Yankee Magazine November/December 2024

Unwrap the O

CONTENTS

62 /// The Comfort of Candlelight

As winter’s chill descends, Old Sturbridge Village warms with the glow of a bygone era. By Justin Shatwell

70 /// The 2024 Yankee Food Awards

From restaurant stars to tried-and-tested artisan makers, these culinary standouts represent the best of New England food right now. By Amy Traverso

Peering through a window onto the past at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. “The Comfort of Candlelight,” p. 62

78 /// Orphan Holidays

Redefining “family” through the powers of cooking and friendship. By Edie Clark

82 /// The French Connection

If scallops one day become Maine’s premier seafood, history may credit a surprising esprit de corps. By Rowan Jacobsen

88 /// Company Town

An enclave of retired spies reveals how New England keeps its secrets. By Jon Marcus

From the rich maritime heritage of whaling towns to quaint island villages and the grand seaside mansions of the Gilded Age, our small, comfortable ships can take you to the heart of New England’s most treasured destinations. Be welcomed back to your home away from home, where you can delight in the warm camaraderie of fellow guests and crew.

Small Ship Cruising Done Perfectly ®

28 /// Yule’s Gold

Together, an architectural historian and an architectural photographer create a holiday home to treasure in Lovell, Maine. By Marni Katz

34 /// Made in New England

Over the past eight decades, Vermont’s JK Adams has built a reputation for woodenware that’s a cut above. By Mel Allen

12

INSIDE YANKEE

Mel Allen pays tribute to the late Edie Clark: beloved Yankee columnist, gifted storyteller, and longtime friend.

Plus: Readers across the country share what Edie’s words have meant to them.

40 /// Thanksgiving in 7 Ingredients or Less

With their quick shopping lists and simple instructions, these recipes make for a holiday feast that’s easier on you and your budget. By Amy Traverso

50 /// Weekend Away

Plan a pre-Christmas escape to Freeport, Maine, to discover one-stop holiday shopping in a town where nature can be a welcome outlet, too. By

Sara Anne Donnelly

56 /// Twice Blissed

Body and soul share in the soothing at New England’s top wellness retreats. Compiled by Bill Scheller

20 FIRST LIGHT

At Santa’s Land USA, a Christmas mood takes hold long before the snow flies. By Ian Aldrich

26 UP CLOSE

This little piggy went to market—and put its Vermont creator on the road to fame. By Jenn Johnson

120

LIFE IN THE KINGDOM

Finding that rare pause in a season that urges us to hurry up, hurry up. By Ben Hewitt

Zachary Violette and Sean Litchfield’s 1830s Greek Revival home in Maine, all decked out for the season (see p. 28).

Photo by Sean Litchfield

EDITORIAL

Editor Mel Allen

Managing Editor Jenn Johnson

Senior Features Editor Ian Aldrich

Senior Food Editor Amy Traverso

Senior Digital/Home Editor Aimee Tucker

Travel Editor Kim Knox Beckius

Associate Digital Editor Katherine Keenan

Contributing Editors Sara Anne Donnelly, Annie Graves, Ben Hewitt, Rowan Jacobsen, Nina MacLaughlin, Bill Scheller, Julia Shipley, Kate Whouley

ART

Art Director Katharine Van Itallie

Senior Photo Editor Heather Marcus

Contributing Photographers Adam DeTour, Megan Haley, Corey Hendrickson, Michael Piazza, Greta Rybus

PRODUCTION

Director David Ziarnowski

Manager Brian Johnson

Senior Artists Jennifer Freeman, Rachel Kipka

DIGITAL

Vice President Paul Belliveau Jr.

Senior Designer Amy O’Brien

Ecommerce Director Alan Henning

Digital Manager Holly Sanderson

Marketing Specialist Jessica Garcia

Email Marketing Manager Eric Bailey

YANKEE PUBLISHING INC.

ESTABLISHED 1935 | AN EMPLOYEE-OWNED COMPANY

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Editor Emeritus Judson D. Hale Sr.

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Vice President, Finance & Administration Jennie Meister

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FOUNDERS

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Publisher Brook Holmberg

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Director Kate Hathaway Weeks

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PUBLIC RELATIONS

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NEWSSTAND

Vice President Sherin Pierce

NEWSSTAND CONSULTING

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LIVING

 2024 Holiday Gift Guide

From handmade candles to the coziest of flannels, our New England gift guide has something for everyone on your list. newengland.com/2024giftguide

FOOD

 Chocolate Peppermint Cloud Cake

Crushed peppermint candies give this cake’s frosting its gorgeous pink color— and make it a can’t-miss dessert to bring to holiday get-togethers. newengland.com/peppermintcake

TRAVEL

 9 Best Coastal Christmas Celebrations in New England

Discover our region’s merriest coastal meetups, brightened by lobster trap trees, Santa’s arrival by boat, and more. newengland.com/coastalchristmas

New England’s Best Ice Skating Spots

A guide to places with extra pizazz that make gliding on ice feel fresh and new. newengland.com/iceskating

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Remembering Edie

die Clark and I came to Yankee within a year of each other in the late 1970s. After working in publishing in Philadelphia, she and her then-husband had settled in New England, inspired to follow in the homesteading footsteps of Helen and Scott Nearing. Edie and I bonded over our love for writers like Lillian Ross, Tracy Kidder, and John McPhee, and we talked about writing as we walked the paths near Yankee’s o ces that took us to the lake. I became Edie’s rst reader, and she became mine.

Her stories spanned everything from land development and water pollution to an exploration of the Connecticut River that took 20,000 words across ve issues of Yankee to share all that she had discovered. Edie possessed the gift of nding people whose lives were virtually unknown but whose stories, she felt, needed to be told—for example, the oldest newspaper columnist in the country. “I listen to people’s stories and I never tire of it,” she once wrote. “I am constantly amazed at people’s lives, how the most ordinary people come alive with the most unusual stories.” For years, it was the rare issue of Yankee that did not feature an Edie Clark portrait of a person or a place, but also writing as tender as when she described caring for her mother in her nal days.

In the fall of 1984, when Edie married her second husband, Paul Bolton, a shy and gifted carpenter, I o ered as my gift a two-tiered wedding cake from a famous Maine bakery two hours distant. As I drove to Edie’s home, the cake rested on the seat beside me, its mocha-frosted top rising out of the box. At an intersection a few miles from my destination, a car abruptly turned in front of me. I slammed on the brakes. e cake tumbled from box to windshield. Forty years later, I still hear my shout of horror.

Edie knew a cake maker named Mary Walker, who lived in an 18th-century farmhouse on a knoll that looked out to a wide meadow and the shoulder of Mount Monadnock. Mary did emergency surgery on my smooshed o ering, and wedding guests saw only a cake decorated with a startling bouquet of owers. As it turned out, the house where Mary lived would become Edie’s some years later. In her writing, she called it simply “Mary’s Farm.”

I tell this here because it shows Edie’s gift for turning a devastating moment into

FROM TOP: The Harrisville, New Hampshire, home that Edie Clark bought in 1997 and immortalized in Yankee as “Mary’s Farm”; a 2009 photo of Edie in her dining room, a place she loved to fill with conversation and good food.

something beautiful. In her poignant memoir e Place He Made, she wrote about her love story with Paul, who died at age 39 only a few years after their marriage. e depth of her sorrow and her need to tell stories led to my urging Edie to write a monthly Yankee column about the renewal of hope and life and the restorative power of small, precious moments. “I hoped my readers would accept me simply as a lover of the miracles of the earth,” she wrote.

For three decades, she brought thousands of readers into the rhythm of a life bounded by sunrises, shifting seasons, the people she knew, the antics of her dogs, the comfort of a pot of beans roasting in her cookstove, the delight in hosting friends in a home she loved more than I have ever known anyone to love a house.

e years Edie spent rehabbing her ancient home and barn and tending to the gardens owed into her writing. She sat at a desk in a sun- lled room looking out to the meadow and mountain, and her life became entwined with those of her readers; to many she became friend, family, touchstone.

So when in 2017 a series of mini strokes forced Edie to leave Mary’s Farm and enter the care of nursing facilities, her readers let her know how much she meant to them, how deeply they missed her. eir cards and letters over owed my mailbox at Yankee, and lled boxes in her tiny, crowded room.

I delivered dozens of these messages on my visits to Edie. Because her eyesight was failing, I read them aloud. Many came with handcolored drawings, and she would hold them close to her face so she could see. She would smile and tear up at the same time. e love that strangers felt for her words reminded Edie of what had been lost and, no matter how much she wanted it, was likely not to be found again.

In many ways we can say that these years were the worst of Edie’s life—cut o from so much that she knew, her room so crowded that she slept in a reclining chair. Yet: She never lost belief that she would write again, even as she understood how unlikely that might be. She laughed easily when friends came. She was delighted when someone brought a delicious dish from a favorite restaurant, and when I’d wheel her outside to sit in the garden watching birds it from tree to tree. One couple from Massachusetts who had discovered her writing would come visit and drive Edie to her

beloved homestead, where she looked out at the meadow and breathed the air she knew so well. She called outings with friends “my jailbreaks.”

On the Sunday before she died, two writer friends came to visit. “I have never seen her so happy, so radiant,” her friend Howard would later recall. Edie told them about her improbable friendship with a tall Korean man who had arrived at her care facility following a brain injury. He had found her sitting by the garden and had stood beside her and held her hand. (She told Howard how long it had been since she had felt that.) Week after week, they sat together outside, and he had coaxed her to join the others in the dining room. Recently he had asked Edie to marry him. “We are the talk of the nursing home,” she said.

Two days after her friends’ visit, Edie awoke having trouble breathing. She left a message on my phone. It was my birthday and she always remembered that, and when I called back she did not pick up. e care facility took her to the hospital, where her breathing grew more labored. e doctors suggested a ventilator, which she refused. Edie died the following morning, July 17, with a doctor holding the phone to her ear as her sister said good-bye.

Edie now rests beside her husband, Paul, in a lovely cemetery with a view of a lake. A writer leaves her life on the page, which we can visit whenever we wish, as often as we desire. Edie lives on through her words, and she has left us hundreds of thousands of them. To say that she will be missed is an understatement. To say her work will endure long into the future is not.

Mel Allen editor@yankeepub.com

l “Her Readers Remember, Too”

From California to Massachusetts, Edie Clark’s fans share stories from the heart—just as she did. p. 16

l “Orphan Holidays”

Longtime readers of Edie Clark’s work will recognize this essay as an old friend. New readers will find it a wonderful place to start. p. 78

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Her Readers Remember, Too

My late husband Steve once remarked that if you care for someone you should never let the words go unspoken.

Over the years it was my intention to write to Edie at Yankee and let her know how much her books and her stories from “Mary’s Farm” and “The Garden at Chesham Depot” touched my heart. Her stories transported this Pennsylvania girl to the beautiful mountains, roads, and towns of New England, and I became a part of the landscape, people, and animals she befriended.

Edie is now gone, and I never put my words and feelings to paper. However, I now have the opportunity to say:

Thank you, Edie. Your books and stories will be treasured by all who recognize the remarkable human spirit at work on this earth.

With gratitude,

Marilyn Hatherill Wright Bath, Pennsylvania

Reading that Edie Clark had passed made me so sad, but grateful that she’s found peace. Every Christmas, I reread her story “Half Buried” (originally published in her column “The Garden at Chesham Depot”). In it, she finds an old Christmas ornament, faded and dirty but still intact. Its resilience inspires her to bring out holiday decorations she hasn’t used since her husband’s death, and she hangs the plain little ornament at the top of a freshly cut small fir. I loved all of her writing, but this column is my favorite, as a similarly tarnished and worn little thrift-shop ornament—“mysteries intact, stories untold”—helped me see past grief to the joyful light of Christmas. May you rest in peace, Edie. Thank you.

Katherine Lukasik Chicago, Illinois

Some years ago, I ventured out of my comfort zone to attend a workshop given by Edie on “Writing the Personal Essay.” She graciously hosted a

THE EDIE CLARK COLLECTION

Edie published a number of books in her lifetime, including collections of her Yankee columns and a memoir about her late husband, Paul, called The Place He Made. Often hard to find in bookstores, these titles are now available to order through Yankee’s online store. Go to:

few writers as well as my scared little soul in a room off her kitchen, which she confessed would soon be cleared of all furniture and become her wood room—stacked high to the ceiling and stuffed tight to the walls with, mostly, all the wood she’d need to burn for the winter months.

As we’d read to her and the group, she’d smile and nod her head or gently remind us to breathe when we came to a spot where our words abandoned us before the cascade of tears. Someone would pass the tissue box.

I continued to write and attempt to publish. Edie became my mentor of sorts. I would write to her in longhand on white lined paper—so oldfashioned. I know she got a kick out of

it, and she always wrote back encouraging me to keep going

When she could no longer stay at Mary’s Farm, her sister came to New Hampshire to organize an estate sale. Edie’s grandfather’s desk now sits in my home office, her published books lovingly displayed on her little tilted book holder on the top. I sit and write at this desk—not as often as I should—and fondly remember Edie. Her words echo in my ears. Keep going.

