How to Cook a Moose (5 page)

I stirred a cup of stew into his half-cup of kibble and gave him his bowl. Less than two minutes later, he had licked the bowl clean and was gazing up at me with adoration, licking his chops. I was tempted to laugh about this, but I resisted the urge, because this is exactly what we human members of the household do. Every day, we anticipate our dinner, talk about it, plan it, make it, drool over the cooking smells, load up our plates—and then it's gone.

3 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts, chopped

1 lb. carrots, chopped

1 cup green beans, chopped

1 cup broccoli, chopped, with peeled stems

Place all ingredients into a big pot and cover with water, plus one inch. Simmer, partially covered, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is cooked and the vegetables are soft. Let cool before serving.

Store in an airtight container. Keeps for 5 to 6 days in the refrigerator.

Chapter Two

My First Moose and the Yankee Palazzo

Every day in the farmhouse, Brendan and I walked Dingo along the dirt road by the lake to the main road, four miles round trip. On a very busy day, six or seven cars might drive by in one hour, most of them locals but some of them strangers taking the shortcut to Maine. “We have to get this road taken off GPS,” we griped, half-joking. “This is too much traffic.”

And then, suddenly, one early summer day, there it was, headed down the dirt road, straight toward us—my first moose.

“Look at that tall, fat horse with spindly legs,” I murmured to Brendan, not wanting to scare it away. “It looks like Don Quixote's spavined nag and Sancho Panza rolled into one.”

“That's not a horse,” he whispered back with a laugh.

I had lived in California, Arizona, France, Upstate New York, Oregon, Iowa, and New York City, and I'd traveled all over the world, but moose were in some ways more foreign to me than polar bears, penguins, or sloths—I'd seen the first two in zoos and the third in the
Costa Rican jungle, at least. Yes, I'd seen photographs of moose, but it took me a minute to recognize this as such. First of all, I was startled by its size. I hadn't realized they were so tall, so enormous, but in fact, they're the tallest mammals in North America. Males can weigh as much as 1,800 pounds, and their antlers can span as much as six feet.

This one was female, but she was still huge. Fortunately, I didn't know yet that moose, when startled or threatened, can be aggressive; she seemed peaceable enough. Also luckily, Dingo hadn't noticed her yet. He was behind us on the road, sniffing at a clump of weeds, as usual, oblivious to everything but the thousand and one smells his quivering black wet nostrils were inhaling and parsing out.

The moose looked back at us. We'd evidently interrupted her meditative constitutional. We stood quietly, very still, to show her that we weren't going to bother her any further.

She had a long, narrow face with a big upper lip like a camel's and a big dewlap under her chin, ears like a jackalope's, and a big, slightly bulbous nose. Her eyes were far apart, a liquid, reflective brown. There was a hump high up on her shoulder blades. Her fur was dark brown and looked almost fluffy. Her gentle, intelligent expression, rather than being supercilious like a camel's or adorable like a deer's, was mournful and introspective.

After a moment, this tragicomic, lovely, improbable creature lumbered off on her spindly legs down toward the lake and disappeared into the woods. I watched her go, feeling as if we'd been visited by an otherworldly being.

As much as we loved our idyllic life in the White Mountains, we had to find a permanent place to live. The farmhouse wasn't ours. It
belonged to Brendan's family, and on the occasions when they were living there, we felt acutely that we needed a place of our own.

In the spring of 2011, we began house-hunting in earnest. I'd moved out of the very cheap shared apartment in New York I'd been using for occasional brief visits back. At first, we thought of buying a tiny pied-à-terre in Brooklyn. Then, when I decided that I no longer wanted to live in the city and couldn't afford a decent apartment there anyway, we looked at a few houses an hour's drive up the Hudson River from the City. But the Hudson Valley is a dark place, even on the brightest days, and that close to the City, it's basically an extended suburb.

Finally, we realized we didn't want to leave New England. At first we fantasized about renovating the old barn by the farmhouse, but that proved to be too complicated in terms of Brendan's family. Then we looked at a few houses in small towns nearby, Sandwich and Tamworth, New Hampshire. But it seemed crazy to buy another house in the rural White Mountains when we already had one standing empty most of the year, and we didn't necessarily want to be buried in the deep countryside for the rest of our lives. We wanted to live in a town.

In retrospect, the perfect solution was there all along; we just had to tumble to it in our own slow way. But as time went by, as we traveled in and out of its easygoing little Jetport an hour and fifteen minutes away from the farmhouse, with lobster and moose on the
WELCOME HOME
signs, we slowly but definitively fell in love with Portland, Maine. We started coming into town more often, eating in the excellent restaurants, admiring the old brick buildings in the small downtown, the seagull-bustling wharves, the long gorgeous views over Casco Bay on the East End, the quiet tree-lined streets of the West End.

With zeal and zest and a clear sense of purpose for the first time since this whole process began, over the course of the summer and
into the fall, we looked at a total of twelve houses on the peninsula, in Munjoy Hill, the West End, and neighborhoods in the middle of the city, near the Old Port.

