, with­out which a meal was not a meal. My grand­fa­ther con­vinced all we chil­dren that the end­less sup­ply of lit­tle sweet pick­les on their table came from his hid­den “pickle bush.”  There was never a pair of fun­nier, sweeter grand­par­ents.  Strict, to be sure — we chil­dren behaved nicely.  But no won­der my mother and her sib­lings brought us there to Five Green Acres over and over for lov­ing week­ends, Christ­mases, Easters.

Under the giant ever­green tree in the back­ground of this photo, Mamoo hid end­less dozens of real Easter eggs, plus the plas­tic col­ored ones that broke in half to reveal foil-wrapped choco­late eggs, plus Easter bas­kets, lit­tle stuffed bun­nies, for we cousins to find.  I will never for­get the Easter morn­ing when, scram­bling under the tree for eggs, we came upon one of those stuffed bun­nies.  And then it hopped away.  Magic!

Through all our times together, Mamoo told sto­ries.  Some were from her child­hood with her adored older sis­ter, my Aunt Toot­sie, who had per­fect pitch and could play any song she’d heard, on the piano, first time per­fect.  All Mamoo’s fam­ily were the­atri­cal, dra­matic and musi­cal.  Mamoo her­self was the only per­son I ever heard who whis­tled with real vibrato.  She told us of Aunt Tootsie’s cat­a­clysmic elope­ment as a teenager, the death of their father when Mamoo was only 16, their strug­gles with the Depres­sion, the peren­nial lack of money.  Many of these tales fol­lowed the clas­sic lines.  “When we were chil­dren, if we got even ONE ORANGE in our Christ­mas stock­ings, we felt lucky indeed.  And that was to SHARE!”

She and Grandpa remem­bered every funny thing their chil­dren had said, and the sto­ries were aired with every fam­ily gath­er­ing.  One of her favorites was the Thanks­giv­ing when my Uncle Kenny sought out Grandpa, nap­ping after the mas­sive meal.  “He came up to your grand­fa­ther and tapped him on the shoul­der until he woke up.  Then he said, ‘Daddy, would you like a piece of turkey?’ “Sure,’ Grandpa said, just to get rid of him.  After he ate it, your Uncle Kenny said, “Daddy, could you chew that piece of turkey?  Because I tried to, and couldn’t.’”  Then Mamoo would shake with laughter.

She and Grandpa trav­eled the world, never neglect­ing to visit us, stag­ger­ing in the back door of my child­hood home, nearly hid­den behind enor­mous piles of Christ­mas presents.  When we first vis­ited them in their down­town hotel, I asked my mother, “What IS a hotel, any­way?”  She answered patiently, “It’s a big build­ing with lots of lit­tle rooms, where peo­ple stay when they are vis­it­ing.”  We trooped into the lobby, waited for the ele­va­tor (my first) and got in.  As the ele­va­tor wafted toward Mamoo’s floor, I said in a tiny voice, “This sure IS a lit­tle room!”

Then one chill Decem­ber day shortly after our Thanks­giv­ing with Mamoo and Grandpa, I came home from school to find my mother in the door­way, ter­ri­ble and tall with her face red and blotched with unbe­liev­able tears.  My mother never, ever cried.  “Your Grandpa, my Daddy, has died.  I must go be with Mamoo.  Dad will take care of you guys.”  And she was gone.  I remem­ber sit­ting on the kitchen counter, watch­ing my father fold laun­dry with totally unac­cus­tomed awk­ward­ness, hear­ing him tell the awful tale.  “Grandpa went to the hos­pi­tal for his retire­ment phys­i­cal, the day before he was going to retire.  He was on the heart machine when it sud­denly went off like crazy.  He died of a heart attack right then and there.”

Mamoo told us the story from her per­spec­tive later.  “I was expect­ing your grand­fa­ther home for lunch as usual, and the time got on.  Just as I was start­ing to worry, there was a knock on the door.  It was the doc­tor, walked down the hill from the hos­pi­tal with the news.”  Later on, a wing of that hos­pi­tal, and the lit­tle road lead­ing to my grand­par­ents’ house, were named after my grand­fa­ther who had been the kind and lov­ing optometrist in that lit­tle town all his adult life.

It took Mamoo a long time to recover her twin­kle, after that.  Once when we were vis­it­ing her after the funeral, I saw a cal­en­dar on her kitchen wall.  Writ­ten on it for the day before, and sev­eral days before that, was, “Alone.  Again.”  They had been mar­ried just over 40 years.

She came, as always, to our plays and musi­cals, and we went often to see her, know­ing that noth­ing could com­fort her for her loss, but fear­ing to leave her alone.  The months crept by in a new sense of loss and change.  I was twelve years old.

Then, after a period of mourn­ing, Mamoo sat us all down to tell us an extra­or­di­nary tale.  “Your grandfather’s best friend, Lon Hor­rall, has come to me to say that he loves me, and would like to get mar­ried.  So we think we will.”  It was a love story that made their ages com­pletely irrel­e­vant.  Lon had sur­vived two wives, bravely sol­dier­ing on in their social cir­cle in that lit­tle Indi­ana town, secretly nurs­ing a pas­sion for my grand­mother, we all decided.  Then when tragedy struck, he was there to pick up the pieces.

Mamoo and Lon began a new life together, we gained a new grand­fa­ther — the only one the lit­tle cousins really ever remem­bered — and sev­eral step­cousins.  We grew up under Lon’s slightly stricter but equally lov­ing gaze, feel­ing pro­foundly grate­ful to him for sav­ing Mamoo from her wid­ow­hood, and offer­ing a sec­ond chance at happiness.

The sum­mer fam­ily reunions, a tra­di­tion since the grand­chil­dren first started arriv­ing, con­tin­ued.  Mamoo and Lon treated us all to a gala din­ner, the air ring­ing with many sto­ries being told all at once.

