Hillery Occasionally

What I was going to tell you about next was how the first thing I did when The Man and I got back to New York was to go shopping, but shopping for things I had not been able to buy in the middle of nowhere. How it’s difficult to shift gears between complete solitude and the diverse energized populous of New York City. But today I find myself sealing up boxes, shipping all of my things back to Brooklyn. Not because I’ll need them for our next stint in the city, but because I’m going back alone…for good.

The truth is, I’ve been pondering the idea of leaving for some time. And after the decision was made, I kept looking around this place wondering what I thought I was doing here. How could a happy existence in a place that is not just foreign, but so not me, have ever seemed possible. Then I remember that whenever those thoughts struck me in the past, I looked over at The Man and was flooded with love and contentedness. That love is still there, but at some point the give and take of it dwindled and the loneliness of life in that vacuum was overwhelming.

Not until today, my last day here, did I allow myself to dwell on the beauty I experienced here, not just in the landscape but in those stages of love we have passed through. I’ve never given myself so completely to anyone and for a long time I was accepted and treasured in a manner I’ve not before known. These are the things I will miss and allowing myself this awareness is what is making it difficult for me to leave. The hope of having it all back is what made me stay as long as I did.

So as I wash my clothes and pack my bags, I’m struck with images that will stay with me forever. The Man’s face in the morning light before he wakes up, the lights on in our house at dusk seen against the mountains from up the hill on the deck of the sauna, waking up at the hot springs and negotiating our way through
the snowy woods to the warm water, among many others. And suddenly it’s hard to leave all of that promise and feeling behind even though I know I must…leave for good.

At least I’m hoping the good will come when I get there. Going home, I have to piece my life back together and I’m challenging myself to do so in a way that will feel more satisfying than the life I left behind when I came here. Because hindsight can make you distrust your own judgment and I don’t want to spend the next six months resenting myself, or The Man, for taking the chances we did. I want to be able to see this time I’ve spent and this love I’ve given as yet another length of rope that if I hadn’t taken the trouble to climb, I wouldn’t be where I’m going. I hope I can.

Not everyone has whole salmon lying around the house and this is probably why I had difficulty finding a good recipe for salmon chowder or salmon stock. We were lucky enough to have two whole sockeyes delivered the other day and after one was filleted and the other cut up for steaks, I decided to make something out of the leftovers. Here is what I came up with!

Salmon Stock

Choose a pot big enough to accommodate the size/amount of fish heads and bones you have available. Start by sautéing roughly chopped onions, celery, and carrots in a small amount of butter. Once the onions have become translucent add some dry white wine, enough to give juice to the bottom of your pan. Add about a tablespoon of whole peppercorns (white are preferred, but black or a mix will do), at least five sprigs of fresh thyme and maybe a half-teaspoon of salt. These measurements will depend on the bulk of you batch. Place the fish heads and bones (cleaned with gills removed) in the pot and add just enough water to cover the contents. Bring to a boil and simmer for twenty minutes. You will notice a light brown foam emerging as the stock cooks. You can try to remove it while the stock simmers, but I find this tedious and not very efficient. It is important not to overcook, so after the stock has simmered remove it from heat and let stand for ten minutes. Prepare a colander lined with cheesecloth (at least four layers) and strain the broth, removing all solids and most of the foam. The stock is now complete and should be refrigerated or frozen immediately, lasting three days in the refrigerator and up to two months in the freezer.

Salmon Chowder

6 tbsps butter
1 small onion (finely diced)
1 small leek (finely diced)
4 tbsps flour
3 cups salmon stock
3 cups whole milk (heated)
6 to 8 boiling potatoes (peeled and cubed)
2 cups frozen corn
fresh salmon meat (use your leftovers as I did, but aim for a pound)
¼ cup red pepper (finely diced)
¼ cup fresh dill (chopped)
¼ cup dry white wine
1 tsp salt
ground pepper to taste
dash paprika

Sauté the leeks and onions in the butter over low heat for about five minutes, then whisk in the flour and cook for three minutes. Turn your heat up to medium-high and add the milk and stock, bring to a boil stirring frequently. Add the potatoes and salt and simmer on medium heat for ten to fifteen minutes.

