family

It was cassoulet-o-rama last night here in Livingston — our friends are home from LA for their spring break, and we all gathered over there last night to eat  Paula Wolfert’s Toulouse-Style Cassoulet from The Cooking of Southwest France. This contains pork, pork skin, duck legs confit, pancetta, proscuitto, sausage — oh, yeah, and...
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Nothing says spring in Montana like six inches of new wet snow — I’m thrilled, actually — we need the water very badly — it’s been so dry that I had pulled out the sprinklers before I went to Arizona. My bathroom is all but done — we need to hang the towel bars...
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I’m in Arizona for a week — just south of Tucson, housesitting for my dear friend Jim who has taken his beloved and her daughter to Italy for two weeks. It’s a perfect writer vacation — I’ve got three little dogs to take care of, two of whom need to go for a walk...
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I spent last weekend in Seattle — I had two days of meetings last week for my Corporate Job, then hung out with my stepmother for the weekend. Susan’s only eight years older than I am, and she and my dad have been divorced for a long time, but we kept her after he...
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Although the house I woke up in this morning on my grandmother’s farm is not the house we all grew up in, the view out the window, a pale landscape of late-season standing corn, hazy Midwestern sky just pinking up to the east, and section lines marked off by rows of old, half-broken oak...
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I had a long talk on the phone last night with my cousin Jennifer. Jennifer’s four years younger than I am, and her mother was my mother’s older sister. Every time there was a crisis in our childhoods, and there were plenty, we were shipped off to our Aunt Lynn’s house, so in a...
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So, when I was home in June for my cousin Jason’s wedding, my grandmother bestowed on me Mrs. Baggot’s Ring. Mrs. Baggot’s ring originally belonged to my great-great grandfather, Charles Ambrose Plamondon, who had a gear company in Chicago and who died, along with his wife Mary (they were celebrating their 37th wedding anniversary)...
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Yesterday was the second anniversary of that sad event Maryanne has named, “Patrick’s Very Bad Day”. Last year I was in Paris for this day, wandering around in a tres melodramatic haze, thinking to myself “Mais, il est mort. Mon frere. Il est mort.” Paris is, in general a good place to go when...
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I usually hate photos of myself, but this is me and my 94-year-old grandmother at my cousin Jason’s wedding this past weekend. It’s a family joke that my older cousin Brad and myself are The Favorites (so are Adam and Jennifer, but even among The Favorites, some are more favored than others), and well,...
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Off next week to San Jose for work, then to Chicago — or rather Leland, for a family wedding. My cousin Jason, who lives on our family farm, is finally making an honest woman out of Jackie — it looks to be quite a hoe-down, with all sorts of people from Jase’s Leland buddies...
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