“I prefer the weddings and babies years to the divorce and death years,” J says to friends, as we sit chatting and digesting after a long, leisurely lunch. Let the record show that the lunch in question was my version of the wonderful Moroccan barbecue as described by . If you like food, culture, and exquisite writing, I encourage you to subscribe to it. It’s filled with delightful history, insights, family lore, and recipes and I’m not exaggerating when I say that reading it makes my day.

This is a milestone season for us - we recently celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary and soon we will bookend the coming 12 months with 65th birthdays - mine in September and J’s next August.

The last time we commemorated anniversaries in multiples of five, we ended up taking a trip to Portugal. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it unexpectedly changed the course of our lives.

How about you? Do milestones make you shake things up? Tell us about it in the comments.

My youngest nephew, originally from Hawaii and a longtime resident of Okinawa, came to visit us with his 12-year-old son. “Can we stop at a grocery store on the way home from the airport and get eggs,” my nephew asked. “We eat a lot of eggs.”

Thirty years ago, on an island in the Pacific Northwest, that nephew, age eight, held an umbrella and walked me down an “aisle” of pine needles to the spot where J and I would get married, overlooking the sea.

Because we had an umbrella handy, we decided to reenact that photo. My nephew and I have both gotten bigger in the past 30 years. J, still has and fits into the Hawaiian shirt he got married in and he brought it to Portugal, looking trim in the photo reenactment. Though I realize it’s not the same thing, for this year’s anniversary dinner, I wore the same outfit I’d worn three years ago. Here’s the funny thing that happened that night, plus Alison Roman’s phenomenal tomato tart recipe which you should absolutely make now while tomatoes are at their peak.

One of the unexpected pleasures of aging is witnessing younger family members and friends forge their own paths and bring new generations into the fold.

It was extremely satisfying to have deep, thought-provoking conversations with my nephew, with whom I have sometimes sparred politically, and delightful to get to know his son, a curious, compassionate, and accomodating person who took in new experiences with glee.

Let the record show that both times we had eggs for breakfast they were prepared by the 12-year-old, who makes a mean scramble with chili crisp.

We Krupnicks do things with gusto and I like to say that we store our determination in our love handles. During their four-day visit, we played hard, listened to great music, talked about working out and protein, and we ate. The pièce de resistance was when my nephew made us not one, not two, but three kinds of poke from his maternal family recipe. We turned it into a feast with ‘s cold cucumber and peach soup and because I finally figured out where to score nduja here, Diana Henry’s Roast Peppers with Burrata and Nduja. You’ll find that recipe below, in the best things I cooked endnote.

The next day, we ate seafood skewers in Nazaré and the rest of the poke and some seared tuna with wasabi mayonnaise for dinner.

The next morning I felt incredible. Could it have been all that lean fish protein?

I admit, like nearly every perimenopausal and post-menopausal woman, I’ve been protein-curious, following the guidelines regarding the value of strength training and increasing protein and fiber ingestion (as well as decreasing sugar, but I live in one of the world’s best wine regions, so let’s get real). But it wasn’t until that Poke Aha Moment that I became motivated to give it a try.

With one month till my milestone birthday and the weeklong hiking-in-the-Pyrenees trip that coincides with it, I decided to hit the gym more often for strength training and up my protein consumption in a big way. Cue the seeds and protein powder.

I don’t need to tell you how hard it can be to ingest 30 grams of protein per meal, especially at lunch time. It’s almost a full-time job. I am now a person who drinks protein shakes for breakfast, much to the delight of my younger daughter, who is visiting soon. When she lived with us, she asked me to buy protein powder and I scoffed and told her to get her daily protein allotment from food. Who’s having the last laugh now?

I regularly WhatsApp chat with friends in the US to compare protein strategies and talk about the merits of various seeds. I don’t know whether J thinks this obsession is an improvement over the shoe conversations my friends and I were having ad nauseam, comparing notes about comfortable, yet stylish calçada-friendly sneakers. What an evolution from discussing pregnancy, baby sleep training, tantrums, the college application process, early morning boot camp, job woes, and hot flashes. I love my friends.

Worried that I would be the squeaky wheel on the Pyrenees hiking trip, I sheepishly admit that I’m relieved to learn that my travel companions are nursing various foot ailments and there’s some acknowledgement that we’ll “see how things go.” I suggested to J, who is one of the foot-sufferers, that maybe we should sprinkle some of my seeds onto his orthotics to see if that helps. He was only slightly amused.

We went to visit a friend who just had a baby. J made his signature Hainanese Chicken Rice and a caprese salad and I made my favorite Fig and Almond Cake, which I’m pleased to say is protein-rich.

It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that we were having babies. We welcomed our second baby on the cusp of turning 40 and J starting doing Polar Bear swims, so he could feel awake again. The year he turned 50, he decided to master doing 50 consecutive pushups. When I turned 50, I was a perimenopausal mother of two pre-teen girls. Though that period of my life is mostly a hormone-rage blur, it also had significant milestones. My mother died and we went to Turkey. She would have loved hearing about that trip, just like she would love hearing about our life in Portugal.

Two-and-a-half years ago, a few weeks before I finished chemotherapy, I joined J, our older daughter, and our friend for my first (and probably last) polar bear swim as a fuck you to cancer. It felt great!

All this to say, I like commemorating milestones.

J’s 98-year-old relative,, who was very close with his father, recently reached out to thank him for the beautiful tribute he wrote for his dad’s memorial service. They made plans to speak on the phone, and J was looking forward to hearing stories of his father as a young man. But she passed away in her sleep a few mornings ago.

The weddings and babies years are indeed better than the divorce and death years.

It’s too soon to tell whether my protein regimen will be effective or sustainable, but hope springs eternal and every day is a new beginning.

In case you were wondering, I’ve logged 61 grams so far today.

Some Great Summer Recipes

Did you know I have a recipe page?

There, you will find Alison Roman’s Tomato Tart, Piperade, ‘s Shaved Melon Salad with Lime Honey Vinaigrette, Fattoush, and the Fig and Almond Cake I mentioned above (hooray for fig season!!!), and many more delicious summer recipes.

Here’s the Diana Henry recipe I promised, which comes from my well-worn copy of From the Oven to the Table:

Roast Peppers with Burrata and Nduja

Preheat the oven to 400 Fahrenheit. Halve and seed six red bell peppers, put them in a baking dish or sheet with a rim, brush with olive oil, season with flaky salt and pepper, and roast for 20 minutes. Scatter 2 1/4 oz of nduja chunks among the peppers and roast for an additional ten minutes.The pepper skins should be slightly blistered and charred in places.

Once cool, tear or leave whole and sprinkle with 1 lb of drained burrata.

It’s sublime.

“Scorpions eat only once a year,’’ my sister-in-law tells me, as we investigate the Roman ruins of Conímbriga in central Portugal. We’ve just had a typical bountiful Portuguese lunch of grilled meat, rice and batatas fritas, and salad, washed down with fruity red wine. The day before, at the suggestion of her namourado, who was in full adventurous vacation spirit, we tried perecebes (barnacles). Anticipating our next round of visitors, my nephew and his son - both hearty eaters, I was thinking about where we would take them to make every meal count, which led me to wonder aloud if, now firmly embedded in my third act of life, I need to make every meal count.

“6,000,” J called from the amphitheater. “That’s how many meals you have left.”

Before we go any further, let me reassure you and myself that either J’s math is wrong, he anticipates my early demise, or he underestimates my dedication to a quest because I calculate my remaining meals to be around 21,000, assuming I last another 20 years and eat three times a day. Even if I take it easy or have a lot of leftovers, I’m still well over 10,000.

(I debated while writing this whether to point out this error to J or to let him discover it once this piece is published. I couldn’t resist. He insisted he never makes math errors and that he was referring to how many dinners I have left).

On the cusp of signing up for Medicare (don’t get me started about how pissed off I am to have to do this or risk paying the accrued penalty if I ever decide to move back to the US), I’m getting lots of “content” about the retirement years - basically that you should front load the decade between 65 and 75 with lots of travel and vigorous experiences because it’s only a matter of time before “comorbidities” will slow you down. My friends in Malta put it more eloquently. TLDR - these are the go-go years and also, day pajamas are a thing.

Have I mentioned that we’ll soon be traveling in Sicily with a 91-year-old and his 78-year-old wife? Apparently these stringent retirement rules don’t apply to them. Not that long ago they were eating horse meat in Uzbekistan (note: that would not be one of my 21,000 remaining meals).

We saw Sting on the beach in Figueira da Foz with a bunch of other oldsters remembering their glory days. He looked and sounded damn good for 74 and showed no signs of slowing down. But friends who saw Rod Stewart (age 81) in Lisbon last year said he took full advantage of his energetic backup singers and dancers, sitting down while they entertained the crowd. Lol - do you think he groaned while getting up from his resting place to perform Do You Think I’m Sexy?

These last years of what can credibly be called midlife are sometimes bewildering. If you fall prey to such things, especially if you’re a woman (because everybody loves to give us advice), you are encouraged to eat more protein and fiber than humanly possible, lift heavy weights several times a week, go on as many big travel adventures as possible, and admonished to not drink alcohol or eat sugar, but also to be mindful, slow down, and savor each moment.

Which to me looks something like this:

But even Mick Jagger can’t indulge like he used to.

In between over-eating and drinking with visitors, I went back to the gym for a fitness evaluation and was given two new training plans. It cracked me up this morning to be sharing a tricep machine with a big buff Portuguese guy, each of us taking turns doing a set and then offering the machine to the other. He pretty much doubled the weights whenever it was his turn and then politely moved them back to my paltry level so I could do my reps without embarrassment.

My nephew says we’ll only indulge in one good meal a day while he’s visiting (thus reducing my 21,000 count) and will work out hard. My daughter, who is coming the week after my nephew, lives on raw carrots and Pilates. Even though she once took me to a MegaReformer class in LA that I feared would break my body in half, I’ll try to follow her lead.

All of this in service of fully embracing these go-go years and preparing to celebrate my entry into senior citizenship on a hiking trip in the French Pyrenees.

Back to the scorpions, who have a better future than my sister-in-law thinks (though since she shares some traits with her brother, I’m sure she will find a way to walk back her comment lol).

Though they can survive on a single insect per year, scorpions mostly eat every two to three weeks., Though their average lifespan is 3-8 years, some rock-dwelling scorpions can last as long as 25 years.

Mealwise, that could be as much as 652 spiders!

I recently shared with you that famous Mary Oliver poem in its entirety. The one with the famous line that some of you have tattooed on your bodies, embroidered onto pillows, tucked into notebooks, or stuck on a magnet on your refrigerator to remind you, protein and fiber intake notwithstanding, to enjoy your life.

So tell me in the comments, how do you plan to enjoy your remaining wild and precious life, your 21,000 meals, or your 652 spiders?

Speaking of meals - I just want to give a shoutout to my new favorite Substack, and an old favorite, (Department of Salad). Both of these feature delicious recipes and beautiful writing. I hope you’ll check them out and subscribe if so inclined.

How I Made the Most of Precious Bounty This Week

Marcella Hazan’s Chicken Fricassee, Cacciatora Style

I’m not gonna lie. Sometimes the go-go lifestyle is exhausting. I came back from the Sting concert, said goodbye to visitors, and then was wiped out, with a hint of a cold coming on.

I’ve told you how common it is for people to give gifts of produce here in our agricultural community and we’ve benefited many times from this bounty.

This week, our Portuguese teacher, Maria C, gifted us a bag of beauties from her vegetable garden. I made the Heidi Swanson zucchini bread I told you about last time (you can find it and every other recipe I’ve shared with you over the past three+ years on my recipe page). With Maria C’s peppers and tomatoes, on a night with a slight chill in the air (another heat wave is coming), I adapted the Marcella Hazan classic recipe linked above, using fresh tomatoes and a lot more bell peppers - green as well as red. It was very soothing.

A friend told me about two Portuguese friends of his, who have been friends with each other for fifteen years. A few weeks ago, for the very first time, one invited the other to his home. Portuguese prefer to meet in public spaces, reserving home visits for close friends and family. I’ve heard various reasons for this — reserve, memories of secret police during the dictatorship, or just the ways things are.

After making my presence loudly and intrusively known in the neighborhood while searching for my cat Finn, who was missing for 36 hours, I wanted to have a party to thank the neighbors, friends, and friends of friends who came out in force to help find him.

I’d attempted to throw a neighborhood party once before, on New Year’s Day, with amusing results. I couldn’t find most of my neighbors to invite them, but I did see Maria B. “Talvez,” (perhaps), she replied when I invited her. But she did show up, with a plate of arroz doce. The only problem was she showed up on the wrong day.

Not a problem really. We had been learning the pretérito perfeito, the past simple tense in Portuguese. As we sat eating nuts and warming ourselves in front of the pellet stove, Maria B told us her life story, which was full of pretérito perfeito conjugations.

The night we found Finn, Maria B, who had been combing the neighborhood for two days looking for him, marched into my house liked she owned the place, to get a look at him. She admonished me that he would be hungry and thirsty and I needed to look after him.

During our recent heat wave, Finn took to sleeping in Maria B’s yard like he owns the place. He lost his new GPS collar there and we went over to retrieve it, greeting Maria B, her husband, and their friends, who were cooling off in the garage.

Now, we’ve settled into a steady back and forth between houses - Maria B has brought us favas, plums, and pears from her garden and eggs from her chickens. We’ve delivered plum torte. “Ah, Doce de Ameixa,” she nodded in recognition. We commiserated over the heat wave, though Maria B said she was making soup for dinner. “Soup?” I exclaimed, eager to practice Portuguese. “It’s so hot. Why not salad?”

“Jamais,” she responded, using the emphatic word for never (usually nunca), which I had just learned.

Sometimes it’s best not to mess with tradition.

When H, the fishmonger, comes by with his Wednesday delivery, I have a surprise for him. A taste of the wild King Pacific smoked salmon that I brought back from Seattle. In a preview of my Portuguese life, I spent years shopping at the Ballard Farmer’s Market, where I first encountered the merry folks at Wilson Fish Market. During the pandemic, they started home deliveries, which I loved, not realizing that a few years later I’d be chasing a Portuguese fishmonger down the road. They made a special delivery for us on our last day in Seattle. H enjoyed the salmon, so different from the Atlantic salmon prevalent here. He gave us two sardines as a thank you.