When I elected to go to grad­u­ate school in Penn­syl­va­nia, Mamoo and Lon stepped in imme­di­ately.  “I don’t know why you want to leave the good old Mid­west for some snooty East­ern town, but as long as you do, we might as well drive you and your things out there.”  And they did, all 900 miles of the jour­ney, and since there was not a hotel room to be found when we arrived, Lon slept in the car, and Mamoo on the mat­tress from my bed, on the floor.  “I didn’t sleep a wink,” she said proudly in the morn­ing.  “Oh yes, you did,” I rejoined silently to myself.  Mamoo had a fierce snore.

We got mar­ried, one by one, and Lon and Mamoo were there to cel­e­brate with us.  Here we are at my wed­ding, in the ecru dress Mamoo had made for Aunt Linda, which my mother had worn, and which was refit­ted for me.

My dear dad needed a lit­tle help with his bou­ton­niere, and Mamoo was there to help.

As indeed, Mamoo always was there to help.  As strong and rather old-fashioned as Mamoo was about her opin­ions of right and wrong, noth­ing was stronger than her love for her fam­ily.  That was never clearer than just before our wed­ding, when we bought some old, sweet fur­ni­ture at the sum­mer reunion in Wash­ing­ton.  “Now, how are you kids going to get that fur­ni­ture out to New Jer­sey?” she asked sternly.  “I guess we’ll hire a van,” I said.  “Non­sense.  What a waste of money.  Lon and I will drive out, and deliver it to you.”  And they did, those two nearly-80-year-olds, stay­ing under our unmar­ried roof with per­fect, if slightly dis­ap­prov­ing aplomb.  And I can assure you that each piece of fur­ni­ture went in the spot where Mamoo thought it would look best.

Mamoo grew softer as she grew older, and there were hugs, with her soft and powder-fragrant cheek against mine.  And noth­ing could keep her from dot­ing on her first great-grandchild, my daugh­ter Avery, com­plet­ing four gen­er­a­tions of our family.

Sev­eral  years later, it was my lit­tle sis­ter Jill’s turn for a beau­ti­ful wedding.

Mamoo and Lon lived out their twi­light years with great, quiet hap­pi­ness.  We moved to New York, and then to Lon­don, and my vis­its with them became fewer and fewer.  I lis­tened with great nos­tal­gia to my mother telling me about Thanks­giv­ing din­ners I was miss­ing, fam­ily reunions I was miss­ing.  Avery never really knew Mamoo and Lon very well, but I have no doubt she feels she did, because I just might have inher­ited my grandmother’s pen­chant for telling a story, over and over.

Four years ago, Lon had a heart attack from which it was obvi­ous he would not recover.  They were sep­a­rated.  His fam­ily stepped in to pro­vide a nurs­ing home for him, and my fam­ily set­tled Mamoo into a nurs­ing home of her own, staffed by lov­ing ladies and gen­tle­man who never tired of telling us what a won­der­ful guest she was, regal­ing every­one in the mid­dle of the night at the nurses’ sta­tion with tale after tale of her fam­ily life.  When Lon died, my fam­ily went to tell her.  “Oh, what a shame,” she said, shak­ing her head.  “He was a lovely man.  So hard-working.”  We think she had retreated into a place where she was still mar­ried to my grand­fa­ther, remem­ber­ing his best friend with fond­ness, rather than the sec­ond hus­band to whom she had been mar­ried for 30 years.

I last saw Mamoo a year and a half ago in her nurs­ing home.  Her mem­ory was fail­ing then, but only for the present-day.  The past still made per­fect sense.  “Well, look who’s here!” she exclaimed.  “Now, honey, did you bring John and Avery with you?”  We talked about Lon­don and her vis­its there with Grandpa in the 1950s and 60s, and Avery’s school adven­tures and our new home, of which I had brought pic­tures.  She wanted to dis­cuss, as always, the place­ment of each piece of fur­ni­ture, the arrange­ment I had made of books on shelves, what sort of neigh­bor­hood it was.  She was her­self, indomitably curi­ous and sharp.

But noth­ing can last for­ever, as we found last week.  We all talked about her con­di­tion in the days lead­ing to her death.  “She is peace­ful,” my mother assured me, and we knew we were for­tu­nate.  She had had a long, impos­si­bly happy, gen­er­ous, funny life, leav­ing behind three chil­dren, eight grand­chil­dren, eleven great-grandchildren and another on the way, due any day.  She died on Feb­ru­ary 1, just six days before her 99th birthday.

Intan­gi­bly, what Mamoo left behind more than any­thing else were her love of life in all its com­pli­ca­tions, her love of the past, her deter­mi­na­tion to keep it alive, and her love of her fam­ily.  Her death is, really, a loss with­out any need for grief.  Noth­ing was left undone or unsaid.  She died as she had lived, full of appre­ci­a­tion for what­ever life had to offer.  Yes­ter­day my band of bell­ringers rang for Sun­day ser­vices in her honor, my beloved teacher read­ing out her name.  Every­one gath­ered around and asked me lovely ques­tions about her life.  And for once, in my ring­ing I made no mis­takes.  How touched and amazed she would have been to know.

Good­bye, Mamoo, and thank you.

This may look like just another Google Map to you, but every mus­cle in my body can assure you that it’s far more than that.  This lit­tle screen­shot of South­east Eng­land rep­re­sents the six vil­lages and six churches that I vis­ited on Sat­ur­day, spend­ing about an hour at each one, ring­ing bells with my equally-crazy bell­ring­ing friends.  Sim­ply a per­fectly Eng­lish way to spend a cold, clear, frosty Jan­u­ary day.  I’ll take you on a tour.

The place-names will tell you straight­away that you’re not in Indi­ana any­more.  We began in Hare­field St Mary’s, Mid­dle­sex, with the win­ter sun low on the horizon.

We gath­ered in the church­yard, exchanged hushed greet­ings, some ringers sip­ping cof­fee or tea from ther­moses they had brought against the chill of the morning.

The church itself was very cold, with that par­tic­u­lar chill an empty, ancient stone build­ing can con­tain.  But it was filled with flow­ers from a recent funeral, and their fra­grance filled the air and lit up the extrav­a­gant altar with color, pro­vid­ing a lively con­trast with the carved, mar­ble Eiz­a­bethan death monuments.