At this point you want to cut your salmon into bite-sized pieces, making sure there are no bones. If you have steak meat rather than filet, you may want to cook the pieces in the soup first and then take them out to more easily remove the bones and chop the meat.

Add the corn and salmon and continue to simmer for about five minutes until the potatoes are soft and the salmon slightly firm. Finish with the dill, red pepper, white wine, paprika, and salt and pepper to taste.

Next time I’m going to try it with mushrooms. If you discover any improvements, let me know!

My garden is coming to the point where its contents are actually recognizable as precursors to their eventual result. Since I started my seeds in little incubated pods in March, this has been a long time coming.
Having lived my entire adult life up to this year in Manhattan and Brooklyn, this is my first gardening experience so forgive me for the many pictures. I’m just so excited to see my babies growing up! As The Man says, “Soon we’ll be eating our own.”

Up on the deck in the planters we built in the spring, we’ve already had two harvests of beans and mixed lettuces.
The carrots are maturing nicely alongside beets and our Portugal peppers are finally starting to turn red. While the rest of my herbs are inside, the basil flourishes in the hot sun.
I’ve been making pesto!

We have a big animal-feeding trough out front and I transplanted all my tomato plants there as soon as we got back in June.
The deer decided, “Lunch!” So we surrounded it with chicken wire. It’s very dense in there now, but the little guys seem to be doing well. I’ll have to figure out another place to plant them next year so I can space them out a bit.

Before we left for Montreal I dug out a new plot with a pick-ax and a shovel. The earth here is all sediment and rocks and the weather is usually sunny with the temperature in the nineties, so it was quite a job. I planted potatoes in most of it to break up the soil for next year and sowed some spinach, mixed greens, and parsley in the shadier part.
It was a boon to see so much progress when we got home.

Of course, I’m already thinking about next year and more plots. I want raspberries and strawberries, maybe where the potatoes are now. I’m thinking of moving the feeding trough and digging out a bigger space for the tomatoes out front in the Southern exposure. 
The Man planted a grapevine a few years ago that climbs up a pot to the deck and we planted another one on the side in June. How long does it take to plant a vineyard?!

Having spent the last two weeks in Montreal, sleeping in a hotel and eating in restaurants, I am reminded of one of the many annoying foreign customers I used to have to deal with as a waiter. Contemplating the breakfast menu at the French bistro where I worked, an attractive woman looked up at me and, in dismay, announced in a thick European accent, “This is not my favorite breakfast.”

Not knowing how else to respond, I smiled. Then came a long succession of carefully composed questions through which the woman was clearly trying to fashion something akin to her favorite breakfast. Could the soft-boiled eggs be boiled hard? Were olives available? Capers? Multigrain toast? By the time we got to mozzarella cheese, she was exasperated by my inability to meet what she considered to be quite basic requirements. “Why?” she asked. “Because this is a French restaurant,” I replied, before I could stop myself and think of a way to cushion the blow of the obvious. Perhaps neither of us had had her coffee yet. All this lady could muster was, “But you are not French!”

I told this story many times at the restaurant, comforting my peers in the wait-until-you-hear-this-one camaraderie that carries one through the rudeness, cheapness, and lack of sophistication you have to swallow when you work in the service industry. Now, snatched from my fifteen-year bubble of New Yorker-ness and finding myself in the most unexpected places, I’m on the lady’s side. When I finally found a real bagel shop in Montreal I had to take my bounty back to my hotel to administer the schmear. They didn’t even have toasters there and all the cream cheese was sold in prepackaged to go cartons. The sacrilege!

That said, The Man and I did manage to eat very well in this town and since Montreal had little else to offer us I thought I’d stick to saying something nice rather than nothing at all and share our recommendations.

Alexandre Restaurant Fraincais (1454 Rue Peel) A basic bistro with reasonable prices and reliable fare, their Steak Frites and Salade Niçoise are undeniably authentic. Café tables on the sidewalk afford an intimate view of other downtown diners going to and fro as well as the opportunity to smoke should you so desire.