Doris (Dee) Matthews Brookfield, Massachusetts

I was saddened to hear of Edie’s passing and always enjoyed her work. I remember the Yankee article from January/February 2018 when her farm was put up for sale. One of the photos showed inside the front door: To the right was an old lantern, and above that was hanging a classic “Elmer Fudd” buffalo check cap. She probably clapped it on to gather wood or go out in winter. I hang one in our mudroom for the same reason and think of Edie when I pass it.

James Kern Lancaster, Ohio

When Edie went into the nursing home, I found myself writing notes to her every couple of months. Every time I read an article in Yankee or reread one of her books or essays, they sparked memories and connections to my living in Maine and New Hampshire in the ’70s and ’80s.

Edie and I were the same age. She was a young wife in rural New Hampshire learning to garden, split wood, and cook on an old wood cookstove. I was a young wife and mother of three toddlers living in a small town in Maine, learning to garden, split wood for a Jotul woodstove, and cook on a ’1940s electric stove. While Edie was baking bread, chasing chickens for their eggs, and starting to write her

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wonderful stories and essays, I was canning pickles, making blueberry jam, raising the little ones, and going to college at night.

I knew her people, places, and the weather she wrote about. Edie wrote so eloquently about them, from Paul and her family to Mary’s Farm. They were my neighbors and family, too. I do like my recipe for baked beans a little better, and I still use my brown soup crocks when I make onion soup for Christmas Eve. There was so much more I wanted to tell her, but we ran out of time.

Thank you, Edie. You are the best.

Jane Emerson Parker, Colorado

My journey with Yankee started about 35 years ago while I was living in Europe. An American friend passed her copy on to me, a native New Eng lander, and I soon took out my own subscription. Moving back to the U.S., I made sure my subscription followed me, and even when money was very tight, I found something to do without so that I could keep Yankee coming.

Upon its arrival, I would turn to “Mary’s Farm” immediately—some times while standing in the street on my walk back from the mailbox. Reading it seemed to connect me to my beloved New England roots like nothing else. Sometimes the essays would make me laugh, at times I would cry, and always I would hold the magazine to my heart after I read it and just smile.

When I heard the news of Edie’s stroke, I cried and then I wrote her a card, and with the arrival of each issue of Yankee I looked for an update on her health from Mel. Edie died on July 17, my birthday. In some strange way I find a bit of comfort in that. I know each year I will remember her and thank her for years of the pure pleasure her col umns brought to me. She touched so, so many of us. She will be missed.

CONTRIBUTORS

JON MARCUS

As a native New Englander with family near Camden, Maine, Marcus kept hearing about the former intelligence agents who retired there [“Company Town,” p. 88]. But over nearly 15 years of trying, he couldn’t penetrate the wall of secrecy around them. Then he realized he had it all wrong: The real story was about how New Englanders keep each other’s secrets. Marcus’s other writing can be found in such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe.

MARNI KATZ

A freelance writer whose work has appeared in Dwell and House Beautiful, among others, Katz was acquainted with Sean Litchfield long before coming to tour the Maine house he owns with his husband, Zach [“Yule’s Gold,” p. 28]. “Sean has photographed dozens (hundreds?) of homes I’ve written about, but we never actually met in real life until I pulled up in his driveway last winter,” she says. “It was a treat to have that kind of time with a colleague outside the usual networking situation.”

Elaine Macko California

ROWAN JACOBSEN

Envisioning the future of the Maine scallop industry required some overseas travel [“The French Connection,” p. 82], but fortunately Jacobsen is no stranger to globe-trotting: He’s logged countless miles reporting such books as Truffle Hound and the newly released Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul, as well as writing for The Atlantic, Scientific American, and other publications. When not hitting the road for a story, he can be found at home in his native Vermont.

CATRINE KELTY

Styling this issue’s food feature [“Thanksgiving in 7 Ingredients or Less,” p. 40] was a great chance to show that “you can have a delicious holiday celebration on a budget,” says Kelty. “We used what we had on hand to garnish and decorate the dishes in a simple and beautiful way—hoping this gives inspiration to readers!” In addition to bringing her talent to Yankee’s pages, Kelty has worked on nearly 100 cookbooks, including Maggie Mulvena Pearson’s brand-new The Feast & Fettle Cookbook

ROSS MACDONALD

With his witty, Nancy Drew–style illustrations for “Company Town” [p. 88], MacDonald adds Yankee to a long and illustrious list of clients: Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, et al. He is also the author and illustrator of four children’s books and has served as a prop designer and consultant for more than 120 movies and TV shows, including Oppenheimer and The Gilded Age. MacDonald lives in Connecticut with his wife, two kids, two dogs, and two cats.

SEAN LITCHFIELD

In photographing his own home for “Yule’s Gold” [p. 28]—not to mention the cover—Litchfield found decking the halls for the shoot to be surprisingly low-pressure. “I don’t take holiday decorating too seriously. It’s fun to just wing it and put up things that make you happy.” Litchfield’s architecture and interior photography has been published by both New England magazines (Cape Cod Home, New England Home, Boston Home) and national ones (Architectural Digest, House Beautiful).

f irstLIGHT

Jolly Good

For nearly 70 years, this Vermont theme park has been putting people in a Christmas mood long before the snow flies.

BY IAN ALDRICH

PHOTOS BY MEGAN HALEY

oliday spirit, in all its forms, burned bright. It was just after lunch on an early December day, and families were busy soaking up the sights and goodies in the gift shop at Santa’s Land USA, a 42-acre theme park in Putney, Vermont. The fireplace crackled, illuminated presents glowed, and a selection of Christmas tree ornaments spangled the walls. There were oversize multicolored lollipops to delight the eye, shelves of teddy bears to squeeze, and quite possibly more trimmed trees per square foot than anywhere else on the planet.

As members of her family perused the shop, an overwhelmed grandmother plopped down in a lounger not far from the fire and opened a paperback. Nearby, a mother took a knee in front of her young daughter, who was attempting to negotiate the purchase of yet another stuffed animal. Did the girl truly need it for her collection? the mother asked gently. A couple of soon-to-be teenagers meandered and pointed, eyes wide with a kind of Christmas Eve wonder, as they strolled through a bluelit tunnel of Christmas trees that led to—you guessed it—more trees. All this, before any of the visitors had even stepped out into the grounds, where a kid-sized train, whimsical animatronic figures, and holiday dioramas amid a grove of evergreens were primed to ratchet up the yuletide vibe even more.

Presiding over the scene was Santa’s Land owner David Haversat, who looked on with

LEFT: The entrance to the gift shop at Santa’s Land USA, which, like the rest of the buildings here, has remained relatively unchanged over the years. “Nothing has been knocked down or demolished,” says owner David Haversat. “So if you were at Santa’s Land in the 1970s, ’80s, or ’90s, coming here today will visually take you back in time.”

ABOVE: Youngsters pose with Santa Tom Baehr, a local musician and composer who is known to stroll the grounds playing his harmonica.

pride. He knows from deep personal experience the power of this place. When he was 8, Haversat had a vision of his future. It was summer, and his family had just arrived at Santa’s Land for their annual vacation visit from Connecticut. Catching sight of a teenager mowing the park’s lawn, he told his mom excitedly: “That’s what I want to do when I’m older!”

He wasn’t the first kid this place had inspired to dream. The brainchild of broadcast radio pioneer Jack Poppele,

Santa’s Land opened in 1957 to the delight of families from across Vermont and beyond, who flocked here for an immersive Christmas experience that ran from summer through the holidays. It may have seemed like an audacious idea—Christmas in July?—but it proved a successful one. Located just four miles from I-91, which would open in this part of the state in 1961, Santa’s Land flourished under Poppele and then his successors, the Brewer family, who owned the park from 1970 to 1998.

FROM

: Santa’s Land owner David Haversat; an animatronic elf stands ready to help decorate a tree in Santa’s Home; writing letters to Santa in the schoolhouse, which has a North Pole mailbox right outside; standing roughly 12 feet tall from antler to hoof, Rudolph is easily spotted from Route 5 along the park’s east side; the snack shack, where hot chocolate (with whipped cream, marshmallows, or crushed peppermints) is the order of the day; the gift shop entrance hall, which Haversat transformed from ho-hum retail shelving into a winter wonderland of his own design.

CLOCKWISE

BOTTOM RIGHT

photo: Holly Perry

After that, however, changing owners and changing times took their toll on Santa’s Land, leading to its closing in 2014. Over the next three years, the decline accelerated: Walkways became overgrown, buildings vandalized. Locals feared the theme park might never reopen.

Enter Haversat. A magician and auction house co-owner by trade, he bought the property in 2017 and immediately got to work: fixing up the original 1950s structures, rebuilding the rides, adding a nine-hole miniature golf course, and even introducing an antique carousel from Coney Island. He reopened Santa’s Land in late 2017, the icon of his childhood restored. “I remember at one point mowing the very same lawn and thinking, I can’t believe this really happened ,” he said.

In 2018, Haversat earned an award from the Preservation Trust of Vermont for his work in saving the park. “To many who have loved the place

over the decades, the reopening was a thrill only matched by the delight of children seeing it for the first time,” said the trust in its presentation of the award to the park’s new owner.

While he was humbled by the honor, Haversat said, what means the most to him is hearing from visitors who are grateful to have Santa’s Land back in their lives. It’s not a fancy amusement park chock-full of high-thrill rides or Disney characters—but that’s kind of the charm of the place. From the scent of the nearby evergreens to the sound of the train rolling down the track, they find comfort in rediscovering

“When I bought the property, Mother Nature had pretty much taken over,” says Haversat, who cleared a tangle of vines, tall

fallen trees to reveal the tidy woodland park of years gone by.

something so familiar, he said.

“It’s a place from another time,” he said. “People who came here when they were kids will tell me it looks just like it did back then. And that means something. Because maybe their parents are gone now, but for a moment, they can go back to when they were all together. That’s pretty special.” santaslandusa.com

SANTA ALSO KEEPS A HOME IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

The story goes like this: One day in the early 1950s, Normand Dubois saw deer crossing the road and got to thinking about reindeer. He and his wife, Cecile, had been looking for a way to bring more attention to New Hampshire’s North Country region, where they lived, on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. Normand’s thoughts of reindeer led him to thoughts of Santa, which prompted the couple to launch a Christmas-themed park in Jefferson called Santa’s Village. More than seven decades later, their family still keeps the holiday light on in the North Country, with 20 jolly amusement rides, yuletide decor, and of course, reindeer. santasvillage.com

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Prized Pig

Putting a homegrown Vermont company on the road to fame? This guy was cut out for it.

Volkswagen had its beetle; Walt Disney, his mouse. But of all the animals that Vermont entrepreneur Ann Clark could have sent to market, she chose a little pig—and ended up with a baking-supplies empire.

The story begins around the holidays some 35 years ago. Clark, who graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in art, always had a knack for making things. She’d already been creating and selling toys and crafts from her family’s Rutland home when, late one night, as she was simultaneously painting ornaments and baking Christmas cookies, inspiration struck. As Clark recalled in an interview with the Rutland Herald , she looked at one of her most popular ornament designs,

“and then I thought to myself, this pig would make a really cute cookie cutter.”

It did, and people noticed. Founded in 1989, Clark’s fledgling company would grow to become the nation’s largest cookie-cutter manufacturer, which today turns out more than 4 million cookie cutters a year—all made right in Rutland—with 700 to 800 individual designs in production at any given time.

While Clark, now 84, still comes into the factory almost every day, Ann Clark Ltd. has been overseen since 1998 by her son, Ben. Under his leadership as CEO, manufacturing has expanded to include related products such as food coloring, baking ingredients, and baking mixes (think: French crepes, Belgian waffles, gourmet scones).

On the cookie - cutter side, meanwhile, the company is continually trying out its hot-from-the-oven designs. Channeling Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, heart sunglasses were a big hit this past summer. There are new sugar skull shapes for fall’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), and this holiday season will see a centerpiece cookie-cutter set for creating pre-portioned cookie “pies.”

Among the top 20 longtime bestsellers, the spirit of Christmas abounds in gingerbread men, snowflakes, and a vintage truck with tree. Alas, there is no plump little pig on that list. But as it turns out, Ann Clark’s success today may be best represented by a surprisingly simple cookie cutter that’s outsold all the rest: the number “1.” —Jenn Johnson

Check the back of your kitchen drawer, and you just might find one of Ann Clark’s original pig cookie cutters, circa 1989.

Yule’s Gold

Together, an architectural historian and an architectural photographer create a holiday home to treasure.

BY MARNI KATZ

PHOTOS BY SEAN LITCHFIELD

Traditional greenery dresses up Sean Litchfield and Zachary Violette’s home for the holiday season. Their 3,500-square-foot Greek Revival is located in Lovell, Maine, 50 miles northwest of Portland.