Gifts of food abound here, especially when the yellow plums are particularly prolific. It reminds me of the zucchini, which everyone except for us was able to successfully grow in the Pacific Northwest. It grew so profusely that people were constantly giving it away. Those were the zucchini bread years. There are a million different zucchini bread recipes and I’ve tried many of them. Here is my current favorite zucchini bread, courtesy of Heidi Swanson from 100 Cookbooks.

We’ve entered our second year of following the growing cycles and our second year of heat waves, so I know what to do. Make an arugula salad, with sliced plums and sharp cheese. Take that fruit and turn it into clafoutis, that endlessly adaptable comfort food. I’ve used Julia Child’s classic recipe while navigating cancer, and recently adapted ‘s clafoutis recipe from Le Sud, to make use of my pear and plum bounty and the figs that are beginning to make their presence known

For Finn’s party, I made use of beautiful summer tomatoes for a Tarte Soleil from Le Sud and a variety of yellow peaches I had never seen before for a peach cobbler. It was my favorite kind of party - snacks and desserts laid out on a table, with cool drinks nearby and a yard full of people and kids getting to know one another.

One of the easiest and most satisfying party snacks was Dates and Manchego from one of my favorite books - Seattle chef Renee Erickson’s, Getaway. Briefly fry 12 ounces of Medjool dates in two tablespoons of olive oil, until they turn rusty and plump up. Put onto a serving plate and top with crunchy salt, 6 tablespoons of crumpled (or in my case, cubed) Manchego cheese, and a drizzle of olive oil.

I wondered if any of my Portuguese neighbors would show up. The next-door neighbors and J, who had been instrumental in Finn’s rescue were out of town and I wasn’t able to make contact with A and T, two neighbors I had just met during the search. But R, the person who actually found Finn came over and was one of the last to leave the party. And Maria B and her husband made an appearance.

I made up a plate for Maria B, explaining what everything was and reassuring her that nothing was spicy. She was particularly taken with the Tarte Soleil, which I referred to as a Torta Tomato. She sat, with her plate of food, surrounded by neighbors, seemingly charmed and bemused by the experience. And after a little while, she thanked us and she and her husband said goodbye and went back home across the street.

I’ll call that a success.

The Best Thing I Made During the Heat Wave

Michael Solomonov’s Classic Mango Amba, from Israeli Soul

I had a tough time choosing which books I would bring to Portugal from my recent visit to my house in. Seattle. I’m so glad Michael Solomonov’s Israeli Soul made the cut. I already know Zahav is coming in the next batch.

I cooked up a batch of chickpeas in the Instant Pot and turned some of them into hummus. The rest, we’ve been eating inside pita bread, with cucumbers, tomatoes, and this phenomenal condiment, the Israeli spin on mango pickle. It’s so good and so easy to make.

Classic Mango Amba, adapted from Israeli Soul

Ingredients: 2 ripe mangoes. 1 small chopped onion, 1 large clove garlic, thinly sliced, I teaspoon kosher salt, 2 teaspoons mustard seed, 1 1/2 teaspoons ground turmeric, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, 1 teaspoon crushed Aleppo pepper, 1 teaspoon ground fenugreek, 1 teaspoon smoked paprika.

To finish - kosher salt to taste and lemon juice.

1. Combine all of the first batch of ingredients in a medium saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until mangoes have broken down and mixture has reduced by half, about 20 minutes.

2. Let the amba cool, then taste and add salt and a squeeze of lemon juice.

3. Refrigerate in a covered container for up to two weeks.

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I’m standing naked in front of the mirror in the bedroom of the house I lived in for 30 years, trying on clothes that had been haphazardly strewn into a zip-up bag and tossed into the garage 16 months ago.

An hour or so before this period of reckoning, I ran around that house like a dog, sniffing and exploring each room, but the smells and the house were unfamiliar. I’d been naked in front of that mirror countless times before, during pregnancy and its aftermath, in the aftermath of surgeries, during radiation and chemo, and of course, during the many diet and exercise regimens that will be familiar to most of my female peers.

The clothes in the bag didn’t make the cut for the new life in Portugal I was embarking on. Now, I was revisiting them and the house and the neighborhood and the city I’d left behind.

I didn’t want to return to the US. I considered staying away an act of defiance. But we were gathering in Mendocino, California with family to scatter J’s dad’s ashes. The trip we crafted would be in beautiful liberal bubbles - San Francisco, Mendocino, Seattle, San Juan Island, Lummi Island.

Though I was deliberately avoiding MAGA country, I still thought I would be reckoning with America. Instead, I found myself reckoning with what I had outgrown and what still fit, as well as the legacies and responsibilities of family.

Enter the sea lions.

First, the one that ushered my father-in-law into the Pacific Ocean.

This Be The Verse
by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

We sat in a circle on the grass after a morning yoga session and shared what the man we were gathered to honor had meant to us all. J, his siblings and their partners, and our daughters. Later, on the deck of the house with the Pacific Ocean glistening in the distance, with some of this man’s poetry to guide us, J read a beautiful and heart-wrenching story about what it was like to grow up with a father who was haunted by the deficiencies of his own parents, yet overcame them to be an exemplary father himself.

Take that, Philip Larkin.

In the car, driving back to San Francisco, my poet/artist daughter reviewed the miseries of her childhood, but she does not blame us. “I think I have some things in common with Grandpa,” she observed. “Maybe I got my sensitivity from him.” My other daughter, who got the practical genes, was working remotely from the car and strategizing where she could get food to take to the airport.

The sea lions at Seattle’s Shilshole Bay reminded us that coexistence is hard and families are complicated. I walked around the neighborhood where I raised my kids, wondering if what we had done for them was enough. Thankfully, they think so, but sometimes I’m not so sure.

They are in the throes of one of the most challenging stages of adulthood and because I chose to live on another continent, thousands of miles away, I see them briefly, twice a year. That’s not much time to observe and listen and offer thoughtful guidance. Instead, it explosively gets crammed into car rides, dinners, and walks.

Our interactions are like music. We rise to a crescendo. Sometimes it takes a fortepiano to change the mood. Sometimes our collective emotions fade into diminuendo.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” But most of the time, they don’t mean to.

In Mendocino, we read one of my mother-in-law’s poems about her mother and what may have been lacking in their relationship. And then we visited her on the island where she precariously lives alone and brought her to another island where she used to live and has lifelong friends, one of whom is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

We left the 80-somethings to enjoy dinner at home together while we we 60-somethings went out to a restaurant to commiserate about the challenges of caring for aging parents. When we returned, earlier than they wanted as it turned out, they were huddled together at the table with a tub of ice cream, looking like guilty teenagers who weren’t ready for the night to end. They’d once been young and wild and free together and I wished I could preserve this moment.

In Seattle, I slept in the bedroom of a girl I’d known since kindergarten and helped bake the cake for her 27th birthday. Her mother and I stood on the porch where we’d screamed with joy the night Barack Obama was elected president. The day before, I’d sat with my dear friend and confidante, recovering from knee surgery, and we caught up on it all - kids, aging parents, work, health - using the shorthand of good friends who understand each other.

In the nearly two weeks I was in the US, I ate Mexican food, oysters, and salmon until my stomach was ready to burst. And then I came home to Portugal, leaving J with his mother.

How lovely to relax in the quiet of the Blue House with my cats. But Finn had other ideas. That first jet-lagged morning, we sat outside listening to the birds, me coming down from an emotional roller-coaster, Daisy content to remain in the yard. Finn, in his harness and bright pink leash because he likes to go walkabout, less so. In a flash he was gone and I spent the next 36 hours in worried pursuit, concerned that the leash would get caught in the thick bramble of the nearly impenetrable field behind our house, leaving him trapped and vulnerable.

My Portugal village came out in force to help me - neighbors, friends, friends of friends. Maria Beatriz walked the neighborhood looking for Finn and brought me over to José’s house so he could open the gate to his brother’s abandoned property, which abuts the field. My next-door neighbor M and her friend thought they heard a meow and stood guard in case Finn was somehow able to emerge. Our Latvian friends and British housesitters came to search. Belgian neighbors lent me hedge-clippers to cut bramble, South African and British neighbors were at the ready in case I needed more tools, Some Americans were charging their drones in case I needed them to find the pink leash. My German friend F connected me with his Portuguese friend R, who came over and helped me search.

R is young and agile. Did we hear a meow coming from the thicket? Yes, this time we definitely did. Like a cat himself, R descended into the bramble. He spied Finn, no longer wearing the harness and leash. Scared by this encounter with a stranger, Finn went running away.

Eventually I found him in the yard of José’s brother’s house so I climbed the fence with a towel and asked neighbor T to get José and ask him to open the gate. With yowling Finn wrapped up, I ran home. When I came back to retrieve the cat food I had been shaking to entice Finn out, José asked me how I had gotten into the yard. “I climbed the fence,” I explained. He smiled and told me the gate had been unlocked the whole time.

The response to Finn’s escapade confirmed my growing realization that Portugal is home. But, I’ve had another realization too. As my brother-in-law’s partner M observed, the real act of defiance is returning to the places and people I love whenever I want to. So, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ll be back.

Finn will not be content as a housecat, so once his new GPS tracker arrives to replace the woefully-inadequate-for-rural Portugal AirTag he was wearing, I will let him roam free. The leash I’d put on him to protect him only served to constrain and endanger him. “They fuck you up your mum and dad,” often because they love you so much.

Beings are wild and messy and so often it is hard to know the right way to care for them. We feel this acutely from our perch in Portugal, far away from the ones we love.

But the lessons I am taking from my father-in-law and Philip Larkin and the sea lions are best described, not just in the famous final lines of this Mary Oliver poem, but in the rest of it too. Don’t we all owe it to ourselves to explore and experience? To be idle and to fly?

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The Best Things I Cooked This Week

Chana Masala and Arugula Salad with Dates, Feta, and Pistachios

I was trapped at home for two days while looking for Finn, before I had the chance to buy groceries. Luckily, I had a batch of dried chickpeas, which I cooked in the Instant Pot and used for a variety of meals.

‘s Chana Masala from her lovely book Ripe Figs is one of my go-to recipes during times of stress, and was the plate of comfort I needed. And once Finn can home and I was able to leave the house and buy vegetables, I made one of my favorites from ‘s fabulous book Sababa - Arugula Salad with Dates, Feta, and Pistachios. Check out her Magical Hummus from that same book.

I ate these pool-side, with a Porto Tonico, while Finn recuperated in his cat tree.

I’m in the car driving back from Serra d’el Rei, where I’ve gone to visit my two favorite quirky home goods stores to cheer myself up. A few days earlier, my shower door shattered, just as I was completing a very satisfying rinse after a very satisfying afternoon of pickleball. J and I were planning to make margaritas and guacamole and I was going to make my first attempt at air fryer tortilla chips. “Let me just jump in the shower first,” I said.

When I called out to him, my body covered in broken glass and blood, he called back “Hold on, I’m looking for limes.”

I changed the intensity of my call.

J says we were short on limes and the avocado was overripe, so our planned aperitivo wouldn’t have been so great anyway.

Though my wounds only required some glue to fuse the broken skin in place, I was grumpy that my activities were curtailed. In Serra d’el Rei, I found a rustic wooden mirror, which felt like the beginning of a fresh start.

On the way home, I listed to KEXP, my favorite Seattle radio station, which streams worldwide.

Though it was late afternoon in Portugal, it was the first hour of the Morning Show, the iconic program hosted by John Richards, who has a cult-like following. The first hour is always mellow and I enjoyed listening to some old favorites. He played These are Days, by 10,000 Maniacs. When it was over, he gushed to his producer, Owen, "Wasn’t that just perfect?” Owen agreed,

John emoted some more, and then he played the song for a second time.

My Irish friend E has a close friend in London who zips down to Portugal for a visit a few times a year. These are casual, hanging-out-with-old-friends visits, and they are nourishing. How nice to be able to regularly see friends you have history with. To be able to chat while walking the dogs, instead of over Zoom. To not feel the pressure to go anywhere or do anything. Moving to Portugal from so far away, I envy this proximity.

Recently, we hosted two sets of houseguests — beloved friends with whom we have shared important periods of our lives.

Because our friends can’t just zip over regularly, I created ambitious itineraries for both visits. Though each time we accomplished about half the things I proposed, it was the card games, port sipping, home cooking, and general hanging out that stood out.

In January, posted this manifesto about the unspoken rules for visiting friends who live abroad. Since moving to Portugal 15 months ago, we’ve hosted four sets of visitors — one in our rental apartment and three in the Blue House. I’m sure none of them read Heather’s post. They just instinctively were the best guests and the best company they could possibly be.

When K and C, our first visitors were coming to Portugal, a few months after we arrived, I asked whether they needed anything special to make their stay more comfortable. K is an inveterate Diet Coke drinker. “He drinks it all day long,” C told us. That’s when I learned how local regulations and local tastes can impact seemingly familiar products. There is no Diet Coke in Europe. Instead, there is Coke Zero, which has a slightly different flavor palette.

We had a tiny European refrigerator and I wasn’t sure how many cans of Coke would meet the “all day long” standard, so I tried to calculate and came surprisingly close. I know we took K and C around to see the sights, but what sticks out in my mind from their visit is our evening scopa games, fortified by Coke Zero and Porto Tonicos. I tried to introduce canned sardines into the mix, but had no takers.

Visit me and I’ll pretend I’m on a cooking reality TV show — find these ingredients and/or with these constraints, come up with some menus.

We had British guests arriving from Brighton and I knew they would need tea. Turns out, not just any tea — English Breakfast, which you can find here, but not everywhere.

One of our guests was a pure vegetarian and another doesn’t eat seafood. I spent the days before their arrival planning and cooking from ’s wonderful vegetarian book, Boustany.

I prep-cooked Roasted Vegetables with Lemon and Za’atar, Sweet Potato Kubbeh with Chili Salsa and we finished them together, while listening to playlists curated by one of the 19-year olds in the group and snacking on Muhamarra and charcuterie for the meat and cheese eaters. That night, the two 19-year olds taught us some new card games and we introduced them to port, paired with Easter chocolates.

When we were making plans for the next day, 19-year old C said, “That was perfect. Can we do the same thing again tomorrow?”

We closed out their visit with a home-cooked brunch, featuring Shakshuka, in my opinion one of the best foods to share with friends.

A few days after the Brighton crew left, MB and J arrived from Seattle. “I don’t care what we do,” MB had told me. “I just want to experience your new life.” (Lol. She should have stuck around for the shower explosion).