Le Pois Penché (1230 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest) Much more than a bistro, this space is inspired-going-on-gaudy with red velvet seats and red leather banquets set against florid faux French modernist paintings. The food, however, is beyond reproach. Fresh oysters, classic French salads, lobster risotto with a full half a tail, and gorgeous, richly prepared steaks. The wine list begs reckless abandon, but many lovely offerings are available by the glass.

Japonais Sushi Zenya (486 rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest) Tucked away upstairs from busy Catherine Street traffic, this dark and lovely sushi restaurant is the next best thing to Blue Ribbon on Sullivan Street in New York. No higher compliment is possible, so I’ll leave it at that.

Le Club Chasse et Pêche (423 St Claude) Definitely the best place we dined on the entire trip, I might even return to Montreal just for a meal here. Considering their website in advance, I noticed the menu was slight though eccentric. Our phenomenal waiter filled in all the blanks for us at the table, including explaining what we could expect if we ordered the “hot and solid meal,” which that evening was a 32 ounce filet mignon. He even persuaded us to parse our appetizers into separate courses to share, exhibiting no concern over turning our table. We chose one of their classic starters, suckling pig risotto garnished with foie gras. The wine list was again an invitation to hedonism, but we were well directed within our price range. Declining dessert, we were sent after dinner drinks on the house. Everything was amazing!

You may not be able to get a decent pizza or a bagel with a schmear in Montreal, but guess what—it’s not New York City. Once I came to terms with that obvious fact, I noticed that there were classic French patisseries everywhere and an embarrassment of very high quality foie gras. The service was excellent virtually everywhere we went, with nearly every waiter speaking both French and English fluently. We ate so well we never once had room for dessert.

Can I think of anything else to say that’s nice about Montreal? Well, they have a nice park…right in the middle of the city. I’m terrible!

Back on the train!  This morning was our third trip to Penn Station, The Man’s and mine, in less than two weeks.  There was Boston and then a day trip to Trenton, New Jersey and now we are aboard the Adirondack 69 to Montreal.  For various personal reasons, we are taking a rather zigzag route back to The No Place, going from New York to Montreal and then on to Vancouver and then to our part of interior British Columbia.

It may seem a little strange to you, the phrase, “personal reasons,” popping up in this space…because often it feels, to me, that there are no taboos here—nothing that is off limits for discussion.  While that is true about myself, there is now The Man to consider and I think it only fair to say that he is on the fence about being discussed here.

A friend of mine who writes profiles for The New Yorker, even though he is married and perhaps especially because he is often in the business of tattle tailing on the more peculiar weaknesses of the human condition, says he would never date anyone who wrote a blog.  While I see his point, I feel I take care to protect my most intimate relations…even and perhaps especially the guilty ones.  I never name The Man, nor have I named my parents when I discuss them.  Furthermore, I do not snipe; no spats show up word for word the next day for anyone to comment on or judge.  I don’t dish on the sex life.  Few gory details are to be had at all, in fact.  I haven’t even told you about our first date, which is a lovely story by the way, because it hasn’t been relevant to anything I’ve felt like analyzing about my life or the world I see around me.  To my mind, what’s worth mentioning here are the interactions and relationships that have and are currently rearranging my perspective on the world in general and changing the specific circumstances of my life.  Right now, and for these last months, The Man falls into that category on a daily basis.  While I’ve tried to explain this to him (and for now he accepts it), he still grunts occasionally at the mention of the blog.

So, for now, various episodes of our travels and my life will remain under wraps. These are innocent personal matters that, were we to be dining with you, The Man would speak of freely. But they are his personal matters as well as mine, and he is on the fence, and I must remain respectful.

But let me take you back to Spain. It was a big decision, whether or not to make the trip to Madrid for The Man’s opening there in April. We’d just gotten back to New York ten days before we would have to leave and were living together there for the first time, with the kid staying in the picture…and my roommate too, in my small two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. But after much deliberation and last minute arrangements, we were on our way!