In the west parlor, restored six-over-six windows and refinished wide-plank pine floors reflect the care lavished on the property by previous owner Grosvenor Newcomb, who accepted Litchfield and Violette’s offer almost immediately. “With my husband’s background in historic preservation,” Litchfield says, “Grove knew we would be the perfect stewards.” Four years later, the couple’s dogs, Lily and Otis, look right at home.

veryone in town knows this house, so we felt some pressure about decorating it for the holidays,” Zachary Violette says of the Greek Revival residence he owns with his husband, Sean Litchfield, in Lovell, Maine. But the couple—and the home—have risen to the occasion. Wreaths with buxom red velvet ribbons punctuate windows aglow with candlelight, and locally foraged evergreen garlands entwined with fairy lights festoon porch columns.

Violette, an architectural historian turned carpenter, and Litchfield, an architecture and interiors photographer, purchased the home four years ago. Built by timber magnate James Walker in the late 1830s, it had been restored by the previous owner, Grosvenor Newcomb.

A longtime carpenter with an affinity for old homes needing lots of love, Newcomb was drawn to the property’s original features.

“I was particularly intrigued by the moldings,” Newcomb says. “It was clear that a crafts-

man took a lot of time to create them.”

After the upkeep required by a former apartment in an 1880s Brooklyn brownstone, Litchfield was relieved not to take on a fixerupper. Instead, he could focus on furnishing the home’s 10 well-proportioned rooms. Violette, in turn, could hone his carpentry skills by making the raw space on the second floor of the home’s ell habitable. It’s now a chic short-term rental suite with boutique-hotel vibes.

Like many New Englanders, the couple come and go through the mudroom, to which they added beadboard and peg rails. The $20 rug the pair found at Hathaway Mill Antiques in Waterville holds up nicely against wet, muddy paws; Lily, a golden retriever, and Otis, a German shorthaired pointer, live here, too. “Zach brings the dogs hiking at first light every morning,” Litchfield says.

A door painted the same blackened blue as the beadboard opens to reveal a pair of over-

stuffed leather chairs sitting in front of a fire that beckons throughout the winter months. This cozy corner of the large, sunny kitchen and dining space is the heart of the home, where the couple host numerous gatherings, from community meetings to birthday parties (most recently, Zach’s 40th).

At holiday time, Litchfield hangs monogrammed stockings from the mantel, including one each for Lily and Otis, and drapes red wooden beads on the chandelier over the dining table. “Christmas decorations are ephemeral, so I have fun with them,” he says. Underneath the chandelier, a rumpled red-striped tablecloth with a French-country feel covers the farmhouse table that the couple made themselves using floorboards from the home’s original kitchen, now the pantry/bar. “It was the first project we did together when we moved in,” Litchfield recalls.

Ladder-back dining chairs with Shaker tape

seats were plucked from an estate sale in Parsonsfield. “It took living in the house for a bit to understand what furniture styles work best,” Litchfield says. “Our Eames chairs salvaged from a New York City public school were not the right vibe.” He finds that simple pieces with clean lines complement the home’s understated moldings. “I didn’t quite appreciate a Shaker aesthetic until I lived here,” he adds.

Litchfield used a mix of furniture styles in the front-facing double parlors, where tall windows with fluted casings and pediments let in light from three sides. A trio of cognaccolored leather safari chairs scored for $50 from a yard sale surround a marble-topped tulip table repurposed from the couple’s Brooklyn home. “I made Zach pull over when I spied them on the side of the road,” Litchfield says. “He said, ‘Those?’ and I was like, yes, they’re amazing!”

Christmas-morning festivities unfold in the west parlor, where a sparse but utterly charming

LEFT: In the dining area, Violette lights handdipped tapers in brass candlestick holders made by Litchfield’s father, a third-generation machinist, under the name Owl Haven Machine. The chandelier is a $20 find from Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore location in Portland.

CENTER: The centerpiece of the kitchen’s sitting area is the fireplace, which was completely rebuilt by the previous owner to replace a freestanding stove that once occupied that spot.

RIGHT: Windsor-inspired chairs from Maine’s own Chilton Furniture line up along the marble-topped island in the kitchen.

Charlie Brown tree scavenged from the yard fills a corner without blocking the period architecture. Piles of wrapped presents for the dogs nestle under its branches. Last year’s highlight? A giant box of tennis balls. “My folks really spoil the dogs at Christmas,” Litchfield says with a laugh.

Upstairs, an antique jacquard coverlet stretches across the couple’s Maine-made canopy bed that Litchfield discovered on Facebook Marketplace. One of his clients, Jenny Morrison of Morrison Design House in Windham, gifted him the Huey sconces with pleated ceramic shades and introduced him to Alexander Donatelle of Donatelle & Co., who custom-made the extra-skinny nightstands.

But Violette deems the guest bedroom with the red four-poster bed dressed in L.L. Bean pinstripes the prettiest room in the house. “Red, white, and blue looks good in summer and winter,” he says. “The whole house looks great in the wintertime.”

To learn about the one-of-a-kind Airbnb suite that Litchfield and Violette have created in their historic home, go to newengland.com/yules-gold.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Lily and Otis greet Violette in the all-important mudroom, which takes its vintage color cue from Gentleman’s Gray by Benjamin Moore; even the powder room under the stairs gets its own tannenbaum (“I’m a Christmas maximalist—I like a Christmas tree in every room,” Violette explains); a view of the sun-filled guest bedroom.

Board by Board

Over 80 years, Vermont’s JK Adams has built a reputation for woodenware that’s a cut above.

BY MEL ALLEN

At the JK Adams factory in Dorset, Vermont, local workers turn out the company’s heralded cutting boards along with an array of other hardwood products for kitchen and home. The octagonal beams shown at far right, for instance, will be made into modular wine racks.

If you were an apple, especially one plucked from an heirloom tree, you’d do well to be sliced on a JK Adams “Q-Tee” cutting board—a design that goes back more than 60 years—before being served with hunks of Vermont cheddar. If, on the other hand, you were a fresh-from-the-oven turkey, you could wind up atop something truly prestigious: the JK Adams maple reversible carving board, which for many years has been named the best of its kind by the experts at America’s Test Kitchen. At a time when many bemoan the loss of U.S. manufacturing, there might be a lesson in this venerable family business just outside the village of Dorset, Vermont. Simply put: If you make something better than anyone else, people will want it.

Like all great American success stories, this one springs from humble origins. In 1944, Josiah Knowles Adams began manufacturing a small wooden pull toy dubbed the Speedy Racer in a small Dorset garage. His creation caught on, and Adams soon moved operations into a former icehouse located in the spot off Route 30 where his namesake company still stands today.

Adams’s fledgling wood-products business added T-squares and slide rules to its line, and in 1949 an industrial engineer named Malcolm Cooper Sr. joined as a partner. A man of talent and vision who eventually became the company’s owner, Cooper had ambition that matched the country’s growing appetite for kitchen products that were both practical and aesthetically pleasing.

His son, Malcolm Cooper Jr., once told a reporter, “I don’t recall us ever talking about

JK Adams owner

Malcolm Cooper Jr.

FROM TOP: A point of pride for JK Adams is its use of sustainably grown and harvested North American timber, like the maple used for these round cutting boards; the natural woodgrain pattern on the Peacham maple paddle board provides an artful background for charcuterie; JK Adams’s Professional Collection features cutting boards with end-grain or edgegrain construction that mimics the feel of butcher block countertops.

sports or political news around the dinner table. It was always about the business and how to drive the business forward.” (When asked why his father did not give his own name to the company, he chalked it up to Yankee thrift: It would cost too much to change the stationery.)

Using wood from North American hardwood forests—maple, ash, walnut, cherry— the elder Cooper designed kitchen products meant to endure and be passed down through generations. He was always tinkering: One day, frustrated by how awkward it was to pull kitchen knives from their holders, he cut the bottom of a wooden block so that it slanted at a 45-degree angle. Knives slid in and out of the block with ease, and the world took notice. He also created the first modular wine rack, as well as the rotating spice rack.

As JK Adams continued turning out wooden products ranging from rolling pins to carving boards and trays, it was bringing something new to the kitchen seemingly every year. Plus, Cooper knew how to build and keep a business competitive, and in time he was able to pass the reins down to his son, Malcolm Jr., the current owner and chairman.

Today, a visit to the company’s Dorset headquarters offers the chance not only to browse the on-site Kitchen Store, but also to peek at what goes into the company’s guaranteed-forlife creations. Daily guided tours lead visitors along a catwalk to an observation deck, which looks down on the action in the 40,000-squarefoot workspace. The whine of power saws, the smell of cut hardwood, the roar of massive industrial fans—they’re all part of a steady thrum of creation. And as befits a company that owes its name to Yankee frugality, nearly every scrap of wood here goes either to heating the plant or into a useful part of something.

A few years ago, Malcolm Cooper Jr. told a reporter why he was confident that despite global market pressures, there would always be a need for the craftsmanship he saw at work every day.

“Wood has been used for tools, shelter, and accessories since the start of recorded human history,” he said. “It’s attractive, warm to the touch, and relatively easy to work with. People always come back to wood. Dad believed that if you build something that is functional and well made, people will buy it. We are going to hold on to that.” jkadams.com

FRESH FLAVOR FROM MAINE

One of my favorite souvenirs to bring home from my travels is a bit of local flavor from artisan makers. If you’re visiting Maine, one of those regional bites just might be a bag of Acadian ployes mix from Bouchard Family Farms in Fort Kent. Ployes are a crepe-like flatbread made with buckwheat flour, and a er trying my hand at making these versatile li le cakes, I thought they’d be a great dish for a brunch menu this holiday season. You can serve them with a variety of sweet or savory toppings— I opted for dropping some sweet maple-cinnamon bu er on top of my warm stack of ployes—and they cook on the griddle in about one minute, so they’re perfect for dishing out at holiday gatherings! —Kate Bowler

of the award-winning food and lifestyle website Domestikatedlife.com and the author of the entertaining cookbook New England Invite: Fresh Feasts to Savor the Seasons. You can follow her @domestikateblog.

Did You Know?

Fort Kent, Maine, is home to the annual Ploye Festival, where one of the featured events is the making of the world’s largest ploye—measuring up to 12 feet in diameter at past festivals! For more culinary inspiration and seasonal flavors of Maine, check out VisitMaine.com.

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Acadian Ployes with MapleCinnamon Butter

Recipe by Kate Bowler of @domestikateblog

Note: Ployes are endlessly versatile because they can take all kinds of toppings. I chose to use maple-cinnamon butter here, but a savory topping like Swiss and sautéed mushrooms is equally delicious.

Ingredients

1 stick of butter, softened 1 tbsp. maple syrup

1 tsp. cinnamon Acadian buckwheat ployes mix

Instructions

1. In a bowl, combine the softened butter, maple syrup, and cinnamon. Use the back of a fork to mash the butter until the maple syrup and cinnamon are well incorporated. Transfer to a small serving bowl and chill until ready to serve.

2. While the maple-cinnamon butter is chilling, prepare the ployes mix as directed with cold water. Spoon about 3 tbsp. of the batter onto a hot griddle and spread with the back of a spoon until 1/8 inch thick. Cook for about a minute, until bubbles appear, and the top is no longer shiny (do not flip). Cook longer if you prefer a crispier texture.

3. Serve the cooked ployes warm with maple-cinnamon butter.

Can’t make it to Maine? You can find Acadian ployes mix from Bouchard Family Farms online (ployes.com) and bring home a taste of Maine to your holiday brunch table!

Easy Cranberry-Orange Sauce, recipe p. 44

Dry-Brined Turkey, recipe p. 45

Easy Turkey Gravy, recipe p. 46

Sausage and Onion Dressing, recipe p. 46

Thanksgiving in 7 Ingredients or Less*

With their quick shopping lists and simple instructions, these recipes make for a holiday feast that’s easier on you and your budget.

BY AMY TRAVERSO

* Not including salt and pepper!

PHOTOS BY ADAM DETOUR | STYLING BY CATRINE KELTY

n all the years I’ve been developing Thanksgiving recipes, no one has ever demanded, “Give me a fancy menu with hard-tofind ingredients that will really show off what a sophisticated cook I am.” There are people who treat their holiday meal as a tour de force, but most of us are looking for a delicious menu that’s familiar enough and interesting enough and won’t drive us crazy in the making. That’s what I offer here.

I also limited the number of ingredients in any dish to seven (except for salt and pepper, which are so ubiquitous they hardly count, right?). Despite the fact that supply chains have been restored and inflation has eased a bit, supermarket food prices have stayed stubbornly high. But as these recipes demonstrate, you don’t need a lot of ingredients to deliver a lot of flavor.

So remember: It’s the holidays! A time for merriment and good cheer. May your feast be abundant and your cooking serene, and may all your loved ones be happy and healthy, now and in the coming year.

Spicy Feta and Red Pepper Dip, recipe p. 44

Creamy Green Beans and Mushrooms with Crispy Garlic, recipe p. 45

SPICY FETA AND RED PEPPER DIP

Here’s my take on tirokafteri, a creamy, lightly spicy feta dip from Greece that every cook should have in their repertoire when company is coming.

¼ cup olive oil

½–1 teaspoon red chili flakes

1 red pepper, stemmed, seeded, and quartered

12 ounces fresh feta (preferably packaged in brine)

Zest and juice of ½ large lemon

1 garlic clove, minced

1 tablespoon honey

In a small saucepan over medium heat, warm the olive oil and chili flakes until very small bubbles form on the

bottom of the pan. Remove from heat and set aside.