It was a beau­ti­ful place to ring, with six light and easy bells, befit­ting the first ring of the day.  The ringers came from all over: our own dear St Mary’s Barnes, and Chiswick, and sev­eral ringers from Rich­mond and Ful­ham and one or two from the host church.  We ran the gamut of skill: me at the bot­tom really, then our three teenage girls who formed a gig­gling gag­gle all day, then the seri­ous ringers who have been at it for many, many years.

I’ll explain a tiny bit about what we do.  First we ring what are called “rounds,” in order from the high­est sound (the light­est bell) down the num­bers to the low­est sound (the heav­i­est bell), “la-la-la-la-la-la.”  It’s sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult to do, to be every sin­gle time fourth — for exam­ple — in order, every SIN­GLE time.  A frac­tion of  a sec­ond early and you CLANG onto the sound of the bell before you.  A frac­tion of a sec­ond late and the bell after you CLANGS onto your sound.  Every sin­gle time you pull the bell you have a fresh chance to get it right, which makes it a very sat­is­fy­ing, instant result.  No delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion nec­es­sary!  But every mis­take is intensely pub­lic and pointed to YOU.

Then once we’ve estab­lish good con­sis­tent rounds, some­one (the per­son called the con­duc­tor) begins to “call changes.”  That is, he or she shouts, “Four to five,” and you on the fourth bell switch places with the fifth.  The fifth fol­lows the third and you take fifth’s place.  The you have to pay close atten­tion to what the con­duc­tor tells you to do next, but ALSO what he tells the fifth to do, since you’re fol­low­ing him!  I find it incred­i­bly chal­leng­ing, but every­one tells me that even­tu­ally, fol­low­ing the direc­tions becomes easy.  The rules of change-ringing (as it’s called, when you begin to change places) means no bell can move more than one spot at a time.  Also, the bells must be con­ducted back into “rounds” before we can be told to “stand,” which means to stop ring­ing.  I can­not imag­ine being the con­duc­tor and keep­ing it all in my head!

The more advanced ringers ring what are called “Meth­ods”, where the “changes” have been made into pat­terns and mem­o­rized, with names like “Cam­bridge Sur­prise Minor” or “Kent Tre­ble Bob Major.”  I truly can­not imag­ine ever man­ag­ing to mem­o­rize a method.  But it could hap­pen.  Never say die!

We moved through the grave­yard, solemnly pay­ing homage to the beau­ti­ful and touch­ing ash memo­ri­als in the ancient wall.

From Hare­field we trav­elled to the most beau­ti­ful church I have ever seen, called Chal­font St Giles.

This church is located in the area called, as you might imag­ine, “The Chal­fonts.”  These lit­tle vil­lages, with “The Ruis­lips” and “The Slaugh­ters” and “The Riss­ing­tons” make up what one of my favorite mys­tery authors calls “guests at a din­ner party.”  As in, “I’ve invited the Chal­fonts, but they can’t come, so I’ll ask the Ruis­lips instead.”

Chal­font St Giles was warm and cozy, over­looked by Cromwell and there­fore still dec­o­rated with 14th-century reli­gious paintings.

We rang St Giles’s eight bells, mar­vel­ling at how dif­fer­ent they all felt from Harefield.

I wan­dered around the ring­ing cham­ber read­ing what are called “peal boards,” which list the con­duc­tor and ringers who have gath­ered in the past to ring a suc­cess­ful “method,” which usu­ally takes about three hours.  Our host pointed out to me Mr J.D. Shanklin.  “This chap found time between ring­ing peals to dis­cover the hole in the ozone layer.”

After our ring, the more hardy among us climbed the extremely steep and ancient bell­tower stairs to see the orig­i­nal tim­ber fit­tings hold­ing up the bells.  Six hun­dred years old.

Even more touch­ing, more per­sonal, and more stun­ning to me than the tim­ber itself, was this object, the orig­i­nal lad­der lead­ing to the bells.  Look­ing at this lad­der brings vividly to my mind the thou­sands of feet that climbed them from time immemo­r­ial, tak­ing an hour or two out of their busy medieval, Renais­sance, Eliz­a­bethan, Vic­to­rian, 21st cen­tury lives to care for the bells of St Giles.

From St Giles we went to Chal­font St Peter, a heav­ier ring of eight bells the heav­i­est of which weighed about 1000 pounds.  Here the peal boards seemed to me the ulti­mate in Eng­lish­ness.  The names!  New­ton, Thack­eray, Whit­ting­ton.  And a trib­ute to Mr E George Swift, who rang until he was 92 and then asked that a peal be rung on his birth­day every year until he would have turned 100.

From St Peter we drove to the gor­geous, impos­si­bly mag­i­cal vil­lage of Den­ham in Buck­ing­hamshire, home to many tele­vi­sion dra­mas.  You can see why.

How beau­ti­ful that house must be in the spring, when the vines are heavy with flow­ers.  And this house!  Can you imag­ine liv­ing in such a picture-perfect place?  It would make you behave dif­fer­ently, break­ing into atro­cious blank verse at the drop of a hat, wear­ing ruffs around your neck.

We had a lovely lunch in the Green Man pub — fil­let of sea bream with a rich root veg­etable dauphi­noise and pick­led fen­nel, deli­cious — and then walked through the vil­lage to St Mary’s, to ring their lovely HEAVY eight bells — the tenor (the heav­i­est and there­fore low­est note) weigh­ing just over a TON.  I can assure I didn’t ring it!  But I did ring the num­ber 6 which weighed a half ton.

From there we headed to the only ten-bell church on our agenda, at Rick­mansworth, in Hertfordshire.

The sound of 10 bells being rung in rounds, once we got it per­fectly timed, was sim­ply majes­tic.  Here is a record­ing (don’t click the link if you’re sit­ting next to a sleep­ing baby or mate!) of 10 bells, ring­ing partly in rounds and partly in a method.  I think it could be a love-hate thing.  Some neigh­bors liv­ing near to churches with bells think they’re in heaven, oth­ers get sim­ply gaga at the sound every week.