Not only was it my first time to Spain, I’d never accompanied The Man to one of his openings. While I was not looking forward to the trans-Atlantic flight, as I am deathly afraid of flying where an emergency landing is next to impossible, the excitement of the excursion and the comfort of intimate company overwhelmed my fears.

Madrid is a beautifully kept, one might even say manicured, smaller European city. Almost everyone speaks a little English and they are kind and understanding when visitors stumble with phrasebook Spanish, as we did. It took us forty-five minutes to accomplish the purchase of said phrasebook at the department store, but that was our fault for not thinking ahead. Try it sometime, asking for Spanish-English conversational book of translation when you can say nothing more than “gracias…” Go ahead, I dare you.

The gallery arranged a lovely hotel for us, but with two twin beds put together for a king…and on wheels. Mind the gap, indeed. I knew enough to expect very little ice in cocktails, shops closing in the middle of the day, unfamiliar cuisine—travel to a foreign country is always an experience of a different way of life…but not being able to snuggle your lovely through the night? That was one thing I didn’t expect and for which I was unable to account.

Even so, one makes do. Once we were settled in at the hotel, we went to the gallery to meet and greet and make sure the paintings were arranged appropriately for the opening the next evening. On arriving were graciously informed that the paintings…had not arrived. We’d been slightly concerned about this possibility, due to extenuating circumstances photographing and shipping the work from the middle of nowhere. But in twenty years of exhibiting The Man has never had his paintings not make it in time and he was optimistic that everything would come together at the last minute. He was even in good spirits once given the bad news. I was not so cool. I managed to keep it together while at the gallery, if glumly, but when we got back to the hotel I cried. We’d come thousands of miles not to have an opening. It was such a to do to get there when we had just gotten home to New York, I couldn’t believe it was all for naught.

The Man managed to cheer me up, if you can believe the irony, and we did make a lovely holiday out of our trip. We went to the No Show, as I’ve come to call it, as there was another artist exhibiting in the gallery’s adjacent space who was also opening his show that night. We dressed up and chatted up anyone who chanced to stray into the room with blank walls and then joined the other artist and gallery associates for dinner. On our other few days we went to the Prado, walked around the beautiful city, and even ate dinner at a gorgeous restaurant Philip Stark had fashioned from an old theater. Although highly unexpected, it was a trip I’ll never forget.

I’m afraid the part The Man will remember most was our disastrous journey home. Remember my terrible fear of flying? Since our trip was so last minute I was unable to book us seats together on the return flight. He was sure we’d be able to work it out at the airport, but I had nightmares about it as our trip came to an end. Finally finding the one you love and then plummeting to your deaths three rows apart was not a fate I could accept. As melodramatic as my worst-case scenario thinking tends to run, I needed to be seated next to him if I was putting my life in the hands of Continental. Continental, it turns out, couldn’t be bothered. No one at the ticket desk would help us and after days of unclear communication and a major worst-case scenario come true, I lost it. I had a full blown personality meltdown in the middle of the airport and was on the verge of another on the plane—at the hands of already frustrated flight attendants who probably had no real power to help me, but who were all too ready to wield their authority to have us escorted off the plane—when a few kind people offered to rearrange their seating to accommodate us. Obviously, we landed in tact…or in my case relatively in tact. But that’s usually the state of my case, isn’t it?

It felt good to be back in New York for a solid couple of months. We had so much to do and so many people to see. And we had a life together that we would have to translate into a new dialect.

So, The Man and I had lunch at the only restaurant in "town" today and they were playing Billy Idol’s latest greatest hits record. I knew every fucking word to every fucking song. It was disturbing to us both. I’m not even that girl, but I leaned over to him and explained, "It’s that thing where even though I know I’m being pandered to with packaging, I have a vagina so I can’t say no. It’s why I watch Grey’s Anatomy (even though I tell people I’m in it for those cross over moments, for instance when Dr. Bailey all of a sudden talks Han Solo) and it’s why I will always love Billy Idol…even Rock the Cradle of Love."