Set your broiler to high heat. Arrange the red pepper pieces, skin side up, on a foil-lined baking sheet and broil 3 to 4 inches from the heating element until the skin is partly blackened and the flesh is soft, 7 to 10 minutes. (Keep a close eye as the pepper cooks.) Remove and discard the blackened skin. Put the rest into a food processor or blender.

Break up the feta into small chunks and add to the pepper, along with the lemon zest and juice, garlic, honey, and olive oil with chili flakes. Pulse until smooth. Transfer to a bowl, drizzle with olive oil, and serve with pita or toasted bread slices. The dip can be made up to

3 days in advance and kept covered in the refrigerator. Yields about 2 cups.

EASY CRANBERRY-ORANGE SAUCE

Cranberry sauce doesn’t get much simpler than this. The flavors are so perfect together, you just don’t need anything else.

6 cups (two 12-ounce bags) cranberries

Zest and juice of 1 large orange 1 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Put all the ingredients in a 3- or 4-quart pot over medium-high heat, cover, and bring to a boil. Remove lid, reduce heat to medium low, and gently simmer, stirring occasionally, until the

Easy CranberryOrange Sauce

cranberries have split their skins and the sauce thickens a bit, 10 to 12 min utes. Serve cold or at room tempera ture. Yields about 5 cups.

CREAMY GREEN BEANS AND MUSHROOMS WITH CRISPY GARLIC

Knowing that oven space is at a premium on Thanksgiving Day, I developed a stovetop-only take on the iconic green bean casserole. The old-school French cream sauce with white wine and butter adds a bit of nostalgia and a lot of deliciousness. And crispy garlic gives a crunchy finish.

4 tablespoons plus 3 tablespoons salted butter

10 garlic cloves, thinly sliced, plus 1 garlic clove, minced

¾ pound white mushrooms, sliced

½ teaspoon plus ½ cup kosher salt

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

½ cup dry white wine

1 cup heavy cream

1½ pounds green beans, ends trimmed

In a small saucepan over mediumlow heat, melt the 4 tablespoons but ter. Add the sliced garlic. The butter should bubble but not smoke, so adjust heat as needed. Cook the garlic, swirl ing often and keeping a close eye on it, until very light golden brown, 2 to 3 minutes. Immediately remove the garlic with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Save the garlic-infused melted butter for future use. (It makes delicious garlic bread.)

Now, prepare the mushrooms: In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt the remaining 3 tablespoons butter, then add the minced garlic, mushrooms, ½ teaspoon salt, and pepper. Cook, stirring often, until the mushrooms release their liquid and brown at the edges, 7 to 9 minutes. Add the wine, scraping the browned bits off the bottom, and simmer until reduced, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the cream and reduce heat to medium. Simmer until thickened, 3 to 5 minutes.

Finally, cook the beans: In a 5-to7-quart pot, bring 4 quarts water and ½ cup salt to a boil. Add the beans and cook until bright green and just tender, 5 to 7 minutes. Drain and transfer to a serving platter. Pour the sauce over the beans and sprinkle with the crispy garlic. Serve warm. Yields 8 to 10 servings.

DRY-BRINED TURKEY

I’m a big fan of dry-brining turkey. It’s less messy than wet brining, and I love the flavor and texture it creates. You’ll need three days to let the turkey cure— and be sure your bird isn’t pre-salted, as some frozen and all kosher turkeys are. Note: You can brine for just two days, but the flavor won’t be as good.

tablespoons dried thyme

2 tablespoons dried sage

1 tablespoon onion powder

1 tablespoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 (12-to-14-pound) thawed whole natural turkey, not pre-salted

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

Three days before you plan to serve the turkey, prepare the salt mixture: In a small bowl, stir together the salt, thyme, sage, onion powder, coriander, and pepper.

Next, remove the turkey’s giblets and neck and discard (though you could

Impossible Pumpkin Pie, recipe p. 98

use the neck to make turkey stock, if you’d like). Use paper towels to pat the skin dry. Rub the turkey all over with the salt mixture and set it on a rack in a large roasting pan (a V-shaped rack will maximize air circulation, but a flat rack also works). Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for three days. The night before roasting, remove the plastic wrap—this will result in crispier skin.

An hour before roasting, remove the turkey from the refrigerator and let it rest at room temperature. Preheat your oven to 325°F (a convection oven is not recommended here) and set a rack to the lowest position.

Use paper towels to pat the turkey dry, leaving the majority of the dry rub on the skin. Gently push your hand between the skin and the meat of the turkey breast, then spread about half the butter over the breast and under the skin. Melt the remaining butter and brush it lightly all over the turkey.

INSPIRED

Set the turkey on the rack in the roasting pan, breast side down, and cook for 1¾ hours. Turn the bird breastside up and baste with pan juices. Continue roasting, basting periodically, until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast and thighs reaches 160°F (this will take between 45 and 75 minutes for a 12-to-14-pound turkey).

Tip the turkey to drain its juices into the pan and transfer the bird to a platter. Cover loosely with aluminum foil and let stand at room temperature for 20 to 30 minutes. Pour the drippings from the pan into a fat separator or measuring cup and set aside to make gravy (see recipe below). Yields 10 to 12 servings.

EASY TURKEY GRAVY

Despite popular belief, you can make gravy from the drippings of a dry-brined turkey. Whatever saltiness exists in the pan is easily diluted by the 4 cups of stock.

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And this gravy is so simple you can whip it up while your turkey is resting.

Pan drippings from a roasted turkey

4 cups chicken or turkey stock, plus more as needed ½ cup flour

Salt and pepper, to taste

Use a fat separator to isolate the dark pan juices and pour them into a small bowl (leaving the fat in the separator). If you don’t have a fat separator, pour all the drippings into a zip-top bag and let the fat rise to the top. Holding the bag over a measuring cup, carefully cut a small hole in a bottom corner to let the dark pan juices drain out (stop pouring just before the fat reaches the opening). To make the gravy, you’ll need 1 cup pan juices and ½ cup fat. If you don’t have enough pan juices, add chicken or turkey stock; if you don’t have enough fat, add butter.

Combine the pan juices and 4 cups stock in a saucepan over medium-low heat and cook until steaming.

Set a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the fat and flour to the pan, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the mixture is fragrant and lightly browned, about 4 minutes. Add 1 cup of the stock mixture and whisk until thick and smooth. Gradually ladle in the rest of the stock mixture, whisking constantly. Bring to a boil, then adjust the heat so the gravy simmers gently and thickens, about 10 minutes. If the gravy is thicker than you like, add more hot broth, ⅓ cup at a time, until it reaches desired consistency. Season with salt and pepper, and serve hot with the sliced turkey. Yields 5 to 6 cups.

SAUSAGE AND ONION DRESSING

Here’s a classic savory dressing that you bake in a casserole dish. Food scientists prefer this method, as stuffing the bird carries some risk of contamination. If you miss that baked-in-the-bird flavor, just

(Continued on p. 98)

Now Airing on Public Television Stations Nationwide

Feast on Atlantic Canada’s Culinary Experiences

Savor the beauty and bounty of these coastal provinces.

Atlantic Canada stirs the appetite with its exhilarating sights and imaginative culinary scene. In these four provinces—New Brunswick, Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island— seafood is abundant, farms are plentiful, and wineries, cideries, distilleries, and breweries season the landscapes. You will be hungry, too, after paddling beautiful coastlines, hiking seaside cli s and forested peaks, or strolling endless beaches keeping watch for whales, seabirds, and the occasional iceberg.

From New England, this culturally rich region is easily accessible via plane, car, or high-speed ferry. To tantalize you, we’ll take you on a whirlwind tour of memorable culinary adventures. Consider this a mere sprinkling of the ways an Atlantic Canada vacation will fi ll your plate.

TASTE THE TIDES: Fine dining on the ocean floor in Hopewell Cape, New Brunswick

Attached to Maine and easily accessible with 17 U.S. border crossings, New Brunswick is known for its 60 coastal and inland lighthouses, the warmest saltwater beaches north of Virginia, and outdoor adventures in vast, untouched wilderness. You may be familiar with the Flowerpots: towering rock formations eroded by the world’s highest tides in the Bay of Fundy. Now imagine dining in their midst, on the ocean floor, just six hours before 45 feet of water rushes in.

“We showcase southeastern New Brunswick’s local products, including wines,” Chef Anthony Seamone says. The Taste the Tides culinary team forages for fiddleheads, dandelions, garlic scapes, and samphire greens. The salt comes from the waters around Cape Enrage.

It’s an intimate experience, limited to 24 guests at a time, who begin to bond on a guided, interpretive walk before descending to their Castle Cove dining expanse. A glass bowl displaying natural finds awaits on each table, and at the meal’s end, the chef thanks each guest with a surprise message in a bottle.

Feed your New Brunswick travel dreams at tourismnewbrunswick.ca.

ROOTS, RANTS, AND ROARS:

Eat, drink, and make merry in Elliston, Newfoundland Fly or road trip to Newfoundland, where friendly locals “screech in” newcomers with cod kissing and rum. The third weekend in September is a foodie’s delight. Roots, Rants, and Roars brings acclaimed North American chefs to Elliston, the “Root Cellar Capital of the World.” Chef Nick van Mele of the Grounds Café at Murray’s, a former Cod Wars winner, calls the food festival “a beautiful experience for chefs who care about highlighting local ingredients” and for those who attend.

Judging the Cod Wars is a tasty task for festivalgoers, with six chefs’ cod dishes vying for supremacy. “Cod is Newfoundland’s backbone,” van Mele says of the fish’s place in local history, culture, and lore.

He loves The Hike, which features tasting stations, local libations, traditional music, and art installations along a coastal route. The festival wraps with a family-style feast featuring seven courses by seven chefs. “It’s held by the beach and feels o the grid; you live in the moment with others who love the rugged environment and Newfoundland ingredients.”

Plan an indulgent Newfoundland & Labrador trip at newfoundlandlabrador.com.

Region. “It’s the birthplace of North America,” he says. “We have been cultivating grapes here for over 400 years, but only in the last few decades have our wineries garnered international recognition for the quality of their wines. We make fantastic white and award-winning sparkling wines.”

Whether motoring in a 1947 Ford Super Deluxe or a 1952 Pontiac Chieftain, dining among the vines is always an option. “The slower pace of traveling in a vintage car adds to the experience,” Fitzgerald notes.

Each season has its pluses. “Spring is stunning; it’s quiet and relaxed, and the flowers are gorgeous,” Fitzgerald says. Summer is vibrant, and in the fall, he recommends adding farms, orchards, and markets brimming with produce to your customtailored tour. “The grapes are ready, the wineries are alive with activities, workers are harvesting, and grapes are changing color”—that’s bliss.

Explore Nova Scotia’s flavorful nuances at novascotia.com.

THE TABLE CULINARY STUDIO: Heavenly, hyperlocal fare in rural New London, Prince Edward Island

VINTAGE VINO TOURS:

Sip in style at Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley wineries Nova Scotia, easily reachable via The CAT ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, conjures images of the Cape Breton Highlands, South Shore beaches, Halifax’s maritime-history sites, and Annapolis Valley vineyards. On his private Vintage Vino Tours, Brennan Fitzgerald chau eurs guests from vineyard to vineyard in vintage automobiles, weaving in stories about Canada’s Original Wine

On Canada’s Food Island—the land of Green Gables, famed oysters and mussels, red sands and soil, and rare moving dunes—Chef-Owner Derrick Hoare and Executive Chef Hunter Guindon create a divine, seven-course tasting menu at The Table Culinary Studio. Remarkably, no dish served inside this handsomely restored church is repeated during the mid-May through late September season.

“We create the menu backwards,” Hoare says. He and Guindon scour the island, visiting farms, wharves, and foragers to find the best products. “Then we write our menu to feature the freshest foods available,” he says. For ingredients that can’t be sourced on the island, Guindon creates substitutes such as rhubarb for lemon, the little barbs on alder trees for black pepper, or daylily buds for capers.

In the dining space, which seats 27, Guindon appears periodically to explain the whats, whys, and hows of eating sustainably. “The pleasure for us is sharing a little bit of PEI through food, the island vibe, and the atmosphere in the church with guests from around the world.”

Cook up an escape to Prince Edward Island at tourismpei.com.

Freeport, ME

Welcome to one-stop holiday shopping in a town where nature can be a welcome outlet, too.

BY SARA ANNE DONNELLY | PHOTOS BY HANNAH HOGGATT

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Gift-giving inspiration at Palmer & Company; an elegantly prepared shirred egg, served up as part of Brewster House Bed & Breakfast’s three-course morning meal; hiking at Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park; smallbatch chocolates at Wilbur’s of Maine.

THIS PAGE: Holiday lights welcome shoppers to the L.L. Bean campus.

In 1771, the British cartographer Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres surveyed the roads in the farming village that would later become Freeport. There were only a handful, the largest of which was Post Road (now Route 1), which bisected a town center so muddy that it regularly swallowed horses to their haunches. Back then, you’d be better off getting around town by boat, skirting Casco Bay and the Harraseeket River past the modest homes of retired sea captains.