We fin­ished our day at Pin­ner, just out­side Lon­don, in a lovely lit­tle crowded 8-bell cham­ber over­look­ing the nave of the church.  The organ­ist down below prac­ticed doggedly through­out our ring­ing!  The wheel that holds all the ropes — these with beau­ti­ful blue “Sal­lies” — is called a “spi­der” and is wafted into the air, high above the cham­ber, when the bells are at rest.

By this time we were all tired, cold and get­ting a bit cranky, with the con­duc­tors get­ting slightly scratchy at bad rounds or impre­cise call changes.  It was time to go home, at least for the teenagers and me, and our teachers.

We emerged in the cold twi­light feel­ing a tremen­dous sense of achieve­ment, rub­bing our sore and blis­tered hands together, chat­ter­ing about our favorite churches, the idio­syn­cra­cies of the bells, our goals and hopes and fail­ures and embar­rass­ments of the day.  We turned around in the vil­lage street to see Pin­ner St John the Bap­tist ris­ing on the hill­side in the dark.

What a com­pletely mad, bonkers, insane way to spend a day!  Thank good­ness for a good din­ner at home: John had piled tons of extra top­pings — pep­pers, mush­rooms, grilled hal­loumi cheese, Parma ham — onto ready­made piz­zas and had steamed arti­chokes.  Heaven!

So that was my ring­ing adven­ture, our “Win­ter Out­ing.”  I will miss the “Sum­mer Out­ing” when we’re at Red Gate Farm, but I’ll be in charge of orga­niz­ing it because.… drum roll… I’ve been cho­sen as the new Tower Sec­re­tary for St Mary’s Barnes!  I am very excited.  Lots of admin, lots of email, and lots of ringing.

And of course Sun­day morn­ing found me up bright and early stretch­ing tired mus­cles to ring for ser­vices at Barnes and Chiswick, feel­ing a bit mar­tyred but quite proud.  I can­not remem­ber the last time in my life that I set a very dif­fi­cult task, per­se­vered and actu­ally achieved my goal.  It’s a rare enough feel­ing once we’re past school-age, and one to be savored, what­ever the cost.

My reward for all this work was to invent some­thing Avery had for lunch at school, and came home sim­ply rav­ing about.  “Have you ever had Paris But­ter, Mummy?  It’s HEAV­ENLY!”  It was but the work of a moment to google it and find many diver­gent recipes.  The one that worked for us, melted onto grilled fil­let steaks, was this:

Paris But­ter

(makes a large banana-sized roll, keeps for up to 3 months in foil in the freezer)

250g/1 cup butter

1 tbsp each: gar­lic, shal­lots, cor­ni­chons, capers, fresh tar­ragon, fresh thyme, fresh dill, fresh chives, freshrose­mary, tomato paste, lemon zest, pine nuts, anchovy, brandy, madeira

1 tsp Dijon mustard

1 pinch each: curry pow­der, cayenne pep­per, paprika

juice of 1/2 lemon

Sim­ply throw every­thing into a food proces­sor or blender and mix until com­pletely smooth.  Roll in foil in a cylin­der shape and freeze.  Cut off one coin-shaped piece for each steak.

*************

Duty calls now.  Avery is home ill and list­less with a cold, so chicken soup is in order.  Then I’ll sit back, watch my blis­ters heal­ing, and enjoy the mem­o­ries of a mag­i­cal day out in my adopted land.  What an adven­ture it was.

This is indeed a rare sight in my life: sun­rise!  As you know, I am no morn­ing per­son.  Quite the oppo­site; I am at my very best late at night when all the expe­ri­ences of the day have fil­tered into my mind in all their vari­ety.  I tend to avoid early-morning activ­i­ties when­ever pos­si­ble, as every­thing seems quite impos­si­ble to me at 7 a.m.

How­ever, vol­un­teer­ing at Avery’s school waits for no woman, and this week saw me at an early meet­ing of the Tutor Group Rep­re­sen­ta­tives at a school mum’s house in Chelsea.  So up I got, and my reward was this lovely Lon­don sky.

There has been so much vol­un­teer­ing lately!  I always feel that since I don’t work full-time should donate all the time I can to school and else­where when­ever I can, but some­times I won­der if I’ve got in over my head.  We Tutor Reps dis­cussed hav­ing var­i­ous social events for the class par­ents, and I had to stop myself offer­ing up our house for drinks for 80.  What if it rained and we couldn’t use the gar­den and were all stuck in the kitchen, as cozy as it is?

On Fri­day I shall host my termly lun­cheon of the Lost Prop­erty vol­un­teers, which does mean stuff­ing 30 ladies into the kitchen-dining room.  I do love the lun­cheon, and have been spend­ing a lot of time in the mid­dle of the night try­ing to decide what two main dishes to cook.  A whole side of salmon, roasted in honey and soy sauce?  A crab and goats cheese tart with scal­lions and fresh thyme?  My cur­rent obses­sion: chicken meat­balls in a creamy paprika sauce?  Or the peren­nial favorite of Lil­lian Hell­man chicken, breast fil­lets baked in cheese and bread­crumbs with fresh thyme?

Lil­lian Hell­man Chicken

(serves 6)

6 bone­less chicken breast fil­lets, well-trimmed

1 1/2 cups each may­on­naise and Pecorino or Parme­san cheese, grated

juice of 1/2 lemon

2 stalks fresh thyme, leaves only

1 1/2 cups fresh breadcrumbs

1 tsp Fox Point Seasoning

hand­ful rocket/arugula leaves

In a wide, shal­low bowl or deep plate, mix the may­on­naise and cheese and lemon juice and thyme.  In another shal­low bowl or plate, mix the bread­crumbs and Fox Point Sea­son­ing.  Have a foil-lined cookie sheet ready.

Smear the chicken pieces each with the may­on­naise mix­tures, then dredge in bread­crumbs on all sur­faces.  Bake at 425F/220C for 30 min­utes.  Serve sliced on the bias in thick slices and gar­nish with rocket leaves.