Sure, we took them to Batalha and Nazare and Lisbon, but it was morning coffee outside and a beach walk, culminating in a stop at our favorite local cafe, that stood out. As we ambitiously traipsed around Alfama, trying to figure out where to go next, Seattle J said, “I’d just like to have a drink and play cards.” And so, we taught them the card game we had just learned from the Brits, at a bar with a spectacular view of Lisbon, and talked about kids and aging parents and retirement. It was all very soothing.

Back home at the Blue House, after a long day of sightseeing, I sent MB and J off with my J to watch the sunset, while I prepared Shakshuka. I know it sounds cheesy, but they returned to the smell of that amalgam of exotic flavors and the mournful sounds of fado, from a Spotify playlist on my iPhone and the evening felt just right.

I won’t forget those communal meals, card games, playlists, and port tastings, and especially the deep conversations we had over morning coffee, in the car, on walks, and by the pellet stove.

These days with old friends were nourishing. It made me wish we could do them all over again.

The Best Thing I Cooked for Friends

Shakshuka from ’s Plenty

There are so many version of Shakshuka and I have cooked and loved many of them. But the one that started it all for me, is the recipe from ’s seminal book, Plenty. J can’t believe that I remember the first time I cooked it. But that should come as no surprise. We were hosting an old friend from J’s Nepal trekking days, and his wife, who quickly also became a friend.

Gooey eggs, tomatoes, onions, peppers, and deep conversations with friends? It doesn’t get much better than that.

During my year of cancer treatment, I got involved with the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative, a wonderful initiative that enables patients, caregivers, medical professionals, and others to use art as the lens through which to view and interpret experiences in the medical realm. One of their offerings is a live storytelling project called The Interstitium, stories of health, illness, wellness, and beyond. In January, 2024, I had the privilege of performing a story on the Interstitium stage in Seattle. You can read and/or listen to that story here.

This weekend, the Interstitium is back, with stories of letting go. Though I can’t be in Seattle for the performance, I was encouraged to write a story. You can read or listen to it in this post.

LETTING GO

of being a cancer patient

Two years ago, I stepped onto the stage at Seattle’s Shafer Baillie mansion sporting a red, purple, and black polka dotted scarf on my head on top of a magenta snood, hoping the whole contraption wouldn’t slip. Four weeks after starting chemotherapy for breast cancer, I was making my debut as a scarf-wearing cancer patient because my hair, never great, had thinned to the point of making me look like Mr. Filch in the Harry Potter movies.

The theme that night was What Were They Thinking. I read a piece about the medical ecosystem, where doctors and patients have very specific roles and interactions are carefully choreographed. Though for most of the 13 months I spent undergoing cancer treatment I leaned into being a patient, once in a while it felt good to take a step back and view the experience through the eyes of an anthropologist.

What would you think if I told you that sometimes I miss the predictability and the rhythm of that year?

The nerdy thrill I got from seeing the results of my blood work pop up in MyChart and evaluating them like the stock market, to see what had gone up or down. The slowing down of time – “hospitals operate on their own timeframe,” a friend whose wife was navigating terminal ovarian cancer told me, and he was right. When you are sick, time as we know it in our busy Western society freezes. It was strangely comforting to just sit in hospital waiting rooms doing NY Times puzzles with nowhere else to be and limited connectivity to the outside world. At home, it was soothing to rest, with my devoted dog by my side.

After my friend died, her husband gave me her collection of beanies and the ice mittens, booties, and cap I would wear during chemotherapy to prevent neuropathy and help me hang onto as much hair as I could. The only time I ever cried during those thirteen months was when I thought I would be bald. In hindsight, bald might have been a better look than Mr. Filch. In my little cubicle at the infusion center, I donned my chilled gear, plunged my hands and feet into ice baths, and my husband and I watched the show Slow Horses, the perfect edgy program for when you are uncomfortably immersed in ice with poison coursing through your body.

When I was done with the ice gear and had determined that snoods and quirky hats weren’t for me, I passed these supplies off to Pia, a family member in Oregon who had been diagnosed with a cancer much scarier than mine. Pia, an actress, who spent time on stages in New York, could pull off a snood. We met later that year at a family graduation party in Portland and compared cancer looks. By that time, I had settled into gypsy bandanna style -- wearing colorful scarves I had collected during a lifetime of travel and statement earrings. Pia looked dashing in one of the felt-brimmed hats I had sent her. Of course, both of us wore bright lipstick.

That year of navigating cancer had put a temporary hold on my plans to move to Portugal with my husband. To their credit, my oncology team knew this and worked it into their pep talks. Sometimes I would practice Portuguese with an app while receiving immunotherapy infusions. The nurses cheered me on.

And then it was over and we moved to Portugal and bought a house near the ocean and settled into the life I’d dreamed of before cancer fucked with my plans. My trusty canine companion, ill with heart disease, accompanied us to make sure we were all settled in, before he passed on.

In the year we’ve lived here, my hair has grown back. Instead of being bloated with steroids, my belly is full from delicious wine and bread. I have a lovely Portuguese oncologist who signs her emails to me with beijinhos, the Portuguese endearment that means “little kisses.” The medical care here is very good but, in contrast to the carefulness I portrayed in my previous Interstitium story, you don’t have to wonder what Portuguese doctors are thinking. “Your face doesn’t match your body,” my oncologist sweetly told me. She meant it as a compliment of my youthful appearance... from the neck up.

When my cats stand on my chest in the morning, imploring me to wake up because they are ready for breakfast, my left boob hurts. Apart from that and the lymphedema that makes my bust look like it belongs to either Lauren Sanchez Bezos or a Jewish bubbe, both horrifying in their own way, I barely remember that my body was cut, poisoned, and burned. These days, I spend far more time worrying about my wrinkly neck. The scarves that used to adorn my head now get tied jauntily around my throat, in an optimistically sloppy attempt to look both youthful and European.

As we navigate the intricacies of Portuguese bureaucracy, my brain, foggy from chemo and anesthesia and the general onslaught of treatment, is finally waking up, two years after finishing chemo and 15 months after my last immunotherapy infusion. When you can’t remember the fine points of anything and then suddenly you can, it puts a new, positive spin on the phrase, the devil is in the details.

We moved to Portugal in part because in four years I had cancer twice and a weird benign growth on my intestine that required emergency surgery and three months with an ostomy bag. You could say that bad luck comes in threes. I’d like to think that all of that is behind me now and that all I’ll have to deal with moving forward is the typical challenges of aging.

And yet one never knows.

Last September we traveled to Madrid with family members. We sent photos of every exquisite meal we ate to Pia, whose cancer had returned after two rigorous rounds of treatment. She sent cheerful “with you in spirit!” texts back.

Then, she was admitted to a clinical trial and miraculously her tumors were gone.

Six months later, she was in the final weeks of her life – one lived with fortitude and a helluva lot of panache.

The same week I got the news about Pia, I learned about an acquaintance here in Portugal who had just begun treatment for stomach cancer. Hearing about it took me back to infusion rooms, steroid highs and lows, body bloat, hair loss, broken nails, fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, humor, and hope.

Every life experience – getting married or divorced, having a baby, buying real estate, making a big move, or going through cancer treatment -- opens your eyes and forever changes you. There is no letting go. Though the immediacy and the intensity of the ordeal eventually fades, it remains imprinted in your psyche.

Years ago, while in the frumpy phase of raising young children, my world small and revolving around them, I was at a family gathering in a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles with Pia. Earlier that day, she had delighted my daughters by giving them makeovers and adorning them with jewelry. They looked and felt so glamorous in their red lipstick and baubles, as she told them they looked fabulous, spoke to them in French, and regaled them with tales of her world travels and adventures in the theater world. Later, at the restaurant, I went into the bathroom and couldn’t figure out how to turn the fancy sink faucet on. I’d been so isolated at home with my little ones.

When I got back to the table, I confessed this to Pia, who, with impeccable comedic timing, leaned over and said in an Auntie Mame kind of voice, “Honey, you’ve got to get out more.”

I’m on it, Pia.

May you take your next stage by storm.

I’m sure you’ll be fabulous.

Rest in peace.

The Best Thing I Cooked this Week

‘s Prawn Lasagna with Habanero Oil

After a long, wet and stormy winter, we’re sprucing up the Blue House and getting ready for visitors. New lighting is being installed, new couches are coming, and outdoor furniture is ready for entertaining. It makes a person feel like cooking.

Twice this week, I availed myself of the fish truck’s offerings. Instead of my usual whole grilled dourado, I fried it with a complex harissa paste, recipe from and ‘s wonderful book, Jerusalem. It was delicious, though it quickly became clear why the recipe calls for fish fillets

Then, last night, after a perfect weather day, and J’s third straight day out on his wingfoil (today makes #4), I whipped up this flavorful prawn lasagna from ‘s creative fusion book, Mezcla.

The best thing I learned as a cancer patient was to appreciate life’s glimmers. I hope I never let go of that.

When the sun comes out on a Wednesday morning, after weeks of heavy rain, you rush outside in response to the honk of the fishmonger’s truck horn, determined to catch him.

It had taken you months to catch the bread truck and establish a relationship with F, the driver, who comes by every morning. The fish guy makes his rounds on Wednesdays and Fridays, but has remained elusive. Buoyed by your success with the bread truck, you go out once, twice, three times to run after the fishmonger, who speeds back and forth along the main road honking his horn, you don’t know how many times, until he moves on to another village. Your elderly Portuguese neighbors are amused and helpful. The fourth time, the old man up the hill gestures to you. You crest the hill and he motions for you to get into his car and he drives you to where the fishmonger’s truck is perched.

The fishmonger, the neighbor making her purchases, and the old man are tickled by your tenacity and this outcome. You leave with a kilo of prawns and the fishmonger’s card.

A few days later, in response to your WhatsApp order, the fishmonger appears at your front door with dorado for your Friday night dinner.

Even before the sun comes out, community groups are rallying to provide support for storm relief and their WhatsApp chats are buzzing. The seven winter storms of 2026 have devastated parts of Leiria, the region where you live, and the community humanitarian outpouring of aid is impressive and extremely heartening. People are donating money, food, clothing, household goods, and building materials, plus their labor.

You participate in one of the weekend work parties in a village an hour north of you and it is one of the most rewarding things you’ve done here. You talk politics with the right-wing husband of your group leader (we are a house divided, she jokes) and economic opportunity with the young professional women who feel priced out of their own city.

The most moving thing you see that day is flowers that have blown out of a cemetery, now adorning piles of storm-induced tree snags and logs and brush.

A few days later, when you come back from that first successful encounter with the fishmonger, S, the cogumelo guy, is waiting for you at your house. He says he saw you cleaning up storm debris on the side of the road in the village where he farms, an hour away, and you tell him you saw him too and had marveled, not for the first time, at what a small world this is. The buildings on his farmland have been destroyed by the storm, yet he perseveres. He sells you a box of exquisite jewel-like mushrooms.

That night, after you mow the lawn for the first time since November, and are nursing your sore muscles that are unaccustomed to so much outdoor labor, you have prawn and mushroom curry for dinner.

Someone has the bright idea to organize some benefit concerts for storm relief and you are asked to help out with marketing. Storm in Portuguese is tempestade, and you think it would be clever to model the concert branding after some of the big relief concerts, using a play on words. You come up with a few different versions of what will eventually become TempestAid. Members of the committee you are on ask around and you ask the Portuguese you play pickleball with and your Portuguese teacher if the name works. After some finessing, it is determined that it does, though not everyone will understand the word play. Later, you hear that the committee has been urged not to abbreviate its WhatsApp chat name, because CU, the abbreviation, means ass in Portuguese.

The mailman delivers your new passport and he is very official as he checks your name and notes that the delivery has been successfully enacted. But then he breaks into a grin when you tell him how happy you are to receive it. The next day, there’s another surprise in the mail - the drivers license you have been trying to obtain for ten months has arrived, less than a week after you were finally approved. This must be some sort of bureaucratic record.

F, the sunny regular bread truck driver is away, and his substitute P is a gruffer sort. He forgets your bread order the first time you meet, but he comes back the next day, and loosens up. He says that he is not happy that he awoke to news of war and as he passionately tells you this, the wind blows the door of the gate to your house closed and you are locked out. You climb through the bramble and scale a wall, wishing not for the first time, that you were taller.

Three deaths, one house, two surgeries, one hurricane, and many beautiful friendships, meals, visits, trips, and sunsets later, we just celebrated our first anniversary of full-time living here. As we move into year two, our life here is gaining depth and our perspective is broadening, along with our language skills. I can’t wait to see how things continue to evolve.

One of the Best Things I Cooked This Week

Portuguese Orange Olive Oil Cake from

In between WhatsApp chats for concert support, I did some power cooking. For the soup kitchen, I made ‘s Orange Olive Oil Cake from his book, the New Portuguese Table. For a lunch I was hosting, I made a slow cooking sauce for Fessenjen from Naz Deravian’s lovely Persian book, The Bottom of the Pot, and put mango puree in the ice cream maker for ‘s Mango Sorbet from his book, The Perfect Scoop. There was also a Cucumber, Orange, and Arugula salad from Meike Peter’s book, Eat in My Kitchen,

I’ll spare you the details of what happened the next day, when the chicken for the Fessenjen turned gamey, but needless to say, our local talho (butcher) had our back.

Our former neighbors taught us that you never return a borrowed plate without including a small offering - even if it’s just a freshly picked lemon or a piece of chocolate. We tried that approach with our current neighbor Maria B, who had shown up on the wrong day for a New Year’s Day open house, bearing a plate of cinnamon-adorned rice pudding. Maria B speaks no English and our Portuguese is still rudimentary. But we sat together, just the three of us, warming ourselves at the pellet stove and eating candied nuts and she told us her life story, a surprising amount of which we think we understood.

When it came time to return the plate, J brought it over to her house with a few pieces of banana bread I had baked. Maria B was surprised and maybe embarrassed. She impressed upon J that he didn’t have to do that. He doggedly explained in Portuguese that we had adopted our former neighbors’ tradition. Hopefully she understood.

This is a post celebrating the spirit of every day acts of generosity and kindness, and the extraordinary effort of rising to the occasion when your city is under siege by lawless thugs or your region is pummeled by 170 mile an hour gale-force winds.

It turned out to be a good idea to purchase the chocolate chips the Belgians were selling at the Alcobaça sweets festival last November and store them in my freezer, knowing that there would come a time when chocolate chip cookies would be just the thing.