These things are guiltless pleasures…or, for those of you who must submit to the Sex in the City movie, I suppose, guiltless expectations disappointed.

I find myself on the Acela Express to Boston, with The Man, en route to his opening there, which I feel certain will be a lot of fun and a great success. However, dear reader, the last time we revisited my goings-on was months ago. Let us mind the gap. As I remember it, I was just settling into The No Place as it became time to leave.

I managed to get my seedlings into the planters The Man had made me just in time.
However, winter in the middle of nowhere does drag on and on. This is probably why The Man had planned for us to return to New York for a real spring. It did pose a problem for my gardening ambitions though. We were unable to put the planters outdoors and were thus forced to rely upon the sun coming through the windows in my writing room to sustain my babies until the freezing nights passed. This was worrisome and I had to face the fact that whatever progress they might make would be unchartable—I would have to wait until we got home to observe what fate had in store.

But we were off in the general direction of civilization, and wasn’t that something! Instead of heading directly back to New York, we took three flights to get to Albuquerque, New Mexico! Nothing doing there, actually. But it’s where you can fly commercially that’s close to Taos and that’s where my childhood friend Christina was getting married. We like little adventures, so we rented a car for the week and booked a direct flight back to JFK from Phoenix, Arizona. Welcome to our fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants Southwest road trip!

First we took a gorgeous drive up into the mountains along the Rio Grande to Taos.
Arriving at the Casa Benavides bed and breakfast, we were presented with a room that could easily be rented as a spacious studio apartment in Manhattan (complete with a kitchen and fireplace) for well over two thousand dollars a month.
We had dinner with some of Christina’s friends from college, including my old friend Doug from high school (who I haven’t seen in fifteen years). The warmth at the table was deep and genuine, such lovely people and all of us so excited for the bride and groom.

The nights are cool at this elevation and I made full use of the fireplace as soon as we got back to our room. The firewood was all from sagebrush and juniper trees, so the room was toasty warm and aromatic.  The Man had on the television, a John Wayne western—The Searchers I think, but I’m not sure. I remember tuning in just as the Duke held the girl in his arms and said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can, angel.” And I could relate.

Days before we left (before the suitcases had even been taken down to be packed) Rodney, one of The Man’s two cats—the one I love, was on to us.  He moped, he marked our property, and finally he got game. Thirty minutes prior to our departure he appeared at the French doors opening into my writing room upstairs with a still live robin in his mouth. He was bringing his bounty to me and I was so proud that finally I could call myself his mistress. Looking through the glass, knowing that I could not let him in, I wished I knew cat for, “it’s not you, it’s me.” Or at least, “I’ll be back as soon as I can, angel.”

The day of the wedding we got up early-ish to go horseback riding to an old miner’s cabin. The Man has not been on a horse for approximately thirty years, but this was his pick out of the brochures I collected at dinner.
The terrain was gorgeous and we had a so much fun, returning just in time for a nap before the ceremony. Unfortunately, somewhere between the overly chlorinated pool at the hotel in Albuquerque and the sun all morning on horseback, my constitution went kaput. I became quite ill at the reception. No dancing for me and no pictures for you!

After a stop at the Taos hospital, we met up with Harlan, an old friend of The Man’s and longtime denizen of Taos, who took us to the Rio Grande Gorge.
The view was absolutely mesmerizing, but as we approached the center I could feel the bridge sway with each gust of wind and I ran back to the car like a little coward. I know it’s designed to give a little, but physics is not something I completely understand…and you just never know where that line is, between a little and a lot.

Harlan then suggested we head toward Truth or Consequences to take advantage of their natural hot springs.  In fact, before the town changed its name to that of the game show, it was called Hot Springs. We hit the road again and saw a good deal of dessert before we made it to the Fire Water Lodge. T or C is an odd little town and our hotel room felt just as strange, but the courtyard held a gorgeous collection of dessert blooms that were obviously laboriously cultivated.