There’d be no major industry here to add sound and fury to your journey for another century, when local businessman Edmund Buxton (“E.B.”) Mallet Jr. took on the reimagining of Freeport as his personal mission, building a shoe factory, a gristmill, and a sawmill; opening a brickyard and a granite quarry; and erecting downtown housing for the hundreds of workers he brought to town to run all of it. Thus were planted the seeds of today’s Freeport—a town synonymous with shopping, the home of L.L. Bean’s flagship store, and one of America’s most visited retail destinations.

But modern-day Freeport still hangs onto its early, off-the-beatenpath beginnings. Its population of roughly 9,000 mostly resides in the countryside; talk to locals here, and you might get an eye roll when the subject of downtown comes up. Too busy, they’ll say. Too commercial . For decades, downtown has been the price Freeporters pay for the solitude they get to enjoy everywhere else. Recently, though, this divide has begun to close, thanks in part to efforts by the town and local advocacy groups to fill commercial vacancies with locally owned spots showcasing the area’s rich crop of artists, chefs, and craftspeople.

There may be no better time to enjoy this nascent coming-together than at one of Freeport’s biggest events,

the annual Sparkle Celebration, which transforms downtown into a winter wonderland featuring thousands of white string lights, a full slate of free events, a talking Christmas tree, and, yes, lots of deep discounts for shoppers. At the same time, L.L. Bean’s seasonlong Northern Lights event—which overlaps with the 10-day Sparkle Celebration—draws visitors to the retail giant’s Freeport campus with attractions like a model train village, Santa and real (!) reindeer, and much more.

As a bonus, visitors can easily spend their days buying local without ever needing to stray far from Main Street—and the same goes for where they sleep. A handful of Victorian-era inns within walking distance of downtown offer a taste of Freeport’s history alongside modern-day amenities. One standout is the 1888 Brewster House Bed & Breakfast, run by partners Dave Noel and Kelleigh Dulany. Noel’s former life as a chef in New York City means dining is taken seriously here: Your multicourse breakfast might include maple syrup made from trees on the property, and sea salt that Noel harvested from a nearby bay.

A few blocks down the street, the 1779 Jameson Tavern is a good choice for lobster stew, but there are also plenty of great modern eateries close by, including the Freeport Oyster Bar, Tuscan Brick Oven Bistro, and

Wanderlust Juicery. While strolling downtown, check out the Meetinghouse Arts Gallery for local artwork and the Freeport Community Services Thrift Shop for quirky, affordable vintage finds. Shoppers needing a retail break can relax to live tunes amid the moody blue lights of the music lounge Cadenza, or take in special holiday events such the Parade of Lights and chocolate house decorating with local confectioner Wilbur’s of Maine.

When you’re ready to connect with Freeport’s aforementioned quiet side, there’s more than 1,700 acres of protected land in and around town, featuring walkable trails through fields and along marshes, rivers, and ocean inlets. The most popular among the outdoor spots is Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park, which borders Casco Bay and a saltwater estuary, but for the best example of Freeport’s rural character, head to Pettengill Farm, an 1810 saltbox farmhouse on 140 acres of orchards, woods, and native gardens maintained by the Freeport Historical Society. Parking here is roadside (and in a quiet neighborhood, so please be respectful), from which a 15-minute

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Looking out toward Googins Island, an osprey sanctuary, from a hiking trail in Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park; Mast Landing Brewing Co.’s Freeport taproom; Pettengill Farm, a preserved 19th-century saltwater farm; Brewster House Bed & Breakfast.

IN & AROUND FREEPORT, ME

EAT & DRINK

Derosier’s: Laid-back pizza and sub shop owned and operated since 1904 by five generations of the Derosier family. Try their hot subs or “toasties.” freeportpizza.com

Freeport Oyster Bar: Raw bar and cocktail lounge in an 1830 carriage house, with Maine oysters, lobster rolls, and kelp-infused drinks to sate your inner Ancient Mariner. freeportoysterbar.com

Lily’s Food Cart: Perfectly seasoned noodles, scallion pancakes, and dumplings— including vegetarian options— all tucked behind the Starbucks at 49 Main St. 207-607-1787

Mast Landing Brewing Co.: A home-brewing enterprise that grew into one of the area’s most beloved beer makers. Find its spacious taproom at Freeport Crossing, with neighboring Nighthawk’s Kitchen providing a solid menu of pub grub. mastlandingbrewing.com

Sip House: Bracing mugs of organic coffee, aromatic teas, and yummy pastries baked in-house and at local microbakery Spün. Facebook

Tuscan Brick Oven Bistro: Homemade pastas and pizzas in a cozy, wood-paneled dining room. Reservations strongly recommended. tuscanbrickovenbistro.com

STAY

Brewster House Bed & Breakfast: Stately Queen Anne mansion that was once home to 19th-century Freeport merchant Jarvis Adelbert Brewster. Modern highlights include local beer on tap in the common area and EV charging. brewsterhouse.com

Casa Alchimia: A living gallery of contemporary Italian art, design, and architecture, set in the 1789 Captain Josiah Mitchell House. Italian aperitivo provided upon arrival. alchimiamaine.com

Harraseeket Inn: Awardwinning 94-room inn with an elegant interior and hotel-like amenities such as a restaurant, indoor pool, and fitness center. harraseeketinn.com

SHOP & PLAY

Brown Goldsmiths: The town’s only bespoke fine jeweler, founded in 1967. Elegant baubles are crafted upstairs from the showroom in a grown-up version of Santa’s workshop. browngoldsmiths.com

walk down a wooded dirt road leads to a breathtaking view of the Harraseeket estuary and a single ghost-white house overlooking it.

The last full-time resident of Pettengill Farm was Mildred Pettengill, who’d grown up there with her brother, Frank. After their parents died, the siblings stayed on as subsistence farmers from 1925 onward, eschewing society and living without plumbing, electricity, or a telephone. Frank passed away in 1960, leaving

Cadenza:

variety of genres, including jazz, country and western, and Broadway, plus tasty food from Brickyard Hollow Brewing Co. cadenzafreeport.com

Freeport Market: rotating cast of more than 50 New England artists creating everything from hand-poured candles and sea-glass jewelry to knit hats and silk-screened clothing. freeportmarket.me

Gingham: Woman-owned boutique selling classic, sustainable fashions, including a choice selection of luxury denim and Maine-made handbags and accessories. ginghamshop.com

L.L. Bean: World-famous outdoors, apparel, and home store—and the sun around which Freeport’s retail scene revolves. Open 24 hours a day. llbean.com

Palmer & Company: Artfully curated gift shop packed with

Mildred on her own until she moved out a decade later. The Pettengill house is open to the public only a few times a year, and not typically during the winter, but the grounds are available to roam year-round during daylight hours, and the inaccessibility of the house during the cold months seems to suit it.

To anyone peering through its cloudy old windows, the Pettengill home might seem frozen in a time when Freeport was known solely for

alongside heirloom-quality toys from names like Maileg and Meri freeporthistoricalsociety.org/ pettengill-farm

Wilbur’s of Maine Factory Store: Four-decade-old familyrun chocolatier selling treats in every conceivable shape, including moose and Bean boots. (There’s also a storefront in Freeport Center.) wilburs.com

Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park: Offering five miles of trails on a stunning peninsula between Casco Bay and the Harraseeket River. For snowshoeing and cross-country skiing, try the Old Woods Road Trail. maine.gov/ wolfesneckwoods

its wild inlets and hideaway woods, places just begging you to disappear into. It’s a reminder of the reclusive character that still exists in this most commercial of towns, if you know where to find it.

Freeport’s 2024 Sparkle Celebration will be held 12/6–12/15; for event details, go to sparklecelebration.com. L.L. Bean’s Northern Lights runs 11/22–12/29; for more information, go to llbean.com.

Mast Landing Brewing Co.

L.L. Bean

Winter’s Earliest Blast

Northern Maine gets a jump on the merriest of seasons.

Winter comes early to Aroostook County, snow illuminating the rolling farm fields and wooded trails, a holiday glow lighting up the towns and villages. Along the quiet country roads of Maine’s northernmost county, potato-barrel “Christmas trees” are wreathed in garlands and greenery. From churches and downtown storefronts drift familiar melodies of carols, words of comfort sung in English, Swedish, and Acadian French.

No place in New England embraces the holiday spirit as fervently as the Crown of Maine, where layers of history and heritage, cherished culinary traditions, and a reliably wintry sparkle all make for a spirited end-of-year escape.

The season begins as soon as the Thanksgiving dishes are cleared, with tree lightings and sleigh-bell parades from Houlton, in the south, to Madawaska, at New England’s northern tip, overlooking New Brunswick across the Saint John River. In Caribou, a pop-up artisan village magically appears on Small Business Saturday, with gifts galore through Christmas Eve. In Presque Isle, Victorian celebrations at the 1875 Vera Estey House are as lively as Christmas Eve at Fezziwig’s, with lavish period decorations, caroling, and plenty of wassail.

On Saint Lucia’s Day, December 13, pageants celebrate the patron saint of light, with white-robed girls donning crowns of candles to brighten the shortest day of the year. This Scandinavian tradition is part of the holiday magic in Aroostook, where a wave of Swedish immigrants settled

in the late 19th century. At Monica’s Scandinavian Imports in Caribou, schoolkids carry out the candlelit procession, while fiddlers and accordionists play old-world folk tunes and revelers pass plates of gingery pepparkakor cookies and the soft saffron buns called lussekatter

Another revered tradition the Swedes brought to Maine: Nordic skiing. Some of the earliest snows in the East fall on Aroostook County, home to world-class cross-country trails that have hosted World Cup events and to family ski mountains where there’s no such thing as a lift line. BigRock Mountain, in Mars Hill, has 26 trails and some 1,000 feet of vertical, with skiers typically hitting the slopes by mid-December. At the Fort Kent Outdoor Center, Nordic skiers watch for snowy owls while exploring more than 19 miles of impeccably groomed backcountry. It helps to fuel up at one of the restaurants in the St. John Valley, the heart of Maine’s Acadian country, where a slice of tourtière, a spiced holiday meat pie, is a requirement for any joyeux noël

Gift yourself a joyful getaway! Scan to discover where to stay, eat, and play in Aroostook County, Maine. visitaroostook.com

Massachusetts.

COMPILED

BY

BILL SCHELLER

CONNECTICUT

MANDARA SPA AT MOHEGAN SUN, Uncasville. Not all the tables at Mohegan Sun have chips on them: The massage tables at Mandara Spa await guests taking a break from gaming to indulge in a bit of pampering. Among the signature offerings are the “Fire & Ice” massage, using heated basalt stones and cooling gels, and a Balinese-style massage that harks back to Mandara Spa’s founding on that Indonesian island nearly 30 years ago. Asian, Indian, and Mediterranean “journeys” combine traditional practices centered on air, fire, and water. mandaraspa.com/mohegan-sun

MAYFLOWER INN & SPA, Washington. Located near the southern gateway to Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills and part of

the luxury lodging firm Auberge Resorts Collection, the century-old, 35-room Mayflower features treatments and wellness practices based on both Western and Eastern traditions. Choose to focus on facial skin health, strength and cardio training, yoga, meditation, exfoliating scrubs, or even a “Full-Body Reboot” designed to improve circulatory and lymphatic functions. In summer, accomplished trainers lead “Move at the Mayflower” wellness and workout sessions. aubergeresorts.com/mayflower SAYBROOK POINT RESORT & MARINA, Old Saybrook. Boaters cruising Long Island Sound find Saybrook Point isn’t just a place to tie up and tuck in on land—it’s also one of the Connecticut shoreline’s best places for a spa indulgence. A favorite is the “Too Good to Be True” package, combining a 50-minute

Swedish massage with a Circadia vitamininfusion facial lasting just as long, perfect for easing away the effects of sun on the Sound. Like the spa’s other massage offerings, it includes use of two year-round heated pools and a whirlpool hot tub. saybrook.com

THE SPA AT NORWICH INN, Norwich. Tucked into a wooded enclave near the headwaters of the Thames River, the Spa at Norwich Inn is one of Connecticut’s premier spas. With services available for day users and inn guests, the spa offers a full range of wrap, facial, and massage sessions including deep-tissue massage, scalp massages, foot massages, and even a 25-minute “express massage.” Customized services for those experiencing medical challenges are a

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A tranquil moment at Canyon Ranch in Lenox,

Sponsored by:

Magical lighting spectacular featuring Shelburne Museum’s iconic features brilliantly illuminated for the season.

NOVEMBER 21–JANUARY 5 SEE WEBSITE

December 7th & 8th, 2024

10:00 A.M. - 4:00 P.M.

Shop for hand-cra ed gi s from a variety of independent artists and makers at Plimoth Patuxet. Join us at the

Plimoth Patuxet Museums | 137 Warren Avenue

A cozy cup of history awaits you at Plimoth Patuxet Museums Shops! Visit us in-store or online at plimoth.com to pursue goods inspired by history. From locally harvested honey to 17thcentury reproduction pottery, we have your cup of tea.

Peak experiences.

Crisp mountain air that invigorates the senses. Cozy fireside evenings and traditions that warm the soul. Freshly coated snowy slopes surrounded by stunning mountain views. This is winter in New Hampshire.