We were feeling raw (America will do that to you these days) and our former neighbors, who had recently suffered a devastating loss, were also feeling raw.

Making and sharing food is J’s and my love language.

So on a very stormy morning, I whipped up a batch of these surprisingly easy chocolate chip cookies without J even noticing what I was doing. Then we brought half of them to our former neighbors, who had received an ominous-looking notice for us from the postal service. Before the day was over we received an effusive text from the eight-year-old in the family and a request for the recipe from her mother, I. They baked a batch of those cookies the next day and another batch a few days later.

“I’ll bring you brownies next time,” I told I. “That could be dangerous,” she said.

When people ask me why I wanted to move to Portugal, I repeat a phrase I heard from a Seattle transplant the first time we visited. “It’s a kinder, gentler place.”

That may be a generalization and it belies the fact that there was plenty of kindness and generosity in Seattle, my home of 30 years, as I’m sure there is in many communities in the US. And as we are seeing in Minnesota and around the country, current displays of cravenness, evil, cruelty, and greed can’t squelch the fact that it’s human nature to care for one another and stand up against cruelty.

Here, we’ve landed in place where helpfulness and mutual support are still very much a way of life. And there are myriad opportunities for immigrants to volunteer and become part of the fabric of Portuguese society.

Last month, I did my first shift at a local soup kitchen. It’s the brainchild of a Portuguese man whose family suffered hard times and he wanted to give back. So every day for a number of years, despite the fact that he has a job, he has cooked and served lunch and dinner for hungry people in the community.

Once a month, he gets a day off. Community volunteers shop for, prep, and cook the food, clean the kitchen and set the tables. Bakers bake cakes. I’m told that the soup kitchen patrons look forward to the days that the “English” volunteer because they like the cakes. Someone told me that chocolate cake, not very common in Portugal, is a particular favorite.

So for my second shift, scheduled for last Thursday, I decided to bake a chocolate cake. Not just any chocolate cake. A Yotam Ottolenghi/Helen Goh cake that the New York Times calls The World’s Best Chocolate Cake. That’s a lot to live up to.

It’s a recipe that has intrigued me for years, so I decided to bake one cake for the soup kitchen and one cake to share with friends who were coming over on Wednesday to see The Blue House for the first time. Short on time, I decided to bake the cakes on Tuesday night.

At 4 am Wednesday morning, Tempestade Kristin devastated Central Portugal. Half a million people, including us and our neighbors, were without power and cities up and down the coast suffered significant damage.

People rallied around each other — that’s human nature — sharing information, resources, offering to help. We ventured outside to survey the damage to our house and to the neighborhood and to check in with our neighbors. I didn’t have much to offer, but I had chocolate cake.

The next day, at the soup kitchen, the work went on as usual, even though many of the volunteers had no power. The organization that coordinates the soup kitchen volunteer effort arranged a donation collection site to gather supplies and raise funds for local families severely impacted by the storm.

I bought a portable gas burner and we went on a wild goose chase to find a small canister of butane, so we were able to heat up food for dinner and brew morning coffee. My British next-door neighbor, who had been drinking cold tea, came over for hot water. I sent her home with a slice of cake. More fortunate than many, we ate chocolate cake and drank port by candlelight. At night, under the covers, our cats kept us warm.

In December, while J was away and I was alone for a month in the Blue House, recuperating from dental surgery, my friend S and her husband came over to fix my broken pellet stove.

“We’re happy to do it,” S told me. “I think the world would be a better place if we just helped each other.”

The power has sporadically returned, gone off, and returned again. There’s been a lull in the storms, but heavy rains are expected to hit this week.

In between wind and rain, there have been moments of natural beauty.

Throughout it all, the beauty of human nature has never wavered.

The Best Thing I Cooked This Week

The World’s Best Chocolate Cake is also known as Take-Home Chocolate Cake, but I prefer its superlative name because it will always remind me of when I truly became a part of my community here, adding a little something in return for the plate of bounty I’ve been given.

It’s moist and delicious and I prefer it unadorned, with just a dollop of crème fraîche.

For Minnesota

I suppressed a scream when J inadvertently dumped the turkey stock that had been simmering on the stove for hours, following the hours I had spent roasting the turkey parts that I was proud to have procured from our local talho (butcher). He had just returned to Portugal with our visiting daughters after a month in the US and, since we hadn’t all been together in almost a year, I was trying to recreate family holiday magic. Cue the gravy.

In my decades of holiday cooking, I’ve always made turkey stock in advance of the main meal, so we could enjoy it with rich gravy. As part of the ritual, we strain the stock and use the cooked morsels of meat as “pet turkey.” So fixated was jet-lagged J on procuring pet turkey for our cats (who missed him very much while he was away and the feeling was mutual), that he dumped out everything else in the pot, an uncharacteristic move for a guy like him.

Remember when Curious George went to a chocolate factory and mayhem ensued?

I felt like the man with the tall white hat, but instead of yelling, save the chocolates!, I admonished J to save the turkey bones.

I acknowledge that I am sharing this post at a time of hopelessness. Untimely tragic deaths, political instability, cravenness, and cruelty have destabilized the world and deeply wounded our already fragile souls. Just when you think the news can’t get worse, it does.

So I apologize if these reflections come across as solipsistic or insensitive. The thing is, we’re all still trying to navigate life, with all its mundane messiness and joy. But now, heaviness and anguish and despair and fear for the future are sadly an unavoidable part of the mix.

***

Let me tell you what else went wrong with my holiday fantasy. The Hanukkah latkes were a bitch to get out of the frying pan intact, maybe because the variety of potatoes I found was waterier than my trustworthy Yukon Golds, or because it took longer than expected to properly heat the oil on my temperamental induction range.

The Christmas morning waffles took forever to cook in the new waffle iron I had purchased, which the salesclerk proudly told me, comes with a three-year warranty. It might take that long to cook a batch of waffles for a family of four. We gave up and turned the rest of the batter into a giant pancake.

The Brussels Sprouts which were in every supermercado I visited in the weeks leading up to Christmas, were nowhere to be found when it was time to purchase ingredients for the holiday meal. I still don’t trust my convection oven, even though I had one in the US. I got the smallest bird the talho could sell me and it was still a few pounds larger than what I had wanted, just managing to fit into my little oven. Making sure the turkey cooked evenly was a delicate dance.

But you know what? It all worked out in the end.

So, too, did family time.

Even when everyone lives in the same country, renegotiating the parent-child relationship now that we’re all adults, can be tricky.

It’s even trickier when you haven’t seen your kids in person for a long time and want to get in a full dose of mothering (aka nagging) to tide everyone over till the next visit.

The kids and husband could be forgiven for not recognizing that in this new life in Portugal, mom is a neat freak. During my month alone in the Blue House while J was away, I kept things immaculate.

New country, new me.

Five minutes after everyone got here, it felt like chaos, though I may be exaggerating.

Like many (probably most) families, we have our strategies for recalibrating and finding equilibrium. For us, it’s beautiful walks (and them suffering through the innumerable family photos I insist on taking. For those of you who saw the pictures I posted, I promise that Daughter #2 was happier than she looked), good food, humorous catch phrases, pet appreciation, and suffering through reformer Pilates together.

And then they leave and it’s bittersweet. Where has the time gone, what will the future bring, and how much of the story will we get to experience together?

***

Now, it’s the new year and each of us is embarking on our own personal journeys towards whatever passes for resolutions, while we figure out how to withstand the horrible news and not succumb to hopelessness.

Fellow Portugal-based Substacker wrote a beautiful piece about appreciating the quality of days, of light, love, good food, good friends and an impending 70th birthday. I commented positively and mentioned that I am turning 65 this year. Lovely Maria said she looked forward to hearing my thoughts on this impending milestone.

Would that they were so beatific.

In my book, there is a story about how for women, drivers license photos are a referendum of how you’ve weathered the different stages of life. I wrote that piece when I was in my mid-40’s. Little did I know.

I thought about it last week, as I attempted to obtain a passport photo that didn't make me cringe. I now understand what Nora Ephron meant when she wrote, I feel bad about my neck.

Then I realized that the next time I need a new passport photo, I will be approaching 75 and will probably envy my 65-year-old visage. Time marches on.

I went straight from the photographer’s studio to the gym we have just joined, where we had fitness evaluations and my results were humbling. I know I drink more wine here than I should, enjoy Portuguese bread, and add sugar to my espresso, but I also play pickleball three times a week, hike once a week, and do yoga most days. Clearly, that’s not enough.

I thought about how silly it is to be so stupidly and unrealistically vain (J - you are 100 years old. It is what it is. Me - not helpful!)), especially in the face of so much tragedy and, as a two-time cancer survivor, to not simply celebrate that I get to embark on this season of life. Like my abs, my attitude adjustment is a work in progress.

I’m grappling with when to accept “it is what it is,” or as they say in Portuguese, é o que é, and when to resist. So I now lift weights and do crunches every day and have my first-ever robo vacuum cleaner and will celebrate from afar, as my daughters turn 27 and 25 next week. That’s the easy part.

What’s harder is to wait for the light at the end of this fucking tunnel.

Who cares if I recognize myself in my next passport photo, ten years from now. It is what it is and though I may wince and complain, I can accept that.

But I’m afraid I won’t recognize the values of my country of origin, which I proudly served for many years. And that, I will never accept.

The Best Thing I Cooked During the Holidays.

Romanesco with Tahini Sauce from Gjelina

Always a mercurial eater, Daughter #2 now lives in LA and has fully embraced the lifestyle. She did an ab workout every day while she was visiting us. At first we clashed whenever she decided to skip whatever we were having for dinner and make herself a spinach smoothie or a chopped salad instead. She’s in her peak cute drivers license/passport photo years.

We came to a meeting of minds and we even kept two batches of carrots in the house — one for her, and one for the rest of us.

So it was a surprise when I made something for dinner that she devoured and asked me to make again. But maybe not such a surprise since it comes from Gjelina, the celebrated restaurant near LA’s Venice Beach. How handy to have that recipe in my back pocket when I couldn't find Brussels Sprouts for Christmas dinner.

On the day of the great apagão, the April 2025 blackout that plunged Portugal and Spain into darkness, I sat on a deck overlooking a verdant valley at a wooden table festooned with wine corks, made by my neighbor V. Our two families pooled the food in our soon-to-be defrosted refrigerators and created a power outage feast — cooked shrimp with a sweet chili/mayonnaise sauce, fresh, crisp salad, slices of sweet fruit. V calmly surveyed the scene, a glass of red wine in his hand, and there was truly no cause for alarm in our little oasis. We were oblivious to the power outage or the time that had passed, until we heard church bells ringing and people in neighboring villages cheering. Then we knew there was light again.

That was just one of many memorable meals we would share with V and his family at that table on that deck and V was always the same steady presence, quietly appreciative, a glass of red wine in his hand.

People come into your life for a reason, they say. How improbable that J and I would befriend a peer who came of age in the Soviet Union, watched it crumble, and helped his country rebuild. How unlikely that we would meet and be neighbors and then friends in a country foreign to us all.

That we would share stories, sweetness, sorrow, and sardines. And that through it all, this man would be the steady presence on the deck, overlooking the verdant vista, a glass of red wine in his hand, bidding us all to sit down at the wooden table festooned with wine corks that he had built.

Our friendship began with a happy hour, but really it began with a rambunctious little girl and her equally rambunctious podengo dog, neither of whom could resist coming up the stairs to our apartment to make friends. We would catch glimpses of the girl and her grandfather V out in the yard practicing football, or climbing into their little white Fiat to go to the gas station, where V would always “surprise” his granddaughter with a treat.

The first time they came up to our place for happy hour, I was nervous about what to cook. But V liked the baked feta and honey I served. “The next week we will host,” his family said, and thus the weekly ritual began — gathering and sharing our native foods and trying new recipes. It soon became evident that their place was better for hosting, so that the podengo, born to be a hunter and far too eager to get to know our cats, could participate. When we were downstairs, my dog Kobe came to love the dulcet sounds of Latvian spoken by V’s wife (also V) and the treats that were freely offered to him by her, the little girl and her mother.

A few hours before Kobe died, we had all been enjoying a happy hour together at our house. It had been raining, but as we ate guacamole, a beautiful rainbow emerged. The next day, when the little girl, her mother, and the podengo came to comfort me, I told them about the Rainbow Bridge, where beloved pets go so they can wait for their loved ones to eventually join them.

When J’s father died and I was alone in the apartment for five weeks, V and his family looked out for me. I played scopa almost every night with the three generations of women in the family, all fiercely competitive, while V sat on the deck sipping his wine.

When the female energy in that household or her emotions got to be too much for the little girl, V quietly stepped in and brought her out to the deck to be with him. He was her soft landing.

In August we were invited to join in a week-long celebration of V and V’s 60th birthdays. Sweethearts since their youth, they had amassed a lifetime of memories together, as well as three children and three grandchildren. Family and friends from around the world came to wish them well and as I listened to their stories about V, I got a better sense of the measure of the man. I already knew he was a devoted husband and a doting father and grandfather. I didn’t know that he was also a father figure to many, a visionary builder, and a lifelong friend.

V’s sardines were the only sardines I’ve ever truly loved — fat and juicy and fresh off the grill, but maybe they tasted so good because the deck was bursting with people. The wooden table festooned with wine corks was full of food and an enormous honey cake had the place of honor in the center of the deck. V and V were wearing the Seattle sweatshirts we had given them for their birthdays. I was moved by the outpouring of love for them and grateful that J and I were welcomed into the fold.

As the week wound down and the guests were getting ready to return to their countries, I ran into V in the garage. He was painstakingly packing up boxes of wine to send home with his guests.

They say people come into your life for a reason and that we all have things to learn from one another.

In the days since V passed away, just a few months after that week of celebration, I’ve been reflecting on what I learned from him.

By all accounts and from what I witnessed, he was a man of integrity and the bonds that he forged with family and friends were the most important achievements of his life. Watching him surrounded by so many of the people whose lives he touched and who touched his life was a reminder that prioritizing human relationships and maintaining a generosity of spirit is the recipe for a life well lived.

V taught his daughter how to run a business. He taught his granddaughter how to play chess when she was little - maybe four or five. He was proud of how smart they both were and of his granddaughter’s irrepressible spirit. “She is singing all the time,” he said lovingly.

When V’s light went out, the podengo knew that his family needed him. He slept beside V’s wife, so that when she woke in the night she would not be alone.

