I catalog the few jars in the pantry that will survive the trip back east. Roma tomatoes canned in their thickened juice. Homemade harissa from my sweet, fleshy Alma paprika peppers. Spicy green schug, packed with herbs and hot green chilies. Smooth black currant jam that tastes like grape, but muskier and more interesting.
I look at all the things in my freezer that I’ll have to leave here: chive oil, frozen shell beans, smoked eggplant. My eyes canvass the stuff I’ve made that won’t last the week: the pot of cream sitting on my counter solidifying into the pudding of crème fra?che, the homemade cheese in my fridge that I mash and mix with heavy cream for Hank’s first cottage cheese. I dip my spoon into the cheese, pull out a divot, and mix it with the harissa: delicious. I pull out another divot and mix it with some black currant jam: another world of good. I spread a heel of bread with jam, then another with cheese, then spicy green schug, and the flavors swirl up and around my head, and I experience the familiar flavor wheel of cooking on the line on a busy night, the endless parade of strong tastes and bright colors.
And finally I know. The dream I have for my cooking life doesn’t live and die in the professional kitchen. My affliction belongs here. It lives in both my successes and my mistakes. In the batches of overfermented sauerkraut I’ve tossed over the fence. The black currant jam that tastes like a feral grape. The thin skins of freshly dug potatoes that pop at the bite. The ripe face of a cut tomato gushing all over my morning toast. All my years of nearsighted devotion to tiny plates culminate in this moment: This is as close range as my cooking bug can get. It was so near to me that I couldn’t see that I was standing on top of it. The best food is fleeting, and unlike Aaron and me, it tolerates no wanderlust. Its flavors don’t travel.
—
“Have you enrolled Hank in pre-K yet?” my friends in Brooklyn email me to ask.
“No. God. Already?”
When I hesitate to enroll my crawling toddler on a waiting list for his school career, they call it. They’ve seen it happen before.
“You’re not coming back.”
I insist to the contrary. When the first frost arrives to kill the tomatoes, the old familiar feeling of seasonal migration returns. As I tug the chilled red tomatoes from the vines to make one final batch of tomato sauce, summer feels over. It’s time to go back to New York, our city, to our friends and our work. But when I walk into Aaron’s studio to check on his packing progress, I’m doubtful. The nine-foot-tall anchor piece he’s making for his winter show in Berlin—an intricately carved wooden sculpture that weighs an actual ton—is really amazing, maybe the best thing he’s ever made, and obviously unfinished.
“Are we…taking that back?” I ask, vowing then and there not to let myself and Hank ride in the truck that will be pulling that behemoth.
“Actually, I think it’s too big.” He sighs.
“For the trailer?”
“No. For my Brooklyn studio.”
“Oh.”
And so, just like that, we decide to stay in Two Inlets for the winter.
It will be a lark, I think, a new unexpected move within a lifetime of unexpected moves that have begun to settle into an all-too-predictable pattern. Ironically, now that we have power at the house, our days in the woods have grown more convenient than our life in Brooklyn with a baby, navigating the inconvenient, dense adult playground that is New York.
Then just when the first chilly fall wind arrives to shake all the dry leaves from the trees, the economy dramatically crashes on the news. It appears that it has taken the luxury market down with it. With growing anxiety we assume that no one will be particularly keen to buy a giant, expensive sculpture right now, and that suddenly, we no longer have an income. Our freeing choice to stay at home in Minnesota becomes instead the—unthinkable—most practical thing to do. Our personal economy has always run on hope, though, and for the first time I trust it and classify this situation as temporary. Nevertheless, the familiar feeling of being broke that I’ve known in the past settles around me like an old worn afghan—dusty but garishly bright.
I knew we’d one day move back home, but I didn’t know it would be so soon. The upside is that we have stopped moving. The downside is that for the first time in recent years, I do not have a job and I am not in a place to get one. Aaron works long days and nights in the studio making his best work to date, for which there are no guaranteed sales. He continues to knock away in the studio, the familiar sound of his carving mallet echoing out over the creek, because that is just what he does.
Over the phone, my mom frets, although she’s happy that we’ve expanded and modernized our place. Even with its original gappy floor—“next, you need to replace that”—our house now registers a full two steps above a hovel. But she worries about my stove. “You can’t bake in that old oven,” she says, and she is not wrong. So she buys us a new one, a really beautiful stove with a hammered brown-coppery finish and five burners, big enough to fit my canning kettles and side projects at the same time. I no longer have to light my oven through the blowhole with a long match as I did with the Roper. Now I have burners that poof alight with a gentle push and a light reassuring click-click-click.
Armed with a proper piece of equipment, I can now do what I do. Only when cooking, when I’m standing in front of the stove skimming the gray scum from a cauldron’s worth of shaggy beef bones, do I know that we’re not lost. As I ladle the hot broth over bowls of Swiss chard, they wilt and float to the surface, and I know we’ll be okay. I’ll scrub the rough wooden floorboards until they shine, as Ruth did, and call my kitchen a cooking school. Cooking at Hazelbrush. I’ll invite people to eat, to drink—and everything will come from the garden. They’ll sit around my counter on wooden stools and I’ll serve them five courses, with wine pairings, each set with clean silver as is done in fine dining. I don’t fret over such technicalities as licensing—it’s a cooking class, like my own modern-day forest speakeasy. The money I take in will be like egg money, enough to keep us richly fed. I’ll fill the deep freezer with local animals and blanched garden vegetables and the cupboards with pickles and jam and canned tomatoes, and if things get really bad, I’ll dig deeper into books of peasant cookery; I’ll confit the wild ducks on the creek if I have to.
—
Before we know it, winter comes. I’d forgotten about the winter.