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Pleasant View Bed & Breakfast

he lanterns hang from metal hooks all along the path. Bundled in a shawl against the early winter chill, Rachel Middaugh stops every few paces to light the candles within. Their meager glow adds nothing to the daylight around, but the village is large and the candles plentiful, so Middaugh must start her work early.

Each year, Old Sturbridge Village keeps its doors open late for its Christmas by Candlelight celebration. The museum consists of 40 historical buildings laid out over a rolling landscape in central Massachusetts. A web of dirt roads ties the buildings together; at its center is a dusty loop that bounds the common green of this reconstructed early-19th-century village. It’s here where I meet Middaugh, one of the museum’s many costumed interpreters, and ask if she’d mind some company.

She is quick to offer that this celebration is a bit of a fantasy. New England’s early Puritan descendants would

never have wasted so many candles lighting the walkways. There’s also the issue of the (gasp!) electric Christmas lights wrapping the trunks of the trees along the green. And most glaring to the historically minded: “Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas,” Middaugh says.

Still, the museum sets aside its usual commitment to realism for the duration of the festival. “We talk about history where we can,” she insists, but the event is more about capturing the magic of the season.

As we slowly circle the green, early guests are poking in and out of the surrounding buildings. In one, children view toys that had delighted their peers of years gone by. In another, they gaze at a miniature Bethlehem laid out in a sprawling nativity scene. In the pristine white meetinghouse at the head of the green, musicians play acoustic Christmas songs for the families in the pews. Above them hangs a massive chandelier, tiny candles flickering from its outstretched arms.

It’s not yet 5 o’clock, but already the sun has dipped below the trees. The sky behind the steeple shifts from a vibrant pink to a fading purple. Yesterday was the solstice. The night

comes early and promises to stay long. I ask Middaugh how early New Englanders ever made it through this time of year.

“You’d think they would have gone to bed early,” she replies, “but they didn’t.” Families would share the light of the open hearth or even a single candle. “One person would be knitting, another reading,” she says. As long as the flames lasted, they faced the night together.

FAR LEFT: Rhys Simmons, director of interpretation, adjusts one of the more than 100 handcrafted tin lanterns that line the museum’s pathways. CENTER: A display of in-progress wooden toys in the cabinetmaking shop. RIGHT: Christmas by Candlelight also shares traditions from cultures beyond New England’s borders. Here, Jasmin Rivas, director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, is dressed in the style of a Puerto Rican bomba dancer in the 1890s.

All of human craft is directed at getting a little bit more than nature provides. The farmer wrings abundance from the land. The weaver captures warmth; the blacksmith gives us strength. But what of the candlemakers? With tallow and wick they push back the night and give us what we crave most: just a little bit more time.

I say good night to Middaugh and try to decide where to go next. The festival is lightly structured. Each building holds its own surprises, and guests are encouraged to explore. As dark sets in, the temperature drops. With hunched shoulders, families wander from one vintage structure to the next, attracted by the light and warmth. Behind one door there are wooden children’s games. Behind another, a scripture reading. All the entertain-

ment is simple and peaceful. Where most Christmas festivals overwhelm the senses with lights and music and sugary smells, Christmas by Candlelight is content to wrap its guests in quiet and calm.

Though there are hundreds of visitors here, the museum is large and there is space to breathe. I often find myself alone on the path. The stars peek through the limbs above my head. The millpond crackles and sings as a thin sheet of ice spreads across its surface.

I follow a crowd into the one-room schoolhouse. Shoulder to shoulder we squeeze into the wooden benches. A woman snuggles into her husband’s arm. A child sits on her mother’s lap. An older woman in a red and green flannel dress approaches the lectern. As though she were about to

Where most Christmas festivals overwhelm the senses with lights and music and sugary smells, Christmas by Candlelight is content to wrap its guests in quiet and calm.

The blazing warmth of a bonfire invites visitors to gather round for some holiday-themed storytelling.

The shed is so dark it’s hard to tell what’s in it. The flicker ing light glances off a bowl behind him and a rough-hewn beam above. Beyond that glow there are only shadows. This is the darkness that early New Englanders knew— their lives playing out in tiny pools of light.

Friedman begins telling a story of a man who grew up in a village like Sturbridge. In his diary, he wrote about visiting a city for the first time at night. He found the oil lamps blinding and marveled at how people could walk the street at night. “The city was transformed into something alive and bright,” Friedman says, then returns to his work. At times, onlookers ask questions, and he answers obligingly. But the scene always slips back into silence, save for the rhythmic kick of the potter’s wheel. Just a man at work in a flickering circle of light, and strangers bearing witness from the shadows.

lage like a miniature Alexander. Here a magic show, there a model railway—he samples what each building has to offer till his tiny attention span is satisfied, then he bounds off toward another door.

He lingers longer at the craft building. For a few dollars we purchase a candle for him to decorate. An interpreter fastens the wick to a metal dipper. Carefully Salem lowers the rod, and the candle disappears below the surface of molten red wax. He holds it there while my mother seeks the best angle to take a picture. I stand tensely behind Salem, ready to avert any disaster. My father keeps watch over the whole scene like a rooster guarding his flock.

The candle emerges bright red and festive. My mother takes another picture. Salem inspects his work, then asks, “Can I make another one for my teacher?” My mother’s hand

With tallow and wick, candlemakers push back the night and give us what we crave most: just a little bit more time.

is in her pocketbook almost before he finishes the sentence.

As the night winds down, we join a small group on a carriage ride around the town green. The muscular horse at the front is three times as tall as Salem, who marvels at the gusts of frosty air billowing from its nose. The wagon begins to move. Completely unbidden, a guest at the front of the carriage begins to sing “Jingle Bells.” My father joins in immediately. Quickly, this group of strangers transforms into a band of carolers. Salem doesn’t know many of the words, but it doesn’t slow him down. He sings full-throated and wide-eyed as the horse plods through the night.

By the time we get off the carriage, the candles in the lanterns have burned down to nubs. Soon the pools of light will vanish, and the village will rest until morning. In the meetinghouse, two men have lowered the chandelier into reach of the candle snuffer. One by one, the flames go out, and the shadows creep another inch from the corners.

Salem grips both of his grandparents’ hands as we shuffle toward the exit. None of us wants the evening to be over. Each would like to steal a few more moments together. But clearly the night has come to an end. The candle has given all it has to give.

: Horse-drawn carryall rides allow families to tour Old Sturbridge Village at a 19th-century pace during the Christmas by Candlelight celebration. RIGHT: Rhys Simmons crafts a redware mug in the pottery shop, harking back to a time when farmers with clay on their land often made mugs, jars, and other functional items to sell for extra income.

GO WITH THE GLOW

n Christmas by Candlelight at Old Sturbridge Village

Discoveries await around every corner of New England’s largest living history museum, from the lighted Christmas Tree Trail to a spectacular nativity scene made up of 600-plus individual pieces. Fridays through Sundays from Nov. 29 to Dec. 29, plus Dec. 23 and 30, 2024. Sturbridge, MA; osv.org/event/christmas-by-candlelight n Candlelight Stroll at Strawbery Banke

Experience more than three centuries of seasonal traditions as you step inside historic houses dressed for the holidays. Fridays through Sundays Dec. 6–22, 2024. Portsmouth, NH; strawberybanke.org/candlelight-stroll

n Lantern Light Village at Mystic Seaport Museum

Old-fashioned lanterns brighten up the Seaport campus, along with live music, carriage rides, storytelling, and more. Fridays and Saturdays Dec. 6–21, plus Dec. 22, 2024. Mystic, CT; mysticseaport.org/lantern-light-village

LEFT

THE 2024

Whether working wonders in restaurant kitchens or lending inspiration to your own, these culinary standouts represent the best of New England food right now.

BY AMY TRAVERSO

When Yankee’s annual Food Awards debuted back in 2013, we singled out artisan makers whose cheeses, chocolates, and other delicacies were helping put New England on the map. “ is old land of cod and beans has become a hotbed of culinary innovation,” we proclaimed back then—and it’s something that’s still true today.

But this year, the spotlight has expanded to include the chefs and restaurants that make this region a dining destination to equal any in the country. As Yankee’s food editor, I looked for people and places with both consistently amazing food and a newsworthy achievement in 2024, whether it was hitting a landmark anniversary or transforming a menu. I also sought out the best representatives of four of the year’s biggest dining trends: tasting menus, mocktails, vegan dining, and mezcal.

Alongside these new honorees is a selection of the region’s best artisan foods, which, as in years past, were chosen because they are exceptional, made in New England, and available to all (i.e., they can be shipped nationwide). e goal? To give you the most complete snapshot of the best New England food right now, whether you’re dining around the region, shopping for the perfect gift, or simply searching for something new and exciting to add to your holiday meal.

RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR

Gift Horse

PROVIDENCE, RI

Benjamin Sukle and Bethany Caliaro’s newest restaurant has earned plenty of laurels over the past year. Chef Sky Haneul Kim was a semifinalist for a James Beard Award, while Gift Horse was named to USA Today’s “Restaurants of the Year” and Esquire’s “50 Best New Restaurants in America.”

Here’s why I’m piling on: Providence has a well-earned reputation as one of the most innovative restaurant towns in New England, and this rawbar/small-plates concept does that rep proud. Doughboys served with caviar, crispy seasonal fish ssam served with seasoned rice and spicy peanut dipping sauce … the list goes on. Surprise and delight are precious commodities, and both are found in abundance here. gifthorsepvd.com

CHEF OF THE YEAR

Melissa Kelly, Primo ROCKLAND, ME

One of the East Coast’s original farm-to-table chefs, Kelly is among the few to build an actual farm on her property, complete with greenhouses, gardens, beehives, and chickens, pigs, and ducks. This bounty drives her Italianaccented menu, which is ever changing but always stocked with homemade pastas and breads, meat dishes like porcini-dusted steaks and pork saltimbocca, wood-fired pizzas, and local cheeses. And as Primo celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, it’s the perfect time to sing Kelly’s praises. primorestaurant.com

BURLINGTON, VT

New England loves its cafés, the best of which roast their own beans, make great coffee drinks, and offer a community vibe. That’s check, check, and check at Brio, which transforms its awardwinning single-origin and blended beans into perfect coffees, espressos, and canned nitro drinks. It also donates a percentage of its sales to the nonprofit Food 4 Farmers. And as of this summer, Brio is a featured vendor at the World Trade Center Oculus in Manhattan, at a store called Local Maverick. It’s been a big year for Brio, and I’m happy to see them making a splash beyond our borders. briocoffeeworks.com

PASTRY CHEF OF THE YEAR

Renae Connolly, Moëca and Giulia CAMBRIDGE, MA

Save room for dessert; make time for art. It’s highly achievable advice when you’re about to savor one of Connolly’s creations—maybe a beach plum macaron filled with vanilla–lemon custard ice cream perched atop pistachio sabayon, or a perfect oval of milk chocolate mousse with a “magic shell” drizzle on a bed of sesame shortbread crumble. Discover treats like these at global-seafood spot Moëca; at its sister restaurant, Giulia; or at Connolly’s recently debuted “Daydreamer” ice cream pop-up series. moecarestaurant.com; giuliarestaurant.com; @renae.connolly on Instagram

WATERFRONT RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR Haring’s

NOANK, CT

A cozy coastal village at the mouth of the Mystic River, Noank is one of Connecticut’s hidden gems. And it’s here that a white dockside shack festooned with lobster buoys, formerly Ford’s Lobster, was acquired by the team behind award-winning Mystic restaurants Oyster Club and The Port of Call and reopened this summer as Haring’s. Grab a table on the pier and tuck into a smashburger, lobster bisque, broiled scallops with grits and tomato-bacon jam, or a fried seafood platter—all a level up from what you’d find at many waterfront tourist spots. Combine fair prices with a fresh sea breeze, and you have one of my favorite new spots in New England. haringsnoank.com

BREWERY OF THE YEAR

Athletic Brewing Company

MILFORD, CT

Gen Z and millennials are drinking less beer and wine, which may be why Athletic Brewing has become such a juggernaut. Its nonalcoholic beer truly tastes like beer, and comes in a range of styles from IPAs to sours to goldens. In the summer, I’ll sip the lemony Ripe Pursuit; in winter, the All Out stout. This certified B Corp secured funding this year to become a bona fide national brand, while also winning gold at the North American Brewers Association’s International Beer and Cider Awards. athleticbrewing.com

PIZZA PLACE OF THE YEAR

The Tillerman BRISTOL, VT

I’ve called out Bristol as one of New England’s best up-and-coming food towns, and The Tillerman is a big reason why. Located in a refurbished inn of the same name, it turns out woodfired sourdough-leavened pies topped with farm-fresh seasonal ingredients and house-made mozzarella. The surroundings are cozy, and the food demonstrates a mastery of flavor and technique. I especially love the potato, blue cheese, and mushroom, and the pepperoni with Italian sweet peppers. thetillermanvt.com

CALEB

Athletic Brewing Company founders John Walker, left, and Bill Shufelt

ICE CREAM SHOP OF THE YEAR

Far Out

BROOKLINE & BOSTON, MA

FOOD TRENDS

l TASTING MENUS

311 Omakase

BOSTON, MA

SEAFOOD SHACK OF THE YEAR

The Clam Shack

KENNEBUNKPORT, ME

Having survived flooding last winter that damaged its on-site seafood market, The Clam Shack came back strong this summer with its signature lobster rolls, fried clams, and fresh-squeezed lemonade.