I don’t know if there is a Rainbow Bridge for humans but I do know that the people we love stay with us in some form. I want to reassure the little girl that her grandfather is still with her, but I don’t need to tell her that, she says she can feel him walking behind her. I want to reassure his daughter that after the profound pain of loss subsides, she will carry her father’s essence with her forever. I want her to know that the light will return to her heart.

So I give her the Maya Angelou poem that brought my family comfort when my father-in-law passed away, the poem that describes what happens When Great Trees Fall.

J was away in Mexico and I was having trouble reaching him when I got the news that V had passed. When I finally do he tells me there was a blackout — an apagón they call it in Spanish.

On behalf of both of us, I offered my condolences to the family with the Maya Angelou poem, a honey cake that J had bought to share with V, a memorial candle like the one we burned for my father-in-law, and six white roses that a Portuguese florist had arranged for me to honor the Latvian tradition of mourning.

They say that one of the challenges of living abroad is forging deep and meaningful relationships.

How lucky are we to have shared stories, sweetness, sorrow, and sardines with V and his family. To have basked in the light of this man, a steady presence on the deck, overlooking the verdant vista, a glass of red wine in his hand, bidding us all to sit down at the wooden table festooned with wine corks that he had built.

People come into your life for a reason.

For some reason, I wanted to ease my aching heart by listening to this beautiful song, by Kenyan singer Ayub Ogada, which I used to listen to a long time ago.

Kothbiro means the rain is coming, and the song is call to the children to gather the livestock as the rain approaches. It’s about community, and unity, and elders passing on their wisdom to the next generation.

I’m driving south to Lisbon on the A8. After days of torrential rain, the weather has taken a welcome turn for the better and I’m singing along to a Spotify playlist featuring the female singers of my youth. A good soundtrack is “gravy,” an unexpected delight on a good day in a good life in a good country.

I make the trek to see my lovely oncologist, who gives me the good news that my MRI, CT scan, and mammogram, my first bellwethers post-cancer treatment, are all clear. Then she sweetly remarks that my face and body don’t match. “Your face doesn’t look like it belongs to a 64-year-old, but you have a 64-year-old body,” she says, without any detectable judgment, but still…

Ouch.

On the way back home I crank up Tori Amos and mentally prepare myself to see the dentist again about my cracked molar.

I’m alone again here in Portugal because J is in the US caring for his mother.

In the two weeks I’ve been sozinha, familiar music has been my best friend. It helps me through bouts of loneliness, punctuates spectacular sunsets, and most important, helps me greet each new day with a sense of hopefulness, gratitude, and joy. I know that sounds cheesy, but I love driving along the Atlantic Highway and looking out at the expanse of sea, beach, and horizon while listening to Sheryl Crow belt out Soak up the Sun.

I’ve said before that it’s a good idea for couples, especially long-married couples like us, to have to manage daily life on their own, which is different than going off to have separate adventures. In this month-long stint of singleness, I’m a new rural homeowner. Before he left, J gave me tutorials on how to drain the swimming pool, how to work the pellet stove, and more. Managing the Blue House during rain storms and wind storms and cold snaps is a good exercise in knowing what to do to maintain things and who to call if things go awry.

Managing myself is more elusive. For some time I’ve been operating from a place of equanimity and I enjoy the steadiness I feel at this stage of life. But when I’m alone for an extended period, my moods turn extreme and youthful and remind me of all the years I was hormonal and of all the dark chocolate I kept stashed in the freezer to even myself out.

I turn things over in my mind, and I have to dig deep to remember how I used to cope. Music, cooking, and exercise have long been my mainstays for sanity. Reading too, though when I’m off-kilter, I can’t seem to concentrate and need just the right book to keep me from doom-scrolling.

After several bouts of trial and error, I’m currently reading Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd, and it seems to be sticking. What do you read when you are feeling blue?

Add a big American holiday in a new country and the onset of that country’s version of the Christmas season into the mix, trying to support a partner shouldering burdens from afar, plus impending dental surgery, and the song that runs through my head is a Portuguese version of Adelaide’s Lament from Guys and Dolls (I realize I’m dating myself here and also that the song is very sexist).

Instead of, “a person could develop a cold,” from all that Adelaide must endure while waiting for her wedding, in my far less dramatic case, a person could develop saudade.

One of my dentists taught me the Portuguese expression, vestir as calças. Literally it means to put on the pants, but it figuratively means to wear the pants in a take- charge kind of way. Learning an idiomatic phrase takes the sting out of the upshot — that after two months of dinking around and downing antibiotics and Ibuprofen, hoping for a miracle, he was letting me know that it’s time for my cracked tooth to go.

In fact, vestir as calças is pretty much how I roll. I’ve said many times before that, in a world full of turkey makers and turkey eaters, I fall solidly in the first camp. And so, that’s how I cope.

My single friend C told me that the best piece of advice she’s received is that every day should contain the three Ms. You should meet with people, move your body, and make something. I’d add listen to music as the fourth M.

I fill up my calendar with as many fun things (hikes, a winery visit, a Friendsgiving party, a holiday concert in a village church, calls with old friends from the US, and pickleball, of course), volunteer activities, and distractions as I can manage, noting that J is also filling up our shared calendar with caregiving obligations and one much-needed mental health break that involves wind, fish tacos, and tequila. The contrast is striking.

On Thanksgiving, I invite friends over for a non-turkey potluck and we have a rollicking good time. On the way to check the pellet stove, I accidentally knock my friend’s glass of red wine all over my brand new Afghan kilim carpet. She cheerfully spends the next hour on the floor with salt, water, cleaning solution, and a brush and I think I have hit the friend jackpot.

When it’s sunny, I do Yoga with Adriene outside next to the swimming pool, while my cats, one moving freely, the other tethered to a harness so he doesn’t jump over the fence and go cruising for trouble, sniff the grass, sharpen their claws on the trees, and catch bugs. We all appreciate these simple pleasures and the feeling of being home.

Because it takes a lot of mental energy to meet and interact with so many new people from so many different places, all with their own life experiences and ways of connecting. This is when I miss J most of all. You make yourself vulnerable when you put yourself out there. Partners (and dogs) can reassure you and provide unconditional love. But solitude provides opportunities for reflection and self-awareness.

Every yoga practice closes with some variation of the phrase, the light in me honors the light in you, and today, for the first time, I think I fully understood the magnitude of its meaning. A people-person, I naturally look for the light in other people and can be disappointed when my light isn’t seen. I’m a classic Meyers-Briggs E, someone who draws their energy from other people, but not everyone is made that way.

Today, someone far more vulnerable than me did something kind and, in return, I extended a kindness back to them. I could literally see their face light up. Then I went off to interview a modest restaurant owner for an article I’m writing. He spoke with quiet pride about the delicious food and warm hospitality he wants the patrons of his restaurant to experience. I saw his light too.

Driving home on beautiful back country roads, my cup was full and I didn't need to listen to any music. I came home and and made a pot of soup to have for dinner after tomorrow’s dental surgery and had a nourishing conversation with my daughter, whose light was just the beacon I needed to lead me towards serenity. That was gravy.

How do you handle solitude and melancholy? If you are in a partnership, do you regularly spend time apart? What’s your favorite road trip music? Tell us about it in the chat.

One of the Best Things I Cooked this Week

I celebrated Thanksgiving twice — one the aforementioned non-traditional potluck and one traditional potluck.

For the non-traditional potluck I hosted, I wanted to do project cooking, so I made the Bstilla (chicken phyllo pie) from Claudia Roden’s seminal, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. You can see it in its glory in the photo at the top of this post. I haven’t made it for a long time and it was like being reacquainted with an old friend. It’s really not hard to make and it’s delicious.

For the traditional potluck I attended, I still went unconventional (because I’m gonna let this little light of mine shine) and made Roasted Butternut Squash and Red Onion with Tahini and Za’atar from Jerusalem, the excellent book by and . It’s a great vegetarian Thanksgiving entree.

Mushy, cool food is in my future this week. I’m glad my bottom back molar went out with a bang.

In a small village in Puglia, an Italian high school student is analyzing the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth, after a full day of the late October olive harvest. She is studying for a test. Over a convivial late night meal of pasta, meat loaf, salad, wine, and pistachio chocolates, the English speaking adults around her try to remember the lines that follow Tyger, Tyger burning bright. I’m impressed that J., who had a partial hippie childhood in Mendocino, California, can summon a respectable number of lines. (I don’t remember studying Blake in my square New Jersey school). But it comes as no surprise that the one among us who went to Catholic school has total recall of the poem, which is part of Blake’s illustrated collection, Songs of Innocence and Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

At the end of our weekend in Puglia, I’ll have a ten-liter tin of olive oil to show for our efforts. I’ll transport that tin across Italy and back home on trains, buses, boats, and airplanes. But when the blue Longchamps bag where I’ve stored the bubble-wrapped tin emerges from the baggage carousel after a stormy Halloween landing in Lisbon, it sits in a pool of liquid gold.

I remember that my friend Sally, 60 years old to my 24 when we met in India, became fixated with her teeth. “Take care of your teeth,” she warned me. “They can end up costing you a lot of time and money.”

I thought of Sally in late September on the drive home from Madrid with an excruciating toothache, probably caused by biting some delicious Fortnum and Mason Gold and Silver Sugared Almonds, which our travel companions had shared with us. And in the six weeks since that drive, I’ve been thinking of her each time I sit in the chair at the dental clinic, open my beleaguered mouth wide and look up, appreciative of the TV screen showing bad American movies with subtitles, so at least I can learn Portuguese while the dentists fuck with my teeth. The dentists are all young badasses and the women have tattoos. They don’t mince words. “This is bad, very bad,” they tell me. “You are probably going to lose that tooth.”

Hiking on the Sentiero degli Dei (the Path of the Gods) on the Amalfi Coast, where we traveled after Puglia, we leapfrogged with a young American woman and two fellow travelers. The first time I spied them, on the bus to Bomerano, where the hike begins, I felt a pang of recognition. I remembered what it felt like to be young and traveling solo and to fall in with companions - countries and borders irrelevant in the face of the shared experience of discovery.

At the end of the hike, we all ended up at the same cafe. The American was 23, it was her first time out of the US, and now, at the end of an extended and exhilarating period of travel, she was heading home and sharing with her French and Israeli companions her hopes for the future. “I want to settle down and eventually start a family. I guess my priorities will change, but I hope I’ll still get to travel.” And then she asked her companions what their zodiac signs were.

When we got up to leave — me, my husband, and my friend of 40 years, travelers in our 20s, still at it in our 60s — I reassured the girl and her companions. “One day, your kids will move out and you’ll be free to travel as much as you want to.

I should have warned her to take care of her teeth.

My mother, my inspiration for my twin passions of travel and cooking, introduced me to Italy 50 years ago and we traveled all over the country. This trip, riding the bus on the winding cliffside Amalfi coastal road, and later, walking the streets of Pompeii, took me back in time — my mother was with me more than any other time in the nearly fifteen years since her death. How lucky I was to have a mother who ignited my wanderlust. What fun we had on our trips. In Sicily, she had a flirtation with a blue-eyed Northern Italian guide named Enzo, who called her Mrs. Blondie, and I was old enough for her not to have to hide the attraction. They went off to have coffee together and I was inadvertently (I think) locked in our hotel room, admiring the little blue mosaic pill box I’d bought as a souvenir, which now sits in my house in Portugal. There was a movie that came out not long after that called The Getting of Wisdom. I think that’s what this souvenir means to me.

Interspersed with all this travel was a visit from old friends from Washington State, who arrived the day after J, had hernia surgery. He could barely walk and I could barely chew, but it was great to see them. We ignored our respective maladies and went off, exploring the schist village of Talasnal and the Unesco heritage city of Evora, delighting in these new discoveries and sharing memories of transformative youthful travels.

Now we’re home, finally settling into the Blue House, where the pellet stove is roaring as I write this. We salvaged almost all of the olive oil we brought from Italy and I’ve been cooking. A woodworker is making me a built-in kitchen bookcase and soon my cookbooks will have a new home. Once they are settled into place, I think I will be too.

Today we had lunch with new friends and all of us caught up with what we’ve been doing over the past two months. Everyone had tales of travels and maladies. Our Irish friends told us that their friends say that this stage of life is like living in a sniper’s gallery.

But how wonderful to still be exploring, to still be innocently delighted by discovery, to still be sharing these experiences with friends, old and new.

Three Good Orange Things I Cooked this Week

Orange and Almond Cake, Miso Butternut Gnocchi, and Butternut Squash and Salmon Porridge

Hands-down the best thing I cooked this week was a seafood paella in the outdoor barbecue of the Blue House, but because I free-styled, it’s a tough recipe to share.

For dessert that njght, I made Claudia Roden’s famous Orange and Almond Cake, for which you boil two oranges for two hours, remove the seeds, then blitz the oranges, peel and all, in the blender and mix them with ground almonds and sugar. It’s a moist, delicious classic cake.

My visiting friends delivered me ‘s very cool and innovative book, Mezcla, from which this recipe for Miso Butternut Gnocchi originates.

And tonight, to use up the rest of the squash, I made Butternut Squash and Salmon Porridge, from Linh Nguyen’s book Lemongrass, Ginger, and Mint: Classic Vietnamese Street Food Made at Home.

Here’s the recipe: 4 1/4 cups chicken stock or water; 1 1/2 cups butternut squash cubes; 1/4 cup jasmine rice; 1/4 cup sticky rice (I used all jasmine rice); 1 T salt; 2 lbs salmon filet cut into cubes (I used much less because that’s what I had); 3 T soy sauce; 1 t ground black pepper, 3 t vegetable oil; 5 scallions; freshly ground pepper; optional crispy fried shallots ( I omitted them).

Bring stock to a boil. Add squash and rice, lower heat and cook for 45 minutes. Season salmon with soy sauce and pepper. Add oil to a sauté pan -sauté white part of green onions for 30 seconds. Add salmon, cook for a minute and then let sit for a minute. Ladle porridge into bowls, add salmon, and top with green part of green onions and shallots, if using.

There’s a certain element of quaint and nostalgic cozy embedded in the lyrics of When I’m 64, the iconic 1967 Beatles song about a couple aging together. As a newly minted 64-year-old, I am surprised at how much of the song resembles my life today, minus Vera, Chuck and Dave, the knee-bouncing grandchildren.

