Monday           July 21             Cornmeal-crusted Chicken with Herbed Crème Fraiche 9.95

Tuesday           July 22             Pan-fried Catfish with Apple Slaw 10.50

Wednesday      July 23             Local Pork Sirloin with Roasted Apples 13.25

Thursday          July 24             Grilled Duck Breast with Rosemary Berry Sauce 13.25

Friday              July 25             Crab, Mushroom, and Parmesan-stuffed Tilapia 13.25

Wednesday, July 23

Stuffed Turkish Peppers with Hickory Nut Gap Beef and Pine Nuts

Full: 39.50

Half: 19.75

Good day to you.

It is a beautiful North Carolina day today.  Not so much different from the beautiful days I just experienced in my home state.  Gorgeous clear days, blue skies, rich, green fields.  They are in the middle of haying now.  Big, round bundles of packed-in grass dot my fields.  I stayed with my Vermont family whose house sits near some of those open fields.  The mountains I started in are off to the East.  In one of these pictures, if you know where to look, you can see the gap, the notch near where I grew up.

I traveled there to read my stories to a group of Vermont writers and artists.  My mother was a member of that very group.  She was very full with our inn and so her outside activities were limited.  This writer’s group was her once-a-month gift to herself and was, no doubt, a help to her when it came time to get to work on her books.  The woman who invited me knew my mother and so, as it turns out, did some others who came to hear me read.

At one moment, as I was standing, waiting for the lunch to be set up, and as I was leaning against the glass door, trying to breathe, surrounded by writers and women and Vermont and the beautiful gallery, new since I’d left, which housed the reading, three lovelies scurried over to me.

 “AHA!” they exclaimed, “THERE you are!  We’ve been looking for you.  WE knew your mother!”

I pushed back into the glass door, nearly blown over by their enthusiasm, their glee.

“You did?  Oh, that’s wonderful.  That is why I came here,” I said, “to meet you.”

They giggled and told a story or two, demanding my age, pronouncing that yes, indeed, it WAS true, the dates worked and it WAS me, it WAS my mother, it WAS, yes, true, that they knew her and now, tra la, they were here to hear me.

When it came time for me to read, I stood, not near the podium but off to the side of the room, a room almost vibrating with the energy of the writers and the artists and, mostly, of the gallery owner, an artist and a singer and a visionary in her own right.  I read my stories and felt deeply heard, cared for, loved, even, by these women who added another piece to my search for parts of who I was and who, therefore, I now am.

Later that day I went home and, exhausted, slept next to the window, soothed by the breeze, the smells, the newly-cut hay, the birds' calls.

The next day I did go to my lake and, still spent from the reading and the meetings, lay on the grassy beach and slept again, lulled not by waves but by the sounds of children and their mothers.  I went to that lake every day in the summers of my childhood and hooted and swam and danced around the sleeping grownups.

I think about following the Golden Thread, the thin strand that leads me around.  I sometimes feel I’ve put it down or felt I’ve lost it.  Lately I have it again.  And it feels good to let it lay my hand where it guides me, shows me, whispers to me about now and then and where to go and how, how to proceed.