The thirteenth house we looked at wasn't for sale; the downstairs apartment was for rent, but Brendan, who had found the listing, insisted that we go and see it anyway, on a hunch. When we first walked in, we were struck by its beauty and elegance, although it was worn and shabby.

“We can't afford this place,” I said sadly, dazzled by the original plasterwork, the white fireplace mantels with decorative carving, the tall, graceful staircase with its newel-post light. “There's no way they'd sell it to us even if we could.”

Thanks to Brendan's persistence, it turned out that the owners did want to sell, after all, and their asking price happened to be exactly the outer limit of what we could afford, thanks to the money my ex-husband had paid me to buy me out of our house in Brooklyn. And so it came to pass that, on an updraft of optimism and faith, in the fall of 2011, we bought a nineteenth-century brick house in the West End, just off Congress Street. It had been divided into two apartments early on. The downstairs apartment included the first floor and the front half of the second floor, and our inherited tenants lived in the other apartment, the back half of the second floor and the whole third floor.

We moved in to the downstairs apartment as soon as the deed was in our hands, having never spent a night in Portland before, knowing no one. It was a raw, blustery, rainy November evening. There we were, in our drafty, unfamiliar old house. We sat on the couch, which was the only furniture in the living room besides the double mattress, surrounded by all my boxes and stuff that had arrived that afternoon in a moving van from my two storage spaces in New York, looking around at all the work that needed to be done, asking ourselves, “What the hell are we doing in Portland, Maine?”

“I'm hungry,” said Brendan. “What should we do for dinner?”

“I don't want to cook,” I said. “Do you? None of our kitchen stuff is unpacked, we have no groceries, and I don't want to go out. It's too wet and cold out there.”

We sat there for a moment.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Of course.”

In the farmhouse, when I'd found myself homesick for cheap, good, fast ethnic food, I realized that, if I wanted pork dumplings, sesame noodles, or pizza, instead of dialing the local place and waiting twenty minutes, I had to make them myself. And so I did.

But now, I simply got out my laptop and googled local delivery places. A Vietnamese place called Saigon delivered, and on the menu was beef pho, to my joy.

I first fell in love with pho in 1989 at a place called Pho Bang on Mott Street. Pronounced
fuh
, it originated in Hanoi at least a hundred years ago, probably more. Pho was always a treat when I lived in New York, since I never lived near a place that served it, let alone delivered it. “Going out for pho” was a pilgrimage, a mission, a search for exciting comfort and nourishing satiation in a stressful, huge, chaotic city. Pho was something you had to go and get; it didn't come to you.

But now, evidently, I could summon a vat of it whenever I wanted, in exchange for ten bucks and a phone call.

Twenty minutes later, a paper bag arrived, containing two plastic containers of broth, piping hot and fragrant with spice and meatiness, accompanied by all the fixings. We squeezed in some lime juice and added cooked rice noodles, then thin slices of beef, which cooked instantly, then thin-sliced raw onions and other additions. We fell on it with chopsticks and spoons, too impatient to wait for it to cool. The broth was rich and beefy and very clear, full of the delicate flavors of roasted exotic spices. The basil, cilantro, and bean sprouts were
fresh and crunchy. This was real pho, excellent pho, the pho of my dreams.

We ate it all, slurping the satiny noodles, splashing Saigon's house-made hot chili sauce on the thin, tender slices of beef. Brendan had a cold, and I felt like I was getting one. After we ate, we both felt cured, nourished, and so much better about this town and our future life here. The house suddenly felt warmer.

We slept well that night on our mattress in the living room, and the next day, energized and cheered, we dove straight into the long, slow process of restoring our half of the house.

We had already half-jokingly nicknamed it the “Yankee Palazzo,” because, despite its shabbiness, the high ceilings with their original plaster medallions made us feel like New England lords and ladies. But the truth was, our house had a checkered history. It had been a Goodwill house for adults with Down syndrome as well as a school. In the past ten years alone, it had gone through several owners, and more than one of them was apparently (according to our next-door neighbor) completely batshit. Its colorful history was manifest in all the terrible things that had been done to it: ugly, cheap, disfiguring fixtures and hideous wall-to-wall carpets, institutional paint, and worst of all, a cold, dark kitchen.

My ex-husband and I had renovated our Brooklyn house mostly by ourselves; having done that once, I felt no need to do it again, and Brendan didn't try to talk me into it. And so, during that first winter, we stayed in the farmhouse much of the time while our house was being restored, as much as possible and as much as we could afford, to its former loveliness.

Once a week, we drove into Portland to meet with our contractors, Patrick, Jeff, and their Landmark Construction crew. We'd find them painting the new built-in bookshelves in the upstairs study or framing out the new shower in the little bathroom, and spend an hour going
over the work still to be done: insulating the basement, painting the stairwell and foyer and rooms, putting a tile inlay into the foyer floor where the old cold-air exchange was, installing in our bedroom the vintage claw-foot bathtub that we found in the basement, a longtime dream of mine. Dingo sat at my feet and yipped at me every so often, demanding to be told what we were doing in this strange place.