 

We decided to seek out slightly more luxurious lodgings before heading to Phoenix to catch our flight to New York and ended up at the Los Abrigados Resort & Spa in Sedona. I hadn’t been to Sedona in ten years or so and while the outlying area is far more commercial now, the town itself is every bit as gorgeous as I remember it. We got a great deal at the resort as they are mainly a time-share operation and they rent out the unoccupied condos at a very reasonable rate. It’s located right in town on a picturesque lot amidst all the unusual rock formations. We finally got to relax, with no immediate responsibilities except getting to Phoenix on time for our flight. As much as I loved seeing old friends and touring the natural landscape,
just hanging out with The Man was my favorite part of the trip.

As I wrap up this little tale of our excursion I am back home from Boston, getting us ready to head to The No Place again. Our house sitter says my tomato plants are already a foot high and they’ve finally been able to move the planters outdoors, but just recently. I do have a few more turns in the road for you though. I’ll be back as soon as I can…

Most of my trouble adapting to life here is that almost nothing is available, ever, much less at the drop of a hat. Coming from Brooklyn to a place that isn’t even a small town, merely a gas station/convenience store on one side of the street and a natural foods store/café on the other…well, it requires a radical reconstruction of one’s expectations. You cannot buy anything after nine at night, except on Sundays when you can’t buy anything after eight. Buying something like decent olive oil or shoes necessitates a 45-minute drive to the nearest small town, which may or may not have what you’re looking for and you may or may not be able to make your purchase depending on the day and time. Every store in said metropolis closes by five PM, except on Fridays when they close earlier or on any given day when they just decide to close or on Good Friday when the entire town shuts down. Who knew that all commerce halted for some random pagan-Catholic holiday? Having lived my entire adult life in New York City, I missed that memo.

When you do get to buy something good, since someone had to take the trouble to get it to the middle of nowhere, it is extremely expensive. Add the expense of getting it to and fro in The Man’s gas guzzling pick-up truck and the time you spent ferreting it out and you come to appreciate the notion of self-sufficiency. This is why I bought a sewing machine, stocked up on quick-freeze meats, and quickly expanded the parameters of my garden.

The Man and I considered planting outdoors, but since we’re leaving town for a couple of months and there are plenty of deer and other animals on his twenty acre parcel we decided to put some planters on the deck where our crop would be warm and safe. No one had any planters to sell us, so he made me some…is in the process of making me some. 
Of course, there are no pre-fab liners for our DIY planters, so I’ve been staple-gunning loose plastic sheeting to the inside and punching drainage holes through. I mix the soil with peat and worm castings and then I transplant my seedlings. This takes so much more time and energy than I ever could have expected. This is why I was so righteously tired last night.

It took me all afternoon to fit out and fill just one planter and there are four more to go, plus tomato plants to be situated in their own pots. I don’t have four more afternoons, period. I tried to explain this to The Man—how my life is even more impossible than before…now that I am actually accomplishing something—while he was trying to finish painting two major shows. He promised to build the rest of the planters in the morning and came up with some scheme to finish everything in time.

Then he took me up to the sauna he built last summer on the hill behind the house and made me relax. This is one of the great things about the no place. After nine PM, when you can no longer buy anything, you can stand warm and naked outside looking at the stars and the lights on in your house. If you’re me, you are afforded the thrilling opportunity to practice peeing standing up…because no one is going to see you, or stop you, or even care.

I think it’s been almost as difficult for The Man to adapt to me being here as it’s been for me to get used to this place. Friends, used to dropping in at all hours for a drink and a chat, have had to be reconditioned to call first and keep visits to more reasonable hours. With just the one car, we’re tied to each other almost all of the time. Furniture has been cast out and entire rooms reorganized. But for all the stress of change, our life here seems to be coming together…just in time for us to take off.

In four days I’ll be leaving my bounty in the hands of our house sitter. We’re keeping the planters inside due to the unpredictable weather. Fortunately, we have a large room with floor to ceiling windows lining a southern exposure. When freezing temperatures finally move on, the sitter will move the planters out on the deck. He’ll have to put up pea netting and tie the tomato plants to their sticks, but otherwise regular watering should do the trick. Then again, they might all drop dead…I don’t know.