**************

This recipe is a tremen­dous win­ner with men, women and chil­dren, and prob­a­bly will win hands down for Fri­day because it is fool-proof, pop­u­lar and easy.  We will all gather around two long tables and dis­cuss the var­i­ous ideas we have for get­ting the girls to “find” more of their Prop­erty.  I always feel there is some­thing rather heroic about all of us with our var­i­ous advanced degrees, reach­ing into dirty rub­bish bags to bring out mud-encrusted lacrosse boots stuffed with mouth­guards, hop­ing to find match­ing pairs.

Before that lovely event, though, tomor­row is my first train­ing day for a new vol­un­teer­ing project, Home-Start.  This effort is funded by the gov­ern­ment and sends vol­un­teers into “at-risk” house­holds with small chil­dren, try­ing to catch trau­ma­tised, depressed or just needy moth­ers and offer them help and sup­port, before the sit­u­a­tion gets so des­per­ate that the Social Ser­vices are called in.  I am a bit intim­i­dated by the idea of try­ing to help these fam­i­lies, but I reas­sure myself that many hours of train­ing will take place before I end up on somebody’s sofa hold­ing a cry­ing baby.

And today I took on a new chal­lenge: find­ing ven­dors for the Christ­mas Fair at my beloved church, home of my bell-ringing efforts.

I had such fun sell­ing Christ­mas cards, set­ting up the Christ­mas tree, and tear­ing down and clean­ing up after the fair that I’ve been tapped for a bit more respon­si­bil­ity this com­ing year.  Isn’t it hard to believe any­one is even THINK­ING about Christ­mas yet?  But we are.  So if you find your­self with a com­pany sell­ing teenager-friendly bracelets, or cash­mere throws, hand­made baby clothes or organic soaps, let me know!  How I’m going to fit this new job into also help­ing John who is head­ing up Avery’s school’s Christ­mas Fair remains to be seen.

To be hon­est, though, I’ve spent an embar­rass­ing por­tion of the last week sim­ply try­ing to get back into Lon­don time.  The older I get, the harder I find it to come back East, espe­cially after sev­eral weeks get­ting used to liv­ing five hours ear­lier.  There have been a fair num­ber of naps, and then the result­ing fair num­ber of sleep­less middle-of-the-nights.  I find myself com­ing down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, feel­ing slightly con­fused as to whether I’ll see the roar­ing wood­stove fire of Red Gate Farm, or feel­ing the warm hum of the Aga of London.

Over the week­end we kept our­selves awake by another visit to Colum­bia Road, East End site of our holly-wreath shop­ping trip before Christ­mas.  Avery is ter­ri­bly keen to live there, right now, how­ever unaf­ford­able and incon­ve­nient it may be to our West Lon­don lives.  But I can see her point.  Armed with her new cam­era, she cap­tured the sights and sounds.

Isn’t it hard to believe that this street view sim­ply hap­pened, with­out plan­ning?  And then there was this beauty.

The graf­fiti is com­pletely clever.  Check out this lit­tle mon­tage of paper fig­ures glued to the wall, their shad­ows painted in ink on the pavement.

There are many mys­te­ri­ous mes­sages to be absorbed.

One won­ders what is expressed here, besides a lovely visual image.

Finally, in need of sus­te­nance, we ambled into Cam­pa­nia Gas­trono­mia, a gor­geous Ital­ian out­post of total deli­cious­ness.  I had lovely hefty meat­balls in a gar­licky tomato sauce, John had a pump­kin and belly pork risotto, and Avery opted for a decep­tively sim­ple panno of the fresh­est moz­zarella, Parma ham, per­fect arti­san bread and fruity olive oil.

What a lovely lit­tle restau­rant.  Next time I want the meat-and-cheese plat­ter which included any num­ber of cured pork, beef and salami, and Gor­gonzola, Pecorino, buf­falo moz­zarella, ahhh…

We had one evening over the week­end to feed our­selves whilst Avery was out on the town, so I invented a dish con­tain­ing prac­ti­cally every ingre­di­ent she doesn’t like.  But you will.

Roasted Salmon on Can­nellini Bean Mash with Gor­gonzola and Parsley

(serves 4)

1 lb fresh salmon fillets

1 tbsp olive oil

sprin­kle Fox Point Seasoning

1/4 cup olive oil

2 soup-size cans can­nellini beans, drained and rinsed

6 cloves gar­lic, minced

LOTS of fresh black pepper

sprin­kle red chilli flakes

large bunch flat-leaf pars­ley, chopped roughly (leaves only)

1 tbsp light cream

 Gor­gonzola or other mild blue cheese, amount to your taste

1 tbsp tiny Eng­lish cress

Place salmon fil­lets on a foil-lined dish and driz­zle with olive oil, then sprin­kle with Fox Point.  Place in a hot oven, 425F/220C and roast for 25 minutes.

Mean­while, heat the rest of the olive oil in a large fry­ing pan.  Add beans, gar­lic, black pep­per, and red chilli flakes.  Cook over medium heat until gar­lic is soft­ened.  Add pars­ley and cook for another minute, stir­ring occa­sion­ally.  When salmon is ready to serve, stir cream into the beans and then sprin­kle over as much Gor­gonzola as you like.  Place a serv­ing of mash on each din­ner plate and top with salmon fil­let.  Sprin­kle with cress and serve hot or warm.

*************

This bean dish is a REV­E­LA­TION of com­plex fla­vors.  The salmon is almost super­flu­ous, although the com­bi­na­tions are lovely.  But a veg­e­tar­ian could make a meal of the beans.  Intensely savoury, redo­lent of gar­lic, soft and com­fort­ing yet full of robust fla­vors, this dish is a real find.

I must love you and leave you.  Avery’s break­fast tomor­row will be lemon-blueberry cake and right now, there are lemons.  And blue­ber­ries.  Must get them together.  In the mean­time, let me ded­i­cate this blog post to a loyal and enthu­si­as­tic reader, my husband’s long­time fam­ily friend Anna, who died two days ago.  She and our fam­ily shared a love of res­cue ani­mals.  Why not take a look at Save a Mex­i­can Mutt, a char­ity dear to her gen­er­ous heart.  We will miss you, Anna, and I am proud of every moment of enjoy­ment my writ­ing brought to you.