Far Out specializes in New Zealand–style ice cream, which blends frozen bananas, mangos, blueberries, and other fruit into vanilla or chocolate ice cream, yielding a more fruit-forward blend. The ice cream itself is super-premium stuff from Maple Valley Creamery in Hadley, so this is, in a sense, an award for both spots. As of this year, Far Out has a new location near Fenway Park, and I hope it’s just the first of many more iterations. farouticecream.com

Owner Steve Kingston is a stickler for quality, and that shows in the food: In the countless times I’ve visited here, I’ve never had a disappointing meal. (Note: The Clam Shack is closed until spring, but it ships kits that allow anyone to make its clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams at home.) theclamshack.net

Facing labor shortages and inflation in recent years, many chefs have pivoted to serving set menus for a fixed price. Meanwhile, sushi restaurants have been doing it for decades. At his restaurant set in a classic South End brownstone, chef Wei Fa Chen makes deceptively simple sushi that layers luxury ingredients like truffle, caviar, and lobster with perfect pieces of tuna, crab, and amberjack. It’s a splurge, but you’ll be wowed. 311boston.com/home

l MEZCAL

Dos Gatos Gastropub

BELFAST, ME

At Dos Gatos, owners Adam Roberson and Jesse Soto translate their love of mezcal— tequila’s smokier, artsier sister— into negronis, Moscow mules, and old-fashioneds. Chef Gary Cooper even threads mezcal through the menu of truly superlative tacos made with homemade tortillas. And there’s plenty of tequila to go around, too. dosgatosgastropub.com

l VEGAN DINING

Foglia

BRISTOL, RI

A 2024 James Beard Award semifinalist, chef Peter Carvelli creates dishes loaded with hearty flavor and textures that run from creamy to crisp—in other words, you won’t miss the meat. Instead, this is a great restaurant that happens to be vegan. Foglia is also friendly to gluten-free diners: Almost every dish is either gluten-free or can be made so. fogliabristol.com

l MOCKTAILS

Aurelia at Castle Hill

NEWPORT, RI

Reflecting the trend toward tasting menus, Aurelia offers six fixed courses with choices for mains and dessert. Another choice? To enjoy your meal with wine pairings or nonalcoholic cocktails designed to match each course’s flavor profile. That might mean a savory mushroom-infused “tea” with a dish of venison and morels, or a nonalcoholic G&T with your hors d’oeuvres. aurelianewport.com

ARTISAN FOOD AWARDS

l HOT DRINKS

Golden Milk Turmeric Tea | Mola Foods

NASHUA, NH

LaFortune Djabea founded Mola Foods in 2016 after moving to the U.S. from Cameroon. Now she makes spice blends, seasonings, sauces, and teas inspired by the flavors of West Africa and beyond. Her Golden Milk Turmeric Tea is a sunny, cozy mix of honey, coconut milk powder, cinnamon, cardamom, turmeric,

Mint Tea | Cup of Sea PORTLAND, ME

Hear the phrase “seaweed tea,” and you might imagine a strange, salty brew. Not so! After being washed and dried, seaweed isn’t salty at all (dulse being the one exception) and can taste very much like green tea. Cup of Sea uses mineral-rich varieties such as kelp and sea lettuce and blends them with black, green, and herbal teas. The mint tea blend combines dried peppermint with kelp to make an invigorating but uncaffeinated sipper, perfect for morning or night. cupofsea.me

Classic Hot Chocolate | My Original Coco NORWICH, VT

It tastes like cocoa. It is cocoa. But compared with the typical mix, My Original Coco’s version has a more complex chocolate flavor—you’ll taste notes of fruit and nuts—and less sugar, though it’s still sweet enough for kids to love. It’s also dairy-, gluten-, and soy-free. mocovt.com

l SWEETS

Chocolate Jewels | ChocAllure

WELLESLEY, MA

Liron Gal makes some of the most spectacular chocolates imaginable: bonbons in bright colors, shiny as lip gloss, and filled with multiple layers of praline, ganache, and caramel or fruit purees, with textures that range from crunch to cream. We adore the s’mores bonbon with its vanilla marshmallow, dark chocolate ganache, and graham cracker crunch. choc-allure.com

Chocolates. Other cows in the herd contribute milk, cream, and butter to produce a full line of single-cow-origin chocolates and bars.

Ursa Major Bar Chocolate EXETER, NH

The finest sustainably sourced chocolate from places like Ecuador, Haiti, and Uganda goes into all of Enna Grazier’s wonderful bars, but we were especially taken with the Ursa Major, whose raspberry white chocolate plays beautifully against dark chocolate from Tanzania,

Maple Cider Vinegar | American Vinegar Works WORCESTER, MA

Following an early-19th-century recipe, Rodrigo Vargas ferments vinegars slowly and ages them in oak. The results are balanced, subtle, and guaranteed to up your salad game. His maple cider vinegar starts with local apples and gets just a hint of sweetness from Vermont maple syrup, provided by previous Yankee Food Awards honoree Runamok Maple. americanvinegarworks.com

Massaman Curry Paste | Little Trúc EASTHAMPTON, MA

“Daydream’s” Sea Salt Caramels | Milk House Chocolates

GOSHEN, CT

These treats begin with a Jersey cow named Daydream at Thorncrest Farm in the Litchfield Hills. Her milk, butter, and cream are exclusively used to make these delectable caramels—enrobed in milk and/or dark chocolate and dusted with crunchy sea salt—at the farm’s own Milk House

l SAUCES & VINEGARS

Brown Butter Squash Alla Vodka Sauce | Trenchers Farmhouse

LYNDONVILLE, VT

Having met in Italy and cooked in Michelin-starred restaurants in the U.S. and abroad, Giacomo and Jenny Vascotto came to Vermont after Jenny’s mother retired to a 100-acre property in the Northeast Kingdom and invited them to join her. There, they make Italian pastas and sauces featuring Vermont-grown grains and their own eggs and vegetables. We love the warm spices and velvety sweetness of their squash alla vodka sauce, especially when tossed with their fresh fettuccine. trenchersfarmhouse.com

Far more vibrant than canned curry pastes, Little Trúc’s version is made fresh with shallots, lemongrass, garlic, spices, and chilies. With this and some coconut milk, you’re halfway to a delicious and easy-to-make Thai-accented dinner—try it atop a stew of diced squash, greens, and chicken served over rice. littletruc.com

Chocolate Jewels bonbons by Massachusetts confectioner ChocAllure

everything the traditional family does and, in many cases, probably much more. So one thing I figured out was the benefit of being able to choose this family.

ORPHAN HOLIDAYS Redefining “family” through the powers of cooking and friendship.

By Edie Clark PAINTINGS BY ALLEN GARNS

I’ve been alone a long time now, nearly 20 years. It’s something I never imagined, and yet at this point in my life, I can’t imagine its being otherwise. I guess you could say I’ve grown accustomed to this life alone. I’ve figured it out.

My life alone intensified five years after my husband, Paul, died; both my parents passed away, and sometime later, my Aunt Peg and Uncle Jamie left this world as well. It’s sobering to be this alone in the world. Being without a spouse, without parents, and without children leaves one in a kind of dangling solitude from which there truly is no rescue. It’s simply a state of being. And I figured either I could continue feeling I was at the end of that perilous rope or I could find a family of my own—a family without the traditional ties but one that nevertheless provides

Yankee published “Orphan Holidays” in November/ December 2007 as a special edition of Edie Clark’s longrunning column “The View from Mary’s Farm.” Excerpted from the memoir she published that year, Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers, this essay represents everything readers loved about Edie’s storytelling: It is graceful, heartwarming, and true.

A lot of the rest of what I figured out had to do with food. I realized that by inviting someone to join me for dinner—and on occasion that “someone” may be as many as 21 people—I’ve accomplished a lot. I love to cook, so I’ve brought to my home people for whom I can cook. And I may presume that I’ve been able to provide these people with some good food and company as well. Though I can’t be absolutely certain I’ve done that for them, I can be certain about the pleasure it brings me.

It’s a mystery to me why I haven’t remarried. I suppose there are many reasons, but I do recall that in those first confusing months after Paul’s death, I felt certain I would marry again. I’d been happy in my marriage to Paul, and so I reasoned that I would find that again. I wished we’d had children, but life is so complex, and to those who truly believe that everything in one’s life is a result of a deliberate decision, I can only say that I wish that were really true.

Most of what any of us encounters is such a complex stew of circumstance and happenstance that we’re truly fortunate if we can choose what we’ll have for dinner that night, much less our own destiny. Anything more that seems deliberate is simply illusion. Paul was 39 when he died. I have many friends who have lost their spouses at a young age, and I know people whose children have died, and friends who have had accidents in which they’ve lost their legs or their minds. No, it seems to me that in many cases we’re asked to react to circumstances, not choose them.

And so, for whatever reason, I’m still alone. But I’m not alone in any real way. For one thing, the renovation of this house has consumed me, as much as any marriage with at least three children would have. Constantly, there were decisions to make, budgets to balance, supplies to pick up or deliver—and all for the ultimate well-being of the structure as well as my soul. I needed this house in a way I’d never needed anything.

After I bought the house, the pace of the project quickened, and once the first few boards were torn from the side of the building, it didn’t slow for nine long years. And so, within that storm of activity, I found a compelling heart to every one of my days, a rhythm that kept beating and never slowed, until just recently. With the work still unfinished but so close, I can rest a bit now and reflect. For a long time, reflection wasn’t possible. Or even desirable. The work was a kind of frenzy; if it had been set to fast motion, as is popular now on house-building shows, you would have seen siding and roofs flying off, additions and dormers magically appearing, walls disappearing,

doors moving from one opening to another, and windows vanishing as new ones zoomed into place. If Mary were to come back from the dead for a visit, she’d be lost in her own house.

But within all of that, there was always time for a meal. The first really new parts of this house were the kitchen and the dining room. And so these two spaces became almost sacred as other spaces were pounded into place. And there were meals, gatherings, parties—something for which I wasn’t particularly well prepared. My Aunt Peg had given dinner parties on occasion, and as a child, I sat there uncomfortably as the erudite conversation wafted high above my head. But the food was good. That was always something to look forward to.

And there was something else, something much harder to grasp. The dining room in that old Colonial house had a big fireplace; in the winter, the fire was always lit, as were the candles, which gave the room a glow and a cozy feeling, as if we’d all come in out of the cold to gather there. Of course, we had, in a sense, but to my way of thinking there was something more primeval about it—a kind of bonding together against the rigors of the wilderness of an evermore-confusing world. Maybe, in some vague way, that’s what I’m reaching for when I invite friends to dinner.

My first bit of fortune came with the table that my parents left me. It had belonged to my great-grandparents. My great-grandparents, I should explain, had a lot of money—money that never made it past the year 1929. The money was gone, but the furniture stayed with us, passed down and down into ever-smaller homes. In our modest house in New Jersey, the table was a circle with four grand chairs around it. Two of the chairs had arms, and with their high, ornate backs, they seemed somehow out of scale against the table, which had a beautiful mahogany finish. As a child, I loved to hide under the table and was always slightly awed by the fierce nature of what held it up: a grand base carved into fearsome eagle’s claws, grasping big wooden balls.

In the basement, my father had stored four more chairs to match the set and four leaves that could be set into the expandable table frame. I’d never seen it with more than one leaf in it, because my parents’ dining room had been too small. But, once the table made its way to this new house, I was able to expand it completely and set all the chairs around it. I’d already envisioned it many times as the workmen were demolishing two old bedrooms and putting the new wainscoting into place: This is where the table will go. This is where the fun will happen.

The appearance of my new dining room and the banquet-size table must have seemed absurd to anyone watching this process, as this was a home for one per-

son. Who was going to sit around this table? I’m sure it’s a question poised on the lips of anyone who enters this house, especially all the men who come to do various jobs, wiring and plumbing and flooring. I can see them glance into the big room and then glance again.

My dinners began some years back when, weary of trying to figure out what to do for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I hit on the idea of what I called “orphan holidays.”

Gradually, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one around who was alone at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not only were there those who were truly alone, but there were others who weren’t technically alone but were in transition— friends whose spouses had died, friends in the midst of divorce, friends in some other kind of despair. I realized we could all come together on those days, and hosting the holidays fulfilled my need to cook a big meal for many hungry friends.

At the most, I’ve crowded 25 people around that table (with an extension), and at the least, I’ve hosted seven—all grateful for a good place to go to share what can otherwise be deadly days of remorse or sadness while (you’re certain) the entire rest of the world is happily celebrating with their big families. An exaggeration, of course, as I know there are people with large families who grit their teeth through the whole ordeal—but, truly, holidays can be so difficult for anyone alone.