Even if everything does live, who knows how much of it we’ll be able to eat. The Man’s stove died on me. I managed to get a lopsided birthday cake and a roast chicken out of it before it went on strike. Then there was an arduously stuffed puff pastry, soggy on the bottom and burned on the top. One night it presented me with half-baked potatoes when the rest of dinner was all ready. In a fit of rage, I threw the potatoes at the oven door as hard as I could. It’s given me nothing since.

The Man, sympathetic as ever, rescued the potatoes and fried them. Then he bought me a new propane grill with a side gas burner and everything. I bake potatoes on the top rack, but I’ll be damned if I can fit a pie pan up there. Is a Hillery a Hillery if she can’t bake? I guess we’ll find out this summer. I’m bringing my ice cream maker just in case.

I am so righteously tired. It is because I’ve worked my ass off all day that I can say this.

Okay, wait, I must interrupt myself. It is snowing. Correction: It’s FUCKING snowing! It happened a couple of times after the thaw and, now, every day for the last week. It doesn’t stick and more and more of the snow actually on the ground disappears daily, but it is fucking snowing on a daily basis when I need to be transplanting seedlings because, hello, April is tomorrow. April is tomorrow and it’s, “April showers bring May flowers,” not April fucking snow.

I’m definitely getting drunk tonight.

This is not my usual post, as you can tell, dear reader. All I can tell you is I am not my usual me. You knew me. I was this pensive, passionate New Yorker who worked nights in a restaurant and spent my days jogging and pursuing my literary, well, pursuits. I made damned good short ribs and pasta primavera.

No longer.

As David Sedaris so clearly put it, quoting his infamous and fabulous mother, "You meet a guy, relinquish a tiny bit of control, and the next thing you know, you’re eating a different part of the pig." I finally met The Man, put almost everything else aside, and ended up in the middle of fucking nowhere. I thought I’d have more time to write. I harbored a lot of naïve delusions about country life. I was wrong.

This is not to say I’ve been unhappy here or with him. As Mary J. says, it ain’t all roses. But, I’m hooked. Not just on The Man, but the place…the no place.

Today is, incidentally, a good example of what I do here. He wakes up first. He makes a fire and then coffee and quietly answers his emails downstairs (he got high-speed just before I arrived…do you even remember dial-up?!). I arise and consult him on our intentions for the day. I have finally trained him to give me things to do that overwhelm him rather than huffing about them until his need for assistance becomes untenable. He gives me three rather tedious chores that, while they’ve been floating around in his head for days, now must be taken care of immediately. Contrary to my conditioning, I say, “I just wonder what you did with yourself before I got here.” (Honestly, he used to go to a computer guru the next town over every time he wanted to download pictures from the internet.) He, good-naturedly, says, “I was fuckered.”

Usually I make breakfast, but I’m feeling peckish and wait him out. He poaches eggs served on toast with grated Parmesan and wilted spinach. No one is starving here. I unload the dishwasher and reload it, scrub down the kitchen countertops, load in firewood,
and sweep the floor. I must constantly check the fire lest he unintentionally let it go out. The coffee is weak and I remind myself to send loads of WholeFoods coffee beans when we get back to New York. I spend my morning sending emails to gallery people and art writers that would take seconds to send at home, but his wacky internet set up requires me to send all emails through webmail and that limits the size of pictures of paintings and…oh let’s just kill ourselves and get it over with!

We go out around lunchtime to visit the post office, the local gardening retailer, and to get lunch at one of two area eateries; not the Cedar Creek Café but Sleep is for Sissies (open ‘till 8 PM). The joint is, unexpectedly to us both, jumpin’. We spy Sophia, the local real estate legend whose saucy headshot graces so many for sale signs on our back road. She has a passable streaky blond dye-job and a matching set of four or five pink pens. Not being in any position to judge as I did not even apply eyebrows this morning and mostly for the sake of alliteration, I call her the slut. As in, “Look, it’s the slut. For real!” The Man is less amused than I am. He is greeted by locals on our way out. They fall into two categories, those I am introduced to and those near whom I linger hopefully…I’m sorry, I mean, those whose names he remembers and those whose names he cannot place, even remotely.