But I think what truly gives the song its staying power, is one sleeper line that comes after the part about digging weeds.

“Who could ask for more?”

I went to the island of Malta to find out.

Six far-flung women, with nearly 115 combined years of government service and relationships dating back as far as 60+ years, gathered in Malta for a birthday celebration.

This group consisted of four former foreign affairs professionals (one a retired Air Force colonel), one CPA, and one architect. Five of them (minus me) had traveled together before. Two are sisters, two had met in a middle school advanced math class in Ohio, three had served together at a US Embassy. I met our hostess more than 30 years ago, when we both worked at the State Department in Washington, DC. Two of us are white, one of us is Black, and three are biracial. Three are married, two are divorced, one remains single. Three of us have biological children, two have stepchildren, one is a child-free doting family elder, two are grandmothers. We live in six different places, each have our unique style of dressing, and have made unique life choices.

But all of us are well-traveled American citizens with college degrees. We are well-read and keep abreast of current events.

At least once, one of us compared us to characters in one of those over-60 gal pal movies, like The Book Club (which I haven’t seen). Initially that stereotype made me cringe, but I can see the resemblance.

I didn’t know much about Malta before the trip, but discovered that it’s a good place to make sense of the course of human existence.

An archipelago strategically located in the Mediterranean, Malta has been inhabited since 6500 BC. and was conquered and occupied by a series of foreign powers who have shaped its culture, society, cuisine, and language. It came under British rule in the 19th century, achieving initial independence in 1964 and becoming a republic in 1974. Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Roman alphabet. You can detect influences of Arabic, Italian, and even French when people speak.

Malta knows a thing or two about adaptation.

But I’m not really here to tell you about Malta.

Get a group of women together, especially when Prosecco is involved, and it doesn't take long before they start sharing stories, perspectives, and recommendations for shoes, cosmetics, workout routines, and travel gear. Given the fact that for decades, four of us, having taken oaths to uphold the Constitution, represented the US Government overseas (and the other two came along for the ride), it was only natural that our conversations veered towards the political.

I wish I could tell you that over tagliatelle with nduja, or arancini stuffed with rabbit (the Maltese eat a lot of rabbit) or baba ganoush with a distinctive Maltese twist, we figured out how to bridge the great American divide, how to preserve American values and the Constitution, how to protect freedom of speech and human rights, how to protect innocent people from ICE raids, how to once and for all abolish gun violence, or who we can turn to to heal our broken country. Unfortunately, there are no ready answers, not even from a group as formidable as ours.

One of us wondered why the lessons about fair play that every child learns are so quickly abandoned by craven power-hungry adults. Another wondered why we can’t all just live and let live.

All of us wondered if all great powers are destined to decline and whether this is the end of the “American experiment.” All of us are devastated that the “beacon of democracy” that we were so proud to represent is no more.

On a personal level, as the 64-year-old baby of the group, I was soaking up life lessons from these women, especially for this stage and beyond.

I learned that the 60’s are go, go; the 70’s are slow go; and if you’re not careful or lucky, the 80’s can be no go.

So take care of yourself and carpe diem.

Go at your own pace and treat yourself to nice “day pajamas.”

Cherish and preserve your lifelong friendships.

(For more wisdom on aging, I highly recommend and its iconic This is (insert age here) interview series.)

Like a birder with a life list, one of our group members told us she had the goal of traveling to 75 countries before she turns 75. She’s on track to beat that goal with years to spare, so has upped it to 100.

I was curious about my own statistics, given that international travel was my lifeblood until I went on a nearly ten-year hiatus.

Malta is my 55th country.

I won’t make it to 65 by my 65th birthday, but I’m back in the game. It’s doubtful I’ll achieve my youthful goal of seeing every country in the world before I die (there were fewer of them then. The current number, depending on whether you include places like the Vatican as a country, is 195), so I’m borrowing my friend’s goal of 75 by 75.

In a couple of days, J and I, both having fasted, will get in the car and drive to the hospital about 45 minutes away from our house so that he can have a colonoscopy and I can have my blood drawn.

The Beatles didn’t talk about such things in their iconic song, but such is our modern version of togetherness.

I’m happy to be 64, now cozily living with J in The Blue House in Portugal, with so much of the world to explore, and old and new friends to keep us company.

But in the face of great global human suffering, achieving individual satisfaction isn’t enough.

Who could ask for more?

All of us.

The Best Thing I Will Cook This Week

Though we’ve lived in the Blue House for around three weeks and have spanking new pots and pans, we haven’t done much cooking here yet.

The day before I left for Malta, I received my copy of ’s book Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from My Palestine and I’ve been eager to cook from it.

Tomorrow night, while J, who is not a big fan of legumes, is suffering through his colonoscopy prep, I plan to make and enjoy Lentil Fatteh with Green Lemon Sauce.

Here’s the recipe from Boustany (metric version). You can find another version of this fatteh on Sami’s Instagram.

Ingredients:

180g split red lentils, washed and drained

1100 ml water

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 1/2 tsp ground cumin, 1/2 tsp ground turmeric, 1/3 tsp ground allspice, 1/3 tsp ground cinnamon, salt and black pepper

2 Tbsp olive oil, plus more for drizzling

Green Lemon Sauce (mix together 10 g chopped parsley, 1 green chili, finely chopped, 75 ml lemon juice, 2 Tbsp white wine vinegar, 2 cloves of garlic, crushed, salt)

2 naan or pita bread cut into 2 cm pieces.

Garnish: 40 g pistachios, 2 Tbsp chopped parsley

Method:

Put the lentils in a medium saucepan with water and bring to a boil, skimming off any foam. Add onion, spices, 2 tsp of salt and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove pan from heat, add olive oil and blitz with an immersion or regular blender. Make lemon sauce.

Preheat oven to 170c fan and line an oven tray with parchment. Toast pistachios for seven minutes and roughly chop them.

Add bread to the hot lentil mixture, along with a few teaspoons of green lemon sauce, and mix well. Cover and let sit for an hour, so bread is absorbed into soup. Serve drizzled with more green lemon sauce and garnish with pistachios, parsley and a drizzle of olive oil. Have the rest of the green lemon sauce handy on the side for those who like spicy food.

Layered on top of the nonstop joyful celebrating that characterizes Portuguese summer (see terrific take on the topic), our wonderful Latvian neighbors had a celebration of their own — a weeklong joint 60th birthday party, with friends and relatives visiting from far and wide.

Their multigenerational, multicultural joy and generosity and inclusiveness were infectious. So much so, that I felt like I was among the Whos in Whoville, who charmed mean old Mr. Grinch with their ability to love unconditionally.

There was even a cute little blonde Cindy Lou Who lookalike with a British accent who slept at our house with her grandma Biruta, her tiny little sandals sweetly laid out on the shoe mat alongside our big slightly jaded footwear.

Our hearts grew three sizes bigger last week.

Amidst all of the revelry, I baked four cakes — two to share with the Latvians and two to donate to a bake sale a local dog rescue organization, where I had volunteered to walk and massage dogs, was having at their booth at the Bombarral Pear and Wine Festival (also an excellent party).

There was so much going on, we were apologetically late to Portuguese class, which always starts with free-form conversation. We explained in our stilted syntax what we’d been up to — parties and cakes and festivals and how we had to rush home to change our clothes for the next event. Our serene and lovely teacher was planning to bake cakes too, for her granddaughter’s fifth birthday party, and she’s Portuguese, so of course she understands the importance of community gatherings.

“I guess we’re all living life here,” I said. “It’s starting to feel like home.” And though I probably botched those sentences in Portuguese, my teacher knew exactly what I meant.

I could tell you about how people are not their governments or their histories or their ages, or how the best way to break down barriers and achieve mutual understanding is to communally eat fat sardines hot off the grill or dance in the middle of a circle of people who don’t all speak a common language but applaud every dancer, no matter how ungainly, or listen to three ladies of a certain age who have been friends since they were girls sing songs of their youth in perfect harmony. But I really want to tell you about Biruta’s famous Latvian honey cake, which took her two days to bake, and which absolutely lived up to the hype.

Baking cakes is a universal labor of love.

Tonight, we are making a Moroccan dinner with our Latvian neighbors and the last of their guests — a Belarusian family that speaks limited English. It was inspired by the preserved lemons I gave the Latvians, made with fruit from a neighbor’s lemon tree, and fueled by my cookbook and spice collections. We’ll have Latvian-made drinks and salads (they make the best salads) and caramel and olive oil ice creams made by J and our seven-year-old Latvian neighbor and her Belarusian cousin.

Eight days from now, we are moving away from this rural oasis, these wonderful neighbors, and our wonderful Portuguese landlords to make a new home in a new village in the Blue House.

We’ve learned to be less guarded here, to delightfully throw ourselves into the revelry, to be less self-conscious, to share. And though it’s bittersweet, we are ready to meet our new neighbors — hearts and minds wide-open and cakes at the ready.

The Best Cakes I Baked Last Week

I baked four cakes, but only two different kinds. Inspired by the big beautiful raspberries (framboesas) at the Praça da Fruta, ripening peaches (pêssagos), and the abundance of hazelnuts (avelãs) here, I relied on two standbys:

Cake #1 - ‘s Honey Yogurt Poundcake with Raspberries from Dining In. This cake travels easily, so is great for picnics and potlucks.

Ingredients
Softened butter or nonstick cooking spray
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp kosher salt
½ cup sugar
¼ cup honey
¾ cup full-fat Greek yogurt
⅓ cup grapeseed or vegetable oil
2 large eggs
2 cups fresh berries

Directions
Preheat oven to 350℉
Grease a 9 x 4 inch loaf pan with softened butter.
In medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt together.
In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, honey, yogurt, oil and eggs. Gently fold in the dry ingredients (but do not overmix), followed by the berries.
Pour batter into pan and smooth the top.
Bake for 60-70 minutes (rotating halfway through the cooking time) until the cake is golden brown and springs back when pressed in the center.
Cool completely! before removing it from the pan.

Cake #2 - Hazelnut, Peach, and Raspberry Cake from ‘s Ottolenghi Simple. A simple, but showstopper of a cake. Oh, those hazelnuts! It’s nice with a little crème fraîche on top.

Recipe here.

Somebody I know recently received the news that, contrary to what she’d been led to believe over the past 10 months, she’s not going to die anytime soon.

This, as you can imagine, is a serious mind fuck.

On the heels of visiting Lisbon’s Campo de Ourique neighborhood for the first time last week, I learned the Portuguese idiom resvés Campo de Ourique. Referring to the fact that Campo de Ourique avoided major damage during the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the expression means something was a close call, or was avoided by “a hair’s breadth.”

While it doesn’t even come close to capturing what it must feel like to literally have a new lease on life, it did make me think about randomness, chance, and the roulette wheel of human existence.

If you suddenly learned you had more time on this planet than you previously thought, or, conversely, your time on earth was coming to an end, how would that change you? When you witness human tragedy that you yourself have avoided how does that make you feel?

Many other people, and themself, have eloquently described how this poet, facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, became the humanity shaman so many of us are desperate for during this tangled time of human existence that I lazily call fraught because I can’t think of a word strong enough to convey the enormous range of physical and emotional devastation that directly and indirectly threatens so many. I encourage you to read and listen to Andrea’s words.

Yet here we sit, in our echo chambers, unable to civilly talk across belief systems.

I recently had lunch in a new Israeli restaurant in a nearby town. The food was delicious and the owners were earnest and kind. But someone I know does not feel comfortable going there for political reasons.

I expressed my dismay about this to J, and he gave me a reality check. You would feel the same way if you learned that the owners of a restaurant were Trump supporters.

Guilty, as charged. Yet when I am in an unfamiliar environment outside of the US, I am insatiably curious and open-minded, even when the belief systems and history don’t align with my own. Inside the US, it’s a different story.

Some years ago, I volunteered with the Solutions Journalism Network, and through that experience, attended a workshop with Amanda Ripley, journalist and author of the book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. During the training, we learned how to keep dialogue open, by asking questions that encouraged the other person to express their point of view in a way that felt non-threatening and respectful, and to listen without judgment to what they had to say.

Around this time, Seattle journalist Mónica Guzmán began the cross-partisan work that would lead to her book, I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.

In the spirit of these two initiatives, which gave me so much hope when they launched, I yearn to be able to ask people with different viewpoints, Tell me more. Why do you feel this way, without being barraged with a slew of insults because I have a different perspective.

But in a post-truth world, where a binary lens reigns supreme and insults and attacks are a substitute for critical thinking and thoughtfulness, there is no room for nuance and limited opportunities to find common ground.

At a recent gathering of Substack writers in Lisbon, as we were discussing the hot-button topic of immigration in Portugal, personality frameworks like astrology, enneagrams, and Security vs. Discovery people, and generally how to make sense of the world while attempting to peacefully coexist with others, I mentioned that at this stage of my life I am trying to show people more grace and be less judgy. A, a vivacious and savvy Jersey girl (she wrote this), smiled with recognition and said, but it’s still a work in progress, isn’t it, or words to that effect. She gets it.

The beauty of idioms is that they enable new ways of seeing things. In my first post grappling with how to be a good citizen of the world, written after meeting my Ukrainian neighbors, I shared the Yiddish expression, I’d rather eat krupnik at home than roast duck with strangers.

I choose to interpret this expression broadly - that sharing food, however humble, with people and opening up your heart to them is a means of finding common ground.

At the risk of being criticized for being just another well-heeled immigrant who romanticizes Portugal, I admit that every time I’m in a restaurant at lunchtime and I see large convivial groups of people sharing a meal, or when I enter the main hall of the neighborhood sports club where I play pickleball and see groups of old men playing sueca, my heart warms.

Twenty-five years ago, in Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam lamented the loss of community in America. It’s hard not to believe that this disintegration is what has led to the current polarization. It’s hard not to admire a place where people still routinely gather, even if that place has its own share of polarization.

In my little neck of the woods, there’s currently a fierce debate about the location of a new hospital. Residents of the city where the current hospital is located are concerned about having to travel further for healthcare and about the economic impact of no longer being a regional medical hub. Residents of the city where the new hospital is slated to be feel exactly the opposite.

More than one thing can be true.

The latest idiom to catch my attention is à noite todos os gatos são pardos, which roughly translates as, at night all cats are gray.

Because I have yet to hear someone actually say this, I am relying on AI, which says the expression advises using caution and prudence when dealing with situations or people, especially when details are not clear or when things are not easily distinguishable. That seems like good advice.