To think that 72 hours ago, this was my view… of the increas­ingly dilap­i­dated nature of our out­build­ings at Red Gate Farm.  We have our summer’s work cut out for us, repair­ing the chicken house and wood­shed.  We left in a flurry of laun­dry, scrub­bing up the house so it will be wel­com­ing to any guests who might want to use it as a retreat over the win­ter and spring.  It always seems so hard to believe sum­mer will ever come, when we leave behind a crunchy lawn, a frozen brook.

Before that brook thaws and fills with its sum­mer fam­ily of tad­poles and min­nows, we have six months of life in Lon­don to accom­plish.  We are back “home,” firmly ensconced once again in the famil­iar house, sur­rounded by friendly cats who missed us ter­ri­bly.  I am hap­pily again cook­ing with my beloved Aga whose con­stant source of warmth is a mas­sive kitty-magnet this win­ter season.

After two days of Recov­ery By Nap, Avery is back at school, how­ever reluc­tantly, and I have spent two gru­elling days at Lost Prop­erty, deal­ing with the dozen or so bags of girls’ belong­ings that the staff some­how unearthed over the hol­i­days.  Girls streamed in and out, exclaim­ing over beloved objects not seen for months, sigh­ing in dis­ap­point­ment at the sin­gle shoe that has not turned up, the house­keys they are des­per­ate not to con­fess they’ve lost, the Chem­istry notes need “right now for a test!”  They sign out the belong­ings they find, in a mean­ing­less lit­tle folder designed to make them take their respon­si­bil­i­ties a bit more seri­ously.  I know I’m not in Con­necti­cut any­more when I read their names: Ara­bella, Poppy, Flora, Astrid, Pippa.  I love Eng­land, and I love Lost Property.

The suit­cases are unpacked of all their Christ­mas trea­sures, the hol­i­day feel­ing a mil­lion years away, a dream.

Our last days at Red Gate Farm WERE like a dream, filled with vis­its from friends, vis­its to friends, for­ays into puzzle-solving…

John’s mom, back home in Iowa, mir­rored us with her puz­zle, one of my presents to her this Christ­mas, a gift only a grand­mother could love.

It is hard to imag­ine our last peace­ful, beau­ti­ful week of hol­i­day with­out pic­tur­ing a cam­era, or two, in Avery’s hands.  John gave her his old Leica for Christ­mas, then together they bought another cam­era and a macro lens to go with it.  But since these cam­eras depend on actual FILM, I have to wait to show them to you until they are all devel­oped.  Who would have thought the world would go back to film?  Still, I have the results of her exper­i­ments with my cam­era.  She was in heaven, walk­ing the prop­erty with her dad, find­ing magic in the details.

She has such a won­der­ful eye!  Even a hum­ble broken-down ham­mock achieves beauty.

The lit­tle stone puppy who spends the win­ter on the pic­nic table, with his chicken friends, has new dignity.

The hydrangea tree, always lus­cious and cel­e­bra­tory in sum­mer, and draped in rare Christ­mas light dur­ing the hol­i­day, became a sort of sculp­ture, with the barn as background.

There was one sun­set I will never for­get.  The three of us walked all around the house, look­ing at the pink, vulnerable-looking sky with wonder.

Nor­mally I race through my day with­out tak­ing the time — at that moment — to appre­ci­ate what I have.  For once, though, that sun­set evening, I looked at my stal­wart, gen­er­ous hus­band teach­ing our beau­ti­ful daugh­ter to share his pas­sion, and felt happy.  Right then.  I know I’ll never get enough of them, but that evening, I tried.

The most won­der­ful part of the over­whelm­ing, exhaust­ing, exhil­a­rat­ing hol­i­day was hav­ing so much time with Avery.  I know the clock is tick­ing on her time in our house — we spend a lot of time talk­ing about uni­ver­sity these days — so it was a lux­ury like foie gras or a beach vaca­tion, to have her around all the time.

We had one last lunch with dear Jill, Joel and the girls at their local diner (where the wait­ress says, “Hey, Jane and Molly!  Happy New Year!”), and luck­ily Avery had her super cam­era with her.

It is impos­si­ble to believe that we will miss six months of my nieces’ lives before July rolls around.  How they will have changed and grown!  Jane will be the age Avery was when we bought Red Gate Farm.

Life goes by so quickly that I really can’t think about miss­ing so much of Jane’s and Molly’s.  Where did this lit­tle Avery go, anyway?

Nor can I think too much about leav­ing Red Gate Farm behind.  Will we ever see it in the spring or fall again, or only in the intense months of sum­mer and winter?

Anne, David and Kate came along for a bril­liant bagel brunch — Kate’s first bagel! — and a nice long chat, for the first time dur­ing the hol­i­days.  Some­times I think we are too ready to let our inter­ac­tions with our beloved neigh­bors to be short and sweet, with the lux­ury of hav­ing them across the road.

It’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent mood to sit in the sun­shine — with dusty motes show­ing just how hard it is to keep that house clean! — and really dis­cuss pol­i­tics, life, Avery’s upcom­ing sum­mer pho­tog­ra­phy camp, child-raising, how much screen-time is too much for a three-year-old.  No one has ever taken Avery more seri­ously as a real per­son, since she was seven years old, as Anne and David.  Their spe­cial brand of respect for her is irre­place­able, and Kate’s total devo­tion not to be for­got­ten.  We were hav­ing too much fun even to take a picture.

By this point, the last day of our hol­i­days, I was in such a state of happy exhaus­tion that I almost skipped my last bell­ring­ing out­ing.  “Don’t do it just to prove it can’t defeat you,” Avery advised, but I couldn’t help it.  So often I do not want to go — it’s hard and scary and intim­i­dat­ing — but I am never sorry when I do.  It was a bril­liant after­noon of bell­ring­ing in Brew­ster, against the back­drop of another beau­ti­ful sunset.

That place has given me a great deal of hap­pi­ness, as have the peo­ple within it.  Are all bell­ring­ing enthu­si­asts as sim­ply wel­com­ing as I have found?  Watch­ing the really good ringers try a “Lon­don Minor” was com­pletely intim­i­dat­ing.  Never!