He was painting in the morning and, this afternoon, while things dry in the studio he helps me get started with my gardening work. I think I mentioned, a few weeks ago, I was starting an herb garden. Think exponentially.

I’ve had a hard time getting down to business in the wilderness. My previous lifestyle simply will not translate to this setting and, in such a case, what can you do but reinvent yourself from top to bottom? That is to say, it’s been hard for me to write here because I’m not completely at home in the place and I realize I’m not exactly visiting either. The Man and I, we’re carefully and quietly working on making a life together. And while that is simultaneously my dream come true and the scariest thing to happen to me ever, it is not the tranquil background of that which I know well and can tune out when I need and want to concentrate on…my pursuits.

So, I’ve been working on not only making myself feel more at home here, but also bringing something to the table in our partnership. I’ve given up my income to live here with him, so I’m doing my best to fill the gaps in other ways. Hence helping The Man with his business and…my putative garden.

It all started when the local greenmarket, with the ironic subtitle Whole Foods, didn’t have fresh thyme. I remembered planting a windowsill herb garden in Brooklyn and wouldn’t it be nice to have fresh herbs whenever we needed them? Spring was just around the corner, after all. I started a mini-greenhouse, pod-type seedbed. You saw a picture of the starter set of seeds.  All good!

The escalating enthusiasm that followed absolutely mystified The Man, bless him. He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t upstairs writing in the sunroom rather than planting scads and scads more seeds. It’s a full on obsession now and with four days to go before we depart for civilization, I need to fill my planters!

And the snow will NOT stop.

I had to remind myself the other day that I haven’t lived with a man in over ten years. 

He asked me last night if it was okay for him to take off for the evening to go play music with his friends, a loosely assembled group of multi-instrumentalists who mostly like to smoke and drink while they make noise.  It’s nothing I’d be yearning to participate in, but that’s beside the point.  He asked me…did I mind?  I’m so used to being completely independent of others in my actions and to having others be independent of me, it took me by surprise.  But in the sweetest possible way.  And I didn’t mind at all.

In my third week here in the wilderness, I’m definitely settling in.  I’ve gotten the kitchen in shape and while I see chaos that requires my attention nearly everywhere,
I have enough of a foothold now that I’m able to keep it at bay and give myself a couple hours at my desk in the mornings while he’s painting in his studio space.  Then I can tackle the ebb and flow of him all around me with the true sense that my identity remains in tact amidst so much foreign matter.

All the snow is melting here and we got running shoes when we were in town earlier in the week.  We’ll go for a walk/jog when he’s done painting.  After lunch I’ll help him with the business of his art—mailing catalogs and compiling high-res images, etc.  I’ll fuss over my little herb garden, do the laundry or some such housework, and then start flipping through cookbooks to see what I might whip up for dinner.

It sounds a little dull, I know, but we always have lists of things to get done that somehow never get fully crossed off.  We have to get new mattresses so his parents have a place to sleep when they visit at the end of the month, the stove has to be fixed, and we need the kitchen knives sharpened.  His paintings must be photographed for invitations and catalogs for his upcoming shows and crates have to be made to ship them all.  The doing of these things, together, is somehow so satisfying…much better than the annoyance of having to accomplish them on one’s own.

We go to the nearest small town about once a week to run errands and eat dinner out, maybe catch a movie.  He’s very good about taking me on little adventures too.  Last weekend we went to a natural hot springs in the mountains about an hour and a half north.  When we got there all the trees were green with only a few snowcaps remaining on some of the highest branches.  When we woke up in our little chalet about eight inches of snow had dumped and the choppers were running helli-skiers up the mountain right over our heads.  We were in a whiteout winter wonderland and we went right back in the water to enjoy it in transformed surroundings.  Of course, I forgot my camera.

Today I remind myself that I’ve never lived with anyone who’s taken such good care of me or cared for me so much.