So does this. If you haven’t already, please read this powerful call to action from World Central Kitchen’s — a call for action and compassion, instead of blame and polarization.

The Most Relevant Thing I Cooked This Week

Fattoush - from Jerusalem, by and

When starvation in Gaza reached horrific proportions and finally caught the world’s attention, there was a movement among food writers to stop blithely publishing recipes and magical food moment anecdotes and photos, so that the harsh reality of what is happening to our fellow humans could be the one conversation we are all having about food, specifically the devastating lack of it.

I was moved by this essay by , who often grapples with how to be a good human.

In 2012, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamini published Jerusalem, their love letter to the city of their birth. Ottolenghi, a Jew, and Tamini, a Muslim, wrote, We want to eat, cook, and be inspired by the richness of a city with 4000 years of history, that has changed hands endlessly and that now stands at the center of three massive faiths and is occupied by residents of such utter diversity it puts the tower of Babylon to shame.

With smoke from Portugal’s wildfires wafting in from the north, I went into our garden and picked the ingredients for an adaptation of the fattoush recipe in Jerusalem, acutely mindful of the legions of people around the world who are not so fortunate.

I didn’t realize when I hustled out early last Thursday morning to finally meet our local fishmonger that I was setting a (nearly) perfect day in motion.

You know those days. Sometimes they are meticulously planned. Sometimes they are spontaneous, as mine was. Waves of delight wash over you until you hear yourself, usually indifferent to hard-boiled eggs, claiming that that egg, the one you had for a mid-morning snack, festooned as it was with piri-piri flor de sal from the nearby salt flats of Rio Maior, was the best hard-boiled egg you’d ever eaten.

Usually on days like that, the Lou Reed song, Perfect Day, runs through my head, despite the fact that it’s overused and that my daughter kind of ruined it for me by sharing the theory that it’s a love letter to heroin, not to a person or the appreciation of simple pleasures. It’s still a great song.

I’m all about the simple pleasures these days.

When I’m content, I’m a much more inspired cook, and living in the country has given me a lot to work with. With abundant fruit trees and a fertile garden, my seven-year-old neighbor as a sous-chef, and card-playing neighbors (we are all obsessed with the Italian card game, scopa) and a sick friend to help with the eating, I’ve been churning out plum creations, making batches of preserved lemons, and fresh salads.

You can find the recipe for Marion Burros’ classic plum torte here. The plums we have here are not the Italian variety and the pits are kind of pesky to remove. But the flavor is good. While you’re at it, check out this recipe for Sheet Plan Chicken with Roasted Plums and Onions from NYT Cooking. It’s what we are having for dinner tonight.

Last December, I was featured in a series Lynn Hill used to write about Other People’s Kitchens in her publication, FoodStack Library. (Lynn has since left Substack and it looks like the link to the full interview is no longer live). Lynn and I had planned three interviews: the first featured the renovation of the funky old kitchen in my 115 year-old Seattle house, which would become an Air BnB after we moved to Portugal.

The second interview was planned for this spring and would have described my transition to a kitchen in a rented apartment in rural Portugal. We assumed I’d be adjusting to a new kitchen space, figuring out shopping and where to source ingredients, and grappling with the metric system, which I was promised in 1969, when I was in third grade, that the US was going to be transitioning to soon.

I couldn't have known when we planned the series, how influenced my cooking would be by living on a property with a huge organic garden and an enthusiastic 79 year-old landlord, who is tirelessly planting and maintaining that garden every day.

We’ve got about five weeks left here until we move to the Blue House. Adapting to a new kitchen in a home of my own was the third in the series Lynn Hill and I had planned. I’m already starting to think about how I will outfit my new kitchen.

I’m blessed here with friends who do meticulous research and thus offer sound recommendations on what to buy. I discovered that small appliances are very popular here, especially those that do double-duty. The first thing I bought was an Instant Pot, which replaces the rice cooker, slow cooker, and pressure cooker I left behind.

Last weekend, I saw a Facebook marketplace ad for an ice cream maker, selling for 15 euros. We’ve had several heat waves and I had been lamenting the one I left behind, so I quickly responded and the ice cream maker is ours. I found vanilla beans, so decided to make ’s iconic vanilla ice cream . We gave into the impatience of our seven-year neighbor and rushed the process, so the ice cream ended up being cream to pour over cake and enjoy while we all played scopa.

But right now we have strawberry fields forever, and thanks to Alice Waters’ book The Art of Simple Food, I have a recipe for strawberry ice cream that I promise not to rush.

I heard the honk of the fishmonger’s truck this morning, but I was too lazy to go out and see what he had to offer and maybe it’s just as well. The air fryer I ordered is about to arrive and my friend T, who swears by hers (I ordered the same one), tells me that I will appreciate the ease of perfectly cooking fish in the air fryer with no fishy frying plan smell.

Maybe that’s the set-up for my next (nearly) perfect day.

What does a perfect day look like for you? Do you have a soundtrack to go with it? Please tell us about it in the comments.

The Best Whole Fish I’ve Ever Cooked

Whole Sea Bream (dourada) from Russell Norman’s Polpo

I’m determined to build back my cookbook library, even if it means doing so five books at a time. J brought me back these gems from our Seattle garage, where my darlings are in storage. I’m already planning for the next five that will come over.

I discovered Polpo: A Venetian Cookbook (of Sorts), about five years ago during a heatwave at the Columbia River Gorge. Lying in bed, unable to sleep, it was nice to fantasize about spritzes and cichèti and living a European life. I learned that its author, Russell Norman, was a much-beloved London restauranteur. His book, Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, made it to Portugal in my first wave of books.

I wrote an appreciation for cooking inspiration and for Russell Norman, when I learned that he had died and I hope you’ll read it and then cook and eat something really delicious.

I once wrote, there are no perfect lives, only perfect moments, and I stand by that.

Here is Russell Norman’s perfect recipe for Whole Sea Bream, or dourada, as it is called in Portugal. I can’t wait to make it again.

For two:

2 medium sea bream - about 400g each (I used one 400g fish)

flaky sea salt

Extra virgin olive oil

I handful of parsley leaves, finely chopped

1/2 garlic clove, finely chopped

1 lemon

Ask your fishmonger to clean and scale the fish. Thoroughly dry it and then season with a little salt and olive oil. Place on a pre-heated medium to high heat griddle or barbecue and leave it alone (i.e. don’t move it).

The average size (400g) fish will take approximately six minutes to cook on each side. Gently turn the fish over to cook the second side. It’s done when the flesh is white, but still moist.

Stir the parsley and garlic into a little olive oil and drizzle over the skin. Serve with lemon.

When my daughters were young, I used to rely on this piece of insight from a parenting expert (I can’t remember who) to help them navigate the inevitable tussles and power struggles that created bewildering conflict among their peers:

Most people just want to feel important and included.

You’d have to ask them if it helped (I recall them accusing me of taking the other person’s side instead of being a fiercely loyal Mama Bear), but I maintain that, after the heat of the moment had passed, they begrudgingly admitted that it was true, and went a long way to explain hurt feelings, attention grabs, and so much more.

Turn out, that advice isn’t just for kids. At the ripe old age of 63 and 3/4, I’m finding this reminder helpful as I learn new skills, navigate new multicultural spaces, think about family dynamics, follow discourse on Substack, and react to the state of the world.

Belonging and esteem sit squarely in the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Sometimes I feel like I’m standing on a bird viewing station looking out in the distance and listening to the cries of birds, some visible, some not. I haven’t fully succumbed to the mid-and later-in-life birdwatching trope (but I want to), but there is something about having the time and the experience to observe and listen.

You learn a lot that way and I dare say that most of the time it makes you kinder.

You can read about my time as a heron nest monitor while I was going through cancer treatment here.

When I was young, I traveled around Europe with a Eurail pass and stayed in a lot of youth hostels. Walking into the common room was always a revelation and a quick way to make some assumptions about different nationalities and their traits, as well as about people in general — who dominates, who hangs back, who is comfortable operating solo, who seeks the support of a partner or a pack, who is friendly, who is reticent.

Decades later, when I started playing pickleball in Seattle, I likened it to that youth hostel experience. On the court were all sorts of people (and several different nationalities) — the loud, brash ones, the reserved serious ones, the friendly ones, the competitive ones, the cliquey ones, the ones who were kind to new players, the ones who (sometimes harshly) gave unsolicited advice.

Navigating life in a new country is not much different from navigating life in a youth hostel, on a pickleball court, or as a mom at a new school (oh, the PTA stories I could tell). But the wine is better.

Our multinational experiences on and off the pickleball court here in Portugal helped us decide to move here. I wanted to be shaken and stirred and I am on a regular basis. Sometimes it’s exhilarating, sometimes it’s exhausting. It’s almost always amusing or inspiring.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know yourself from experience, from reading Brené Brown, or from scrolling Instagram. But I’m coming to believe that age can bring a softness to how we perceive and react to human interaction.

It’s no secret that I am one of a legion of admirers of . Her first book, Between Two Kingdoms, got me through a harrowing medical crisis. The Substack community she created, The Isolation Journals, has sustained and consoled me. And now, her latest book, The Book of Alchemy, which J brought me back from the US, is inspiring me and making me grateful to be part of the fellowship of humanity.

In , Suleika shared an essay and a prompt from writer , which tapped into what I had been feeling about the vulnerability I see all around me, and particularly on Substack. Here’s the note I posted, along with Jayson’s beautiful quote.

To put it another way, a story I’ve probably told too many times is about years ago stumbling on the Facebook profile of someone from my hometown. Beneath her photo, she had this tagline, which I absolutely love:

I’m just a fucked up girl, trying to find some peace.

Aren’t we all?

The Best Things I’ve Cooked (and not cooked) During a Heat Wave

In the spirit of that over-used line, there’s more that unites us, than separates us, I want to talk about peppers and how many cultures have their version of slow, sautéed peppers, often different types, sometimes with tomatoes, usually with olive oil, often with eggs.

During our last heat wave, a few weeks ago, I went down the rabbit hole of pipérade and peperonata and eventually, using ‘s recipe for Pipérade dip as my foundation, sautéed peppers (I used red, orange, and green), tomatoes, onion, garlic, and piment d’Espelette, an understated Basque pepper that I adore, and of course olive oil. I served it mixed into scrambled eggs. You can freestyle it and because I went a little crazy with photos and am running out of room, I’m just going to link to a gift recipe from NYT cooking to give you something to work with.

Don’t judge me. I’m just an overheated girl trying to find some peace.

We’re having another heat wave now. Though I was giddy when I discovered that here you can buy gazpacho in a carton (and I did so a few weeks ago), the other day I decided to make my own. My favorite version is Salmorejo, aka Cordoban gazpacho.

Here’s a good Food and Wine recipe for Salmorejo from . I tend to be a little more liberal with the sherry vinegar.

How do you navigate interpersonal and climactic heat? As always, please share your experiences in the comments.

My father-in-law died two weeks ago.

It was a call from Michigan that prompted our frantic moonlit four-hour drive from Northern Portugal back to our home so that J could quickly pack and drive another hour to Lisbon, where he caught a flight to the US. We are relieved that he made it in time to be with his father and family for several days, and to share in an outpouring of love for the man who was the pillar of our family.

J had been planning a US trip for mid-June. It didn’t make sense for him to return to Portugal and then leave again, so he consolidated his trips. The end result is, that after being together pretty much 24/7 since we moved here, and much of the previous year of cancer treatment, we will be apart for five weeks.

It’s the first long stretch of living alone that I’ve had in almost 30 years.

I didn't get married till I was almost 35. We had a long-distance relationship for three years and, in the early years of our marriage, J and I each had jobs that involved international travel, so we sometimes went weeks and even months without seeing one another. I’ve lived alone, I’ve traveled around the world alone, I’ve eaten in restaurants alone, taken long walks alone, and gone to movies alone.

So it was a bit shocking to wake up alone that first morning in Portugal and to feel at loose ends.

I’ll leave the grief portion of the experience aside, except to say that it was gut-wrenching to be alone in another time zone while the family held their vigil and eventually grieved together. To not be with J to comfort him as he experienced this heart-breaking milestone was hard. Thank goodness for technology.

Day 1, I shelled peas and went swimming and then spent two days eating the Pasta Carbonara with English Peas I told you about. I kept myself occupied with swimming and hiking and pickleball, moving fast and furious so I didn’t have time to think. People here were very kind to me. ‘You’re all alone?” they said. “Let us know if you need anything.”

At home, I cooked stuff J prefers not to eat and watched stuff he prefers not to watch and stayed up way too late worrying about what was going to happen, and scrolling on my phone, something I’d been trying not to do at bedtime.

And I wondered. Is living alone like riding a bicycle?

In 2021, I was unexpectedly alone on July 4 in Seattle. The New York Times had recently published 50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s Blue, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that seminal album. With nothing better to do, I spent the day listening to Blue, and reading the commentary in the NYT piece that accompanies each track.

At its core, Blue is the story of a young woman’s quest for freedom.

Giving the entire album a close listen at age 60, with a lifetime of experience, human entanglements, and wisdom under my belt, it landed differently than it had when I was an unfettered young woman admiring Joni Mitchell’s adventurous spirit.

In that article, we get to find out what happened to Cary.

Early one morning in Portugal, a few hours after I received the call telling me that my father-in-law had passed away, I went out into the field across the street from my house and picked the last of the fava beans. I then went to the castle down the road (I love saying that) to attend a music festival. I was the only person sitting alone.

A young Finnish woman sang songs of love and entanglement and freedom and loss in the spirit of Joni Mitchell, while a bunch of 60-something mostly couples chattered noisily, far removed from the emotions and questions the singer was grappling with.

But of course, they are or will soon be grappling with their own versions of love and entanglement and freedom and loss in the way that one experiences these things later in life.

I wonder who sings about that? I guess Dolly Parton does.

I came home and cooked Grilled Asparagus with Fava Beans and Walnuts, and Sticky Date and Tahini Aubergine. It took a few days to work my way through them.

Here are other people I know who are currently living alone:

a friend whose husband is working in a town on the other side of the state where they live; their daughter, who is studying abroad at a big university, not part of any organized international student program; a friend battling cancer; some divorced friends, on their own after very long and not so long marriages; my elderly mother-in-law, who lives alone on an island; a friend living here whose husband is working abroad; several friends who moved here and started new lives on their own.

And my step-mother-in-law. Now alone, though rich with many friendships, after nearly 50 years of marriage.