One last sup­per in my farm­house kitchen

The Ulti­mate Burger

(makes three)

1 lb bison mince

sprin­kle of Fox Point Seasoning

ripe toma­toes, sliced

red onions, sliced

avo­ca­dos, sliced

dol­lops of blue or goats cheese

dol­lops of crema di car­ciofi e aglio (creamy arti­choke and gar­lic dip)

hand­ful rocket/arugula leaves

3 eggs

toasted whole wheat rolls

In a very hot skil­let, fry the burg­ers to your desired level of done­ness.  At the end of cook­ing, place cheese on top of burg­ers.  Pile every­thing onto the wheat roll, then fry eggs (again, to desired level of done­ness) and top burg­ers with eggs.  Sup­ply vast num­bers of napkins.

*****************

 Of course this burger will ben­e­fit from the egg’s being plucked, as ours were, warm from under the hen owned by the cou­ple who adopted lit­tle Jes­sica the kit­ten two sum­mers ago and given to us with love.  I can’t promise any other egg will taste the same.

Now it is time for me to con­coct an Avery-less sup­per as she spends the evening with friends, this cold, grey Jan­u­ary Lon­don night.  Happy Fri­day the 13th!

Christ­mas — after all the plan­ning, choos­ing, trav­el­ling, envelope-licking, parcel-wrapping, food-shopping and antic­i­pa­tion –finally arrived.  ‘Twas the sea­son of unex­pected knocks on the door, vis­i­tors bring­ing presents on a rush of cold air, blue-flamed logs burn­ing in the fire­place, dozens of can­dles flick­er­ing, cars pulling up into the dri­ve­way and let­ting out the peo­ple we’ve waited months to see.  My beau­ti­ful mother, for example!

What a year she has had.  There has been the sad­ness and anx­i­ety over my father, her adjust­ing to being left alone to deal with the end­less prob­lems our child­hood home has pre­sented her with, and then, last month, a heart scare that brought unex­pected surgery and recov­ery.  My brother and sis­ter have been there to sup­port her through every­thing, but I have been able to see her only twice, wor­ry­ing from afar and feel­ing that awful tug of being very, very far away.  To be able to hug her and chat with her, gos­sip and eat together, made Christ­mas a real gift.  And noth­ing says daugh­ter love like… dev­illed eggs!  Her very favorite.

Mom’s Dev­illed Eggs

(makes 2 dozen)

12 eggs

1/3 cup mayonnaise

1 tbsp dijon mustard

1 tsp curry powder

sea salt and fresh black pep­per to taste

paprika for dusting

Place eggs in a saucepan and cover with cold water.  Bring to a rolling boil and then turn off heat, cov­er­ing the pan.  Leave eggs in boiled water for 15 min­utes, then drain water and place eggs in a bowl and cover with run­ning cold water for minute or two.  Peel eggs and cut in half length­wise, then remove yolks and place in a small bowl.  Mash with a potato masher and mix in all over ingre­di­ents except paprika.  Arrange egg whites on a plat­ter and spoon the yolk mix­ture into each.  Dust with paprika and serve.

*************

Christ­mas Eve saw all of us gath­ered around in the toasty holiday-ish house, my mother admir­ing the Christ­mas tree with its mass of orna­ments old and new, my mother in law tak­ing loads of pho­tos, John tor­ment­ing Jane (or was it the other way around)…

Between stir­ring things and set­ting the table, I man­aged to get Molly up against the “mea­sur­ing door.”  She’s such a tiny lit­tle sprout.

We ate.  My, how we ate!  Oys­ter stew (I had bought an entire GAL­LON of oys­ters, which sounds insane, but we ate every last one, eventually).

We also had four-cheese mac­a­roni and cheese for the kids, and as a nod to my child­hood tra­di­tions, a pile of rather dread­ful egg rolls.

And I suc­cess­fully lit the hydrangea tree can­dles, very lucky to have hit upon a nearly breeze­less night.

Avery indulged her new pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy, brav­ing the chilly night air.

Anne and David popped over to deliver Kate for a visit with her beloved chum Molly.  Their piano duet added a lot to the Christ­mas Eve festivities.

Christ­mas Day dawned cold and fair — no sign of snow this whole hol­i­day, as a direct result, I think, of John’s mom hav­ing given us all incred­i­bly cool snow­shoes for Christ­mas!  We stare at them long­ingly.  Under the tree were the per­fect presents for and from every­one.  Avery gave me this print.  So, so Avery.

I gave John eye­lashes.  Yes, eye­lashes, for our Fiat Cinque­cento in Lon­don.  Here’s how the reac­tion to that present went:

Me: “You don’t look thrilled.  Don’t you want the car to have eyelashes?”

John: “Well, it feels slightly… emasculating.”

Avery: “Daddy, you drive a Cinque­cento.  That ship has already sailed.”

There were the usual iPhoto books and reg­u­lar books — I gave John a first edi­tion of Vita Sackville-West’s his­tory of her ances­tral home, Knole.  Avery of course got a camera.

Or two cam­eras.  Or three, I for­get.  She and John and John’s mom share the obsession.

John gave me hats for my eggs, as befits a girl who gives her hus­band eye­lashes for his car.

We packed our­selves up and jumped in the car to go to Jill and Joel’s.  About five min­utes into the drive, Avery let out a blood-curdling scream.  “DON’T DO THAT WHEN I’M DRI­VING!” John screeched in return.  “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m really sorry, but what just hap­pened was totally scream-worthy.  A MOUSE just jumped from the back­seat ONTO MY COL­LAR­BONE and ric­o­cheted off onto the floor!”

Every­one screamed.  We pulled off the road and jumped out of the car.  “Open all the doors!”  We stood around in the cold.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to get back in,” John said.  “We have to go; it’s Christmas.”

So we climbed gin­gerly back in and pulled into the road again.

“Awk­ward silence,” Avery said.

About ten min­utes later Rose­mary screamed.

“I didn’t think I would!” she apol­o­gized.  “I thought, ‘If it turns up again, there’s no ele­ment of sur­prise.  We know he’s here.  I won’t scream.’  But it appears to be a reflex!”

