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kitchen gatherings

The secret to a successful book club is good food and plenty of drinks. When there are refreshments involved, people tend to show up to enjoy one another’s company—whether they’ve read the book or not. I’ve learned this over a decade of experience in not one, but now two book clubs, the second of which is a group of women spanning generations who all live in my neighborhood. After taking off several months during the pandemic, this group met indoors for the first time during that small window of near-normalcy we experienced early in the summer. We gathered in the kitchen, like people always do, where a potluck of food was arranged and drinks were close at hand. Amid our chit-chat, we admired the host’s kitchen, from her pretty green cabinet color and art collection to the attention to detail that makes modern upgrades appear seamless in a house nearly a century old. We agreed this was one of the things we’d missed most about in-person gatherings: peeking behind the curtain into our friends’ lives, catching the way their stories work themselves into their homes. It’s an intimate thing to open your house to guests—especially your kitchen, where so many messes are made. And, oh, how we’d missed it!

As of this writing, the rise in variant cases has reminded us that the pandemic is not yet behind us, and it might be some time before we’re admiring one another’s kitchens in person again. Because of this, I’m all the more honored to bring the beauty of your Arkansas neighbors’ homes safely to you through the pages of this magazine.

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Stephanie Maxwell Newton, editor stephanie@athomearkansas.com