Maybe my solitude feels hard to bear because I am alone in a still unfamiliar country, in a rental apartment instead of my own home, and fresh from the loss of my dog, my constant and very tactile companion of 13 years. Also, Portugal is one of those places where people travel in packs, so you can be acutely aware of your aloneness.

I make One Pot Chicken Thighs and Rice with a rich, garlicky feta cheese sauce and ‘s Health-Giving Papaya and Avocado Salad with Magic Miso Dressing These last for a couple of days and I feel like I’ve got the self-care thing down.

But then I get sick, so I cook an Instant Pot version of Mujaddara with lentils and bulgur and spend several days not leaving the house. Eventually I am sick of lentils and starving for human company.

Our cats have been doing their best to fill the void left by J and my dog Kobe. Maybe the effort is too much for them, as I wake up many mornings to find cat barf in unexpected places, which means I have to stuff comforters and blankets into our tiny communal washing machine and hope the finicky dryer will work.

Daisy likes to climb to the top of the wardrobe in our bedroom. One night, and then the next I hear her scratching up there and I begin to feel uneasy. I’m too short, even when standing on the bed or a chair, to reach the top of the wardrobe, so I climb up as high as I can get and snap a picture with my phone to get a better look. You don’t want to know.

I miss J, who is 10 inches taller than me.

I handle things. We are getting ready to purchase the Blue House and there are many details to attend to and snafus to rectify. I find myself juggling a lot of balls and worrying I will drop one. The car navigation cuts out one night when I am driving home from the city after midnight and I take a dark, circuitous route home. The house key mysteriously falls off the key-laden chain and I never find it. Luckily, I thought to keep an extra key accessible.

It could be worse. I remember a story my friend D told me about having to fish a big toad out of her swimming pool. She held her nose and did so while repeating the mantra, “I love being a strong, independent woman.”

A few months ago I had lunch with a group of women, all married like me. Two of them complained about couples who are “joined at the hip.” Then, one of them quietly spoke up. “My husband and I have quite a good time together,” she said. We make each other laugh.

And it’s true that that’s what I miss most of all.

After J’s father died, I texted many of the people with whom we have shared our lives, some of whom have recently experienced similar loss, and it felt comforting to be in touch with them.

J has been on a memory-filled odyssey in the US, seeing people and places that have been important to him and to us and mourning the people and the time gone bye.

It’s all so fucking bittersweet.

wrote a profound piece about “the wilderness of solitude” and what it can teach you. I’m not sure I’ve learned much during my current period of aloneness and mourning, though it’s been a stark reminder that we will all be alone at some point, so it’s a good idea to brush up on those coping skills.

Mostly I’m reminded how comforting it is to have people, whether you live with them or not, who bear witness to your life.

What are your thoughts about being and living alone? Let’s have a conversation in the comments.

The Most Celebratory Thing I Cooked This Week (and ate the most days in a row)

After a stressful few days and a whirlwind of activity, I signed the deed for the Blue House, where we will move in a few months.

It’s a good thing I had leftovers of this concoction to heat up and eat with a celebratory glass of wine. It made me feel a little less lonely.

Olive Oil-Braised Carrots and Chickpeas, from Le Sud

2 lbs (910 g) carrots, peeled and halved lengthwise

One 15-oz (430 g) can of chickpeas

1 small, thin skinned lemon thinly sliced and seeded

2/3 cup (160 ml) olive oil

1/3 cup (80 ml) dry white wine

3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

3 anchovy filets

2 T capers, rinsed and drained

3 springs fresh thyme

1 bay leaf

sea salt and pepper

optional pinch of red pepper

In a large Dutch oven or pot with a lid over medium heat, add the carrots, chickpeas, lemon slices, olive oil, wine, garlic, anchovies, capers, thyme, and bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer, stir, and then cover the pot and cook until carrots and chickpeas are very soft and tender (30-40 minutes), tossing halfway through cooking time. Let cool slightly, remove bay leaf and thyme sprigs. Serve warm or at room temperature.

I had this over couscous and spiced it up with some harissa.

The lemon tree on the property to the left of us is so laden with ripe golden orbs it would be a shame not to pick them. Last week, our downstairs neighbors discovered that the fields past the turkey houses down the road to the right have a bounty of peas that are being ignored, so just before sunset we walked over and picked some. Senhor M has been busy clearing and planting our garden every day. Last year at around this time, we were gifted a bag of sweet tangy plums from his trees. Hope springs eternal in a garden, with the promise of new beginnings.

This is our fourth May in Portugal and sometimes I am amazed at how far we’ve come.

There was our first trip of discovery in May 2022, drinking a lot of sangria and traveling the country from top to bottom and several places in between, to our let’s try living in one place for one month and see how we like it adventure of May 2023, when we discovered how mesmerizing the sun setting over the Atlantic Ocean can be and I encountered my first chicken with the head still on it and the feet tucked into its cavity.

That’s when we found the place we now call home, where we made friends, J learned to wing foil, and we could imagine living a life here, not just being on vacation. We returned to this place between cancer treatments in May 2024, me tired and short-haired, but fiercely determined. J found us Senhor M’s property with the bountiful garden and the stunning views to rent. During the long wait to finish treatment, get our visas, and finally move here, I would think about the sweet taste of those plums.

My new hairdresser gets it. She spent much of her adult life in New Jersey and has the warm, down-to-earth demeanor, way with words, and distinctive accent of the Jersey women I remember from my youth. They called you “hon,” fed you, and would give you the shirt off their backs if they thought it would help.

After checking with her doctor friend to make sure the chemicals wouldn’t hurt me this soon after completing cancer treatment, she put blonde streaks in my hair and said, “You are starting a new chapter of your life. You’re back!” The hon was implicit.

Shout-out here to , who nails the Jersey ethos, especially in this post about the Trump/Springsteen fight.

***

We first saw the Blue House on that 2024 trip and I thought of it, along with Senhor M’s plums, often. If all goes as planned, in a few months we will be leaving Senhor M’s bucolic paradise and moving to the Blue House.

That, my friends, is bittersweet.

But we can’t be everywhere all at once, can we?

I ate Joshua McFadden’s English pea toast in Seattle and shared the recipe with you last year. After we picked those country peas, I ate it again the other night with our wonderful neighbors, with whom I watched the Eurovision Song Contest.

I intended to shell and cook the rest of the peas the next night, but we had to make an unexpected trip up north to Bragança, to try to sort out J’s long-awaited residency permit for a trip he was planning back to the US. By the time we got there, there was a phone call. Come back as soon as you can.

There was a beautiful golden half moon illuminating the road, as we set out at 3 am from Bragança for the four-hour drive home so J could pack, drive for another hour, and take a flight to the US from Lisbon.

We knew the downside of moving to this place for happiness and adventure was being farther away from loved ones.

Such a bittersweet choice, but life is full of them and I believe that is how we grow.

The sun sets over the Atlantic and the Pacific and the moon is everywhere all at once.

I want to dedicate this post and the recipes that follow to RS. Our lives contain a finite number of beginnings. May you savor the sweet peas, the sunsets, and the warm glow of the moon and the people who love you in perpetuity.

The Best Thing I Cooked This Week

If I hadn’t already shared Joshua McFadden’s English Pea Toast from his wonderful book, Six Seasons, I would be featuring it in this post (recipe is linked above and can also be found on my recipe page).

Instead, I present you the solitary dinner I had last night and tonight, with the rest of the peas: Joshua McFadden’s Pasta Carbonara with English Peas, also from Six Seasons.

And here is the beautiful song we listened to on that moonlit drive home, which I have been listening to on repeat, with J and our loved ones so far away from me.

The music you hear while waiting to be connected to someone at our vet in Caldas da Rainha is a Portuguese version of the Maroon 5 song Memories. It took me a while to place the song the first time I heard it, when I called to make an appointment for my dog, Kobe. At the height of the COVID pandemic, this song was covered by the One Voice Children’s Choir. Because of quarantine, each child recorded their part at home and the recordings were later put together in a moving video that went viral, receiving over 23 million views.

The next time I heard Memories, when I called the vet clinic to tell them Kobe had died, I became so choked up that by the time the receptionist came on the line I was unable to speak.

You’ve heard these tales before, of the beloved pet whose loss is devastating to his family, and our story isn’t much different. We got Kobe as a 5th grade graduation present for our younger daughter, who is now 24, but we really got him for me. With no more little kids to take care of at home and surly adolescence on the horizon, I needed a little creature to care for who would love me unconditionally instead of roll his eyes.

Going through thirteen years worth of photos of Kobe, as I’ve done every night since he left us, I see bittersweet evidence of the happy years of family life. Kobe was there for all of it.

Though he was ostensibly a Havanese lap dog, Kobe acted like a Pacific Northwest Labrador, living an adventurous life full of hiking, stand up paddle boarding, road trips, and more. He spent time on Lummi Island, witnessed the Adams River salmon run in Canada every four years, spent summers at the Columbia River Gorge, and hiked to see the larches in Eastern Washington in October. On the paddle board, he looked like Kate Winslet at the prow of the Titanic.

He kept adventuring during his final weeks, when his heart was too weak to withstand much walking, riding in a backpack on my back like the good sport he always was.

When I had to have surgery during the pandemic, knowing I wouldn’t be able to resist lifting Kobe up onto the bed or the couch where I was recuperating, J bought short-legged Kobe a set of stairs. This came in handy the next year, when I had to have surgery again, and two years later when I spent 13 months in cancer treatment. Kobe was a great recuperation buddy.

He was also a lover of cats, adoring the two cats we had when he came to live with us, and staying close to their sides when they died. He was big brother to our next pair of kittens, the three of them a happy trio, sleeping together, looking out the window together, and always up for sharing morsels of turkey at lunchtime.

I wanted to tell the Portuguese vet all of this, but all I could do was cry.

In an unfamiliar place, where I didn't know what the customs were for pet burial, and lacking our own home with our own yard, where we could lay Kobe to rest, I was homesick for the first time since we arrived in Portugal.

But the kind receptionist, who apologized for her limited English, made me feel instantly better, telling me about cremation options and how sorry she was for Kobe’s suffering and for our loss.

When we arrived at the vet with Kobe in my arms, having ridden on my lap in the car for the last time, she came out and gave all three of us — me, J, and Kobe, a hug. She was soon joined by the clinic’s medical director, who hugged and kissed us. These two women also kissed Kobe’s soft sweet ears and promised me they would take good care of him.

Portugal gets a bad rap for mistreatment of animals. When I tearfully thanked the two compassionate women, the vet told me that she had been in practice for 36 years and that, as an animal lover, it had been hard for her at the beginning. “Things have improved for animals over the last 10-15 years, thanks to all the foreigners who have come here,” she told us. “You have taught us about compassion.”

On the day I wrote my last post, I told you it was raining, I was grumpy, and I was home with my trio of pets, cooking and preparing for aperitivo with our Latvian neighbors that night. They came over and were joined by our landlord, Senhor M, who Jeff successfully managed to invite, using the words aperitivo and agora (now).

It was a jovial evening that made me so happy to be in this lovely gentle country, surrounded by such kind people. Our neighbor asked each person to name their two favorite fruits and vegetables. In a mixture of Portuguese, Latvian, and English, we all managed to convey what we liked.

Kobe lay at our feet, responding to pats and sweet words in all three languages. He loved the Latvians very much.

At one point we looked out the window and saw a rainbow — arco-iris, our quadrilingual seven-year-old Latvian neighbor told us.

Kobe died in the wee hours. When the little girl and her mother came over to comfort me, bringing blueberries —one of my two favorite fruits — I told her about the “rainbow bridge” and that the arco-iris must have been for him.

“We love our cats, but our dogs love us”, said my wise friend Steve. “Losing a dog will rip your heart out.”

I feel a despair I haven’t ever felt before, not even when I was diagnosed with cancer. My emotions sit at the surface, ready to erupt in sobs at the drop of a hat.

There is so much meanness in the world right now, much of it inflicted by the president of my country of origin and his enablers. It exacerbates my sorrow. And though I vowed to focus on one thing at a time, I can’t. So I’ve told people at pickleball, on a hike, at Portuguese class, that I am grieving. And all of them —Portuguese, Latvian, Israeli, French, Scottish, British, Belgian, Irish, and more — have nodded knowingly. Grief is universal. So is compassion.

People have remarked that Kobe, who was diagnosed with congestive heart failure almost two years ago, hung on so he could join us in Portugal and make sure we were happy and settled here.

For a dog who always looked back to make sure we were safely following him, I believe it.

The Most Comforting Thing I Cooked This Week

That grumpy rainy day (it turns out, Kobe’s last), when I stayed home with my pets to prepare for o aperitivo, I also baked banana bread —specifically ‘s A Better Banana Bread. Waking up with no dog in bed at my feet and no dog to feed and take out, I needed sweet comfort and bracing coffee. This did the trick.

Want some more sweet comfort? If you have a few more minutes to spare, watch the One Voice Children’s choir.

A Better Banana Bread by Alison Roman

Ingredients: 1 1/2 cups flour; 1 teaspoon baking soda; 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt; 1 stick (4 oz) softened butter; 1/2 cup granulated sugar, plus 2-3 tablespoons; 1/2 cup light brown sugar; 2 large eggs; 3 very ripe bananas, peeled and mashed, plus 1 banana halved lengthwise. 1/2 cup mascarpone, whole milk yogurt, or sour cream. 1 cup toasted and chopped walnuts (my addition)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a 9x4-inch loaf plan with parchment or grease with softened butter or cooking spray and sprinkle the interior with enough granulated sugar to coat, tapping out the excess.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt

3. In a stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment (or a bowl with electric mixer or a food processor with a dough attachment, which is what I use here in Portugal) cream the butter, 1/2 cup of granulated sugar, and light brown sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time and beat another 3-5 minutes. Slowly add the flour until everything is incorporated, but be careful not to overmix.

4. Add the mashed bananas and mascarpone, yogurt, or sour cream (I have only made this with plain Greek yogurt and it works well) and mix until well-blended. Add optional toasted, chopped walnuts (my tweak to the recipe. Do it. You won’t regret it). Transfer batter to loaf pan, top with halved banana, cut-side up (I often skip the banana on top) and sprinkle with the remaining 2-3 tablespoons of sugar.

5. Bake until the bread is puffed up, golden, and starting to pull away from the sides of the pan - 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes). Let cool completely before slicing.

6. Feel better.

   Thank you for reading Slice of Midlife

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