“How much longer is this drive?” Avery asked.

It was the longest 40 min­utes of our lives.

We arrived and leaped out of the car, leav­ing all the doors open and reveal­ing our story to our bewil­dered audi­ence.  “Put Snow­ball in the car and shut all the doors,” I sug­gested, refer­ring to their homi­ci­dal cat.  But it was deter­mined that a bet­ter plan was just to leave the doors open as long as pos­si­ble.  John dis­cov­ered a dis­gust­ing mouse nest in the first-aid kit area in the back and cleared it out.  “I think these are our air bags,” he said, ges­tur­ing to the pile of shred­ded nest material.

UGH.

The beauty of Jill’s dec­o­ra­tions washed away all the mou­si­ness, how­ever.  What a gor­geous house.

Christ­mas din­ner was sub­lime, and many more presents exchanged.  Among them my beau­ti­ful new mer­cury glass can­dle­sticks from my sis­ter, which graced our table on Box­ing Day.

We ate our­selves silly — Joel’s per­fect roasted turkey, my cheesy spinach and stuff­ing with fresh sage, sausage and cream, shred­ded pota­toes baked with cream cheese.  Then Jill brought out a pile of notes she’d found in her child­hood closet, writ­ten when she was Avery’s age, and she read them aloud.  Lists like “Things I hate about my life,” and then on the other side a much shorter list, “Things that are OK about my life,” and “Things to Do” which included goals like “Get Chris inter­ested in me” — with a check­mark next to it!  “Get super skinny,” “Be Vale­dic­to­rian” — another check­mark.  We laughed till we cried.

Finally home, on a beau­ti­ful moon­lit night, to see the house nes­tled in the cor­ner of the road, look­ing demure and cozy.

It has been the sort of time when we reap the ben­e­fits of all the rela­tion­ships we sow dur­ing the year.  Liv­ing so far away as we do, it some­times feels daunt­ing to stay close to all the peo­ple who “peo­ple” our life.  The next few days brought vis­its from our friends Mark and Lil­ian, who adopted the kitty Jes­sica two sum­mers ago, and Rol­lie and Judy who laughed till THEY cried over the story of the Car Ride With Santa Mouse.  We vis­ited Young Rol­l­lie and Tri­cia to meet their baby goats, and to see how much Even Younger Rol­lie has grown.

We drove into nearby Ridge­field to Luc’s Cafe to devour piles of frites and exchange Christ­mas greet­ings with our friends Shel­ley and Erik, Cas­san­dra and Rebecca.  Just look what Cas­san­dra made for us.

The most thought­ful gift I can ever imag­ine.  Thank you, Cassandra.

Through all the fes­tiv­i­ties, I looked from my mother to John’s mother, feel­ing ter­ri­bly grate­ful that with all they have been through, they are still here with us to cel­e­brate.  Look at the gor­geous pho­to­graph John’s mom took of the three gen­er­a­tions of my mom’s family.

Many beau­ti­ful images of our hol­i­day came from Avery’s new cam­era!  She has signed up for a pho­tog­ra­phy camp this sum­mer, although I can­not really see how she can learn much more.  She cap­tures so much.

Mom, Andy, Jill and I spent one after­noon together just hang­ing around their house with the two girls, watch­ing high­lights of the year in sports, play­ing board games the girls got for Christ­mas, prepar­ing a huge tray of scal­loped pota­toes to go with the ham I had brought, roast­ing in the oven.  John, his mom, Avery and Joel trooped off to the movies.  The per­fect way for all of us to spend the afternoon.

Finally with many hugs and kisses and “Merry Christ­mas” greet­ings, Mom and Andy went home.  To com­fort us from the sep­a­ra­tion, John and I cel­e­brated our 22nd wed­ding anniversary!

The best way to cel­e­brate was with a long walk across the preser­va­tion land, with our res­i­dent pho­tog­ra­pher on hand to doc­u­ment all the flora.

And to recover from all the Christ­mas food, we made the per­fect savoury dish.

Egg­plant Salsa

(serves 6)

4 tbsps olive oil

2 large egg­plants, peeled and diced

a large white onio, chopped

6 cloves gar­lic, minced

2 large cans whole plum tomatoes

large bunch flat-leaf pars­ley, chopped

sea salt and black pep­per to taste

1 1/2 cups bas­mati rice, steamed

grated Parme­san to sprinkle

Sim­ply saute the egg­plant, onion and gar­lic in the olive oil until soft.  Add toma­toes, squeez­ing them into pieces as you add them.  Sim­mer, stir­ring occa­sion­ally, for at least 1 hour.  At this point the salsa can sit until you want to heat it up to eat it.  The fla­vors improve over time.  When you are ready to eat, add the chopped pars­ley and sea­son to taste.  Serve over steamed rice and top with cheese.

************

This is the per­fect anti­dote to all that stuff­ing and turkey!  And if you need another such idea, how about a mas­sive pot of spinach soup?

Spinach Soup

(serves at least 6)

2 tbsps butter

6 cloves gar­lic, chopped roughly

1 white onion, chopped roughly

2 lbs spinach leaves, washed

pinch fresh nutmeg

4 cups chicken (or duck) stock, or enough to cover about 2/3 of spinach in pot

1/2 cup light cream

Heat but­ter in a  heavy-bottomed pot.  Saute gar­lic and onion until soft, then add spinach and nut­meg and cover with stock.  Sim­mer until spinach is soft, then blitz with a hand blender and add cream.

New Year’s Eve came, and so did Anne and David and Katie, for cas­soulet and ice cream.  And the morn­ing brought an intense desire to turn the house from Christ­mas into New Year’s.  We flew about, pack­ing boxes, drag­ging trees and wreaths into the woods to join those from last year, and the year before that.  John hoovered, John’s mom and I cleaned the sil­ver and moved fur­ni­ture!  And all was tidy and fresh.

And so happy 2012 to all of you, dear read­ers.  May we all look back on 2011 with under­stand­ing and com­pas­sion for its pit­falls and losses, its joys and sor­rows.  I hope the New Year brings you all you wish for.