I love the holidays as a way to try out new recipes and to reexperience the joy of bringing out old favorites. I also love this time as a way of loving my house. You could look at it as something very similar to dressing up—that wonderful outfit just hanging in the closet, waiting for the right occasion. Well, I love dressing up my house. It’s a chance to decorate. (I’d never unpacked even a single Christmas ornament before I started hosting the orphan holidays. It seemed so pointless. Decorate for what? For whom?) And it’s an opportunity to get out the good china and silverware, use the gravy boat, change the tablecloth, put new tapers into the candlesticks ... whatever.

It’s no different from what everyone else loves about having family over for Thanksgiving and Christmas; it’s a chance to change gears, see the house through different eyes. I love every part of a party: planning the menu, cleaning the house, setting the table, cooking the meal— which I insist must be almost completely ready before the first guest arrives. All I want to have to do once the party starts is put the food on the table. After all, I want to attend this party, too. That’s why I’m giving it!

And so, out of the somber puzzle of how to cook for one came the joyous process of cooking for 20 and more. I recommend it highly. My favorite moment of all comes at the height of the party: to sit for a moment and listen … listen to the talk, the laughter, the joy within these walls.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

If one day scallops become Maine’s premier seafood, history may point to a surprising esprit de corps.

BY ROWAN JACOBSEN

he town of Paimpol lies 3,000 miles east of Maine along France’s northern coast, which makes it an unlikely place to glimpse the future of Maine seafood, but one look at the craggy waterfront, stone houses, and fishing boats rocking in the cold Atlantic and we get it. I’m tagging along with a small delegation of Mainers who would like to make the scallop Maine’s Next Big Thing, so we’ve come to the region that wrote the playbook. The Fête de la Coquille Saint-Jacques, held every April on the Côtes-d’Armor, draws 50,000 scallop lovers for a two-day binge of scallop kebabs, scallop rolls, fried scallops, seared scallops, and yes, scallop beignets. You can tour fishing boats, hosed clean for the occasion, and seize the rare opportunity to buy 10-kilo sacks of live scallops in the shell—a bargain at 35 euros—and cart them off to your vehicle with the help of on-site wheelbarrows.

Leading the love for all things coquille is the Confrérie des Chevaliers de la Coquille Saint-Jacques des Côtes-

d’Armor, the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Scallop of the Armor Coast. France has hundreds of confréries devoted to regional specialties. There are Truffle Knights and Strawberry Tart Knights. It’s what you do in retirement instead of joining the Elks Club. The Knights of the Scallop don yellow capes and golden medallions and lead a parade to get the festival rolling. Then they spend the rest of the year promoting scallop amour in France’s restaurants. Their grandmaster, Alain Dornadic, along with a second member also named Alain, walks us through the festivities, explicating the fine points of scallop cookery. “Never with french fries,” Alain 1 says, pointing to several offenders on the main drag. “Always rice.” He has a pointy white beard and a woolen flat cap and looks every bit the retired French chef he is. He urges us to avoid some common mistakes when cooking scallops, such as shaking the pan, which forces water out of the scallops and prevents a good browning. “Just turn them once very gently with tongs.”

Our group nods politely, but frankly most of this crew graduated from Scallops 101 years ago. We’ve got Sam Hayward, dean of Maine cuisine; Robert Dumas, who leads food innovation efforts for the University of Maine; and certified Master Chef of France Jean-Louis Gerin, who was Dumas’s mentor at the New England Culinary Institute and who has graciously called on his French connections for us. We’ve got Andrew Peters, one of the two people in Maine attempting to farm scallops on a commercial scale instead of fishing them wild; Togue Brawn, a one-woman powerhouse of scallop enthusiasm whose Downeast Dayboat delivers straight from the sea to restaurants and individual customers; and Dana Morse, who has been rolling the Sisyphean rock of Maine scallop culture uphill for most of the 25 years he’s been the aquaculture guy for Maine Sea Grant and the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. We’re here thanks to a grant that

An Atlantic sea scallop, freshly harvested and shucked by

If proponents have their way, Maine scallops might attain a status among seafood connoisseurs on par with that of France’s legendary coquille

Maine fisherman Andrew Peters at his Vertical Bay farm in Penobscot Bay.

Saint-Jacques.

Morse scored from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to facilitate a knowledge transfer between the seafood-crazed regions of Maine and France.

We pass another group dressed in yellow robes and scallop-shaped medallions, and a chill can be felt in the air. We quickly decamp to the Alains’ favorite portside restaurant— the chef was recently inducted into the confrérie—so they can explain. There has been a schism in the brotherhood. No need to go into the sordid details (at the annual meeting, somebody bought frozen American scallops by mistake), but the upshot is that a faction has broken away to form the Confrérie Coquille Saint-Jacques Pêchée en Côtes-d’Armor, or the Brotherhood of the Scallop That Is Fished in Côtesd’Armor. They have their own robes and patches and snazzy yellow driving caps with white shells on top. “It’s fine,” Alain 2 says, unconvincingly. “We’re better off without them.”

What matters to me and the rest of our contingent, as we nibble on scallop brochettes served with the bright orange crescent of roe still attached (and just try finding that in the U.S.), is not so much that there are two chapters of Scallop Knights in France (well, three if you count Saint-Méloir-des-Ondes, but of them we will not speak), but that there are any at all. In America, scallops are essentially the chicken nuggets of the sea. Firm, mild, and easy to cook, scallops are popular more for their versatility than their perceived character. But in France, their greatness is a given, even fought over. So why not in Maine? “We need to become the culinary center of scallop culture in the U.S.,” Morse says, blue eyes lit with conviction. “Massachusetts has the quantity, but we have the quality.”

That’s the crux of it. In the U.S., 95 percent of scallops are fished by big boats and vertically integrated corporations based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the undisputed scallop capital of the universe and the most lucrative fishing port in America. These 100-foot “trip boats” will spend a week or more dredging scallops from Georges Bank, the giant underwater shelf 60 miles off the coast of Cape Cod that is the mother lode of scallop beds, returning to port with tens of thousands of pounds of meat—meat that’s been sitting around. “If it’s coming off a trip boat, it’s potentially sat in a sack for 10 days surrounded by melting ice,” Brawn explains. The meat absorbs water, diluting the flavor and preventing the scallops from developing a nice crust in the sauté pan.

That doesn’t happen in Maine, where the tiny supply of scallops is caught by day boats—smaller vessels, usually lobster boats, that fish closer to shore and return to port that same day. These “dry” scallops never touch water after being harvested and retain their concentrated sea essence. “I don’t want to diss the big boats,” Brawn says. “Trip-boat scallops are perfectly fine. But there is a big difference between a trip-boat scallop and a day-boat scallop, and I want the dayboat fishermen to be getting more money for their product.” So far that rarely happens. Despite more than a dozen

“It makes no sense to truck our delicious Maine dayboat scallops out of state to be mixed in with the federal fishery. It’s like pouring a bottle of Dom Pérignon into a vat of Barefoot Bubbly!”

years of spreading the gospel, Brawn has barely managed to expand the pool of Americans willing to pay the premium necessary to make the business sustainable. So what’s different about France?

Well, for one, the scallop. This is most obvious in the shells. While our Atlantic sea scallop, Placopecten magellanicus, has a smooth, brownish-pink shell that is, let’s face it, a little boring, France’s king scallop, Pecten maximus, is stunning, with a deeply fluted orange shell that is the kind of thing Botticelli would paint and Venus would ride around in. Even the French name for Pecten maximus, coquille Saint-Jacques, refers to the sacred nature of the shell, an iconic route marker for the famous pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint James (Saint Jacques in French) at Compostela. Might French scallops outclass America’s in ways

beyond the shell? The thought haunts us, and a reckoning awaits: Brawn has smuggled 20 pounds of her frozen dayboat scallops in her luggage, to be handed out to any openminded aficionado we meet. For now, however, our goal is simple: Meet the chefs, the fishermen, the scientists—and most important, the beast itself.

How much do you know about scallops? It turns out I knew less than I thought. That nugget of meat you find at the seafood counter, for example? That’s just their swimming muscle.

Yes, scallops swim. Don’t let these bivalves fool you. Unlike oysters, clams, and mussels, scallops are pretty mobile. When disturbed, they clap their shells together and squirt water out their hinge end, clattering along comically like a set of wind-up teeth. (That ability makes them trickier to farm than other shellfish. Peters employs a Japanese technique called “ear hanging” that involves threading a thin line through the edge of each scallop’s shell and attaching them to a central line hanging down in the water, so they can roam around like tethered livestock.)

Scallops have hundreds of tiny sensory tentacles for sampling the water around them and dozens of retractable blue eyes that peer out from the edge of their shell. In the wild, they spend most of their time sitting on the bottom of the sea and filtering water across their gills, straining out the plankton.

OPPOSITE: Downeast

Dayboat owner

Togue Brawn, who led the charge to change the way Maine manages its scallop fishery while working for the state’s Department of Marine Resources.

LEFT: Members of the Maine scallop delegation (from left): author Rowan Jacobsen, Hugh Cowperthwaite of Coastal Enterprises, UMaine’s Robert Dumas, Lisa Scali of Alliance Française du Maine, Togue Brawn, Mumbai to Maine founder Cherie Scott, chefs Sam Hayward and Jean-Louis Gerin, Dana

Morse of Maine Sea Grant (kneeling), and Andrew Peters of Vertical Bay.

BELOW: In the French fishing port of Dieppe, a vendor displays the pride of Normandy, coquilles Saint-Jacques.

That life strategy made them sitting ducks for the New England groundfishing industry in the 20th century, whose nets scooped up most of the scallop supply along with the cod and haddock. Badly overfished, they were on few cooks’ radars by the 1990s, when NOAA began closing the primary New England groundfishing areas. Cod never recovered, but scallops’ fecundity allowed them to bounce back after a few years of protection. By 2004, areas off Cape Cod, such as Georges Bank and Nantucket Shoals, were booming. Landings rose from 10 million pounds to 50 million pounds, and scallops began gracing the tables of America’s finest restaurants. Today, scallops are nearly as valuable to Massachusetts as lobster is to Maine.

And much of that wealth accumulates in the coffers of a handful of players we could call Big Scallop. In most fisheries, fishermen are free to sell their licenses to the highest bidder. This has resulted in massive consolidation, as bigger players snatch up more and more licenses. Intended to introduce efficiencies of scale, which can bring down prices and benefit consumers, it also leads to a world where fishermen are mere employees in a big machine.

But one place has staunchly resisted this trend. “Maine is the last Yankee outpost,” Brawn declares with characteristic high intensity as she pilots our minivan through the rolling fields of Normandy, land of cream and Calvados, en route to a meeting with France’s top scallop scientists. “It’s the last place on the East Coast that still has this arcane style of fisheries management where you can’t sell your license.”

In Maine, you keep your license for as long as you fish, and when you retire, it goes to whoever is next on the list. That, along with a culture that prizes independence, has led to what Brawn calls romantic inefficiency: small boats, high quality, working waterfronts distinguished by character rather than sameness.

Brawn came to love the beauty of that culture growing up in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the daughter of a parttime lobsterman and fishing guide. (While her given name is Kristin, she goes by her nickname, Togue, which is Mainer for lake trout.) She went away to Duke for college, but soon came back and landed a job tending bar at J’s Oyster, a notorious dive on the Portland waterfront. She learned to deal with people of all kinds, from tourists to disgruntled fishermen, and she became a fixture on the waterfront scene. When the local drunks had reached their limit, she would literally waltz them out the door so they could leave with their dignity intact.

She soon scored a job with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources (DMR), which allowed her to put her marine policy interests into action. “There were two management committees: one for lobster, and one for everything else. I got everything else.” Even with the state job, she kept tending bar at J’s to keep it real. “People would

say, ‘She’s got a degree in marine biology,’ and I’d say, ‘No, I don’t study fish. I study fishermen. And they’re much more interesting.’”

Brawn has a penumbra of frizzy hair that seems to move of its own accord, a hearty laugh, and a leap-beforeyou-look attitude that has mostly served her well, but not always: Our minivan hadn’t even made it out of the airport rental facility before losing a side panel to a corner curb. At DMR, she channeled that energy into reviving Maine’s scallop fishery, which she saw as healthy insurance for an economy that had become dangerously dependent on lobster. She helped to implement a series of threeyear closures in Maine state waters, during which certain areas would be left alone to repopulate, following scallops’ natural boom-and-bust life cycle. It was a hard sell to the fishermen. “The way you create long-term gains is by forcing short-term pain,” she says. “I got yelled at a lot. But the more pissed off people get, the calmer I get. J’s was great for that.” The plan worked. Maine now has a thriving inshore scallop fishery.

Yet it has struggled to cash in on that success, because the market is not set up to differentiate. Whether it’s from a Cutler day boat or a New Bedford trip boat, almost every scallop gets sent to Massachusetts to be sold at the daily auction—a situation that makes it difficult for small-boat fishermen to survive. “Injustice really galls me,” Brawn says as we drive. “I was at a meeting in Jonesport, and a fisherman was saying he never knew what he was going to get paid for his scallops. And I had this aha! moment.

Like, why is this fisherman, with his 80 pounds of scallops that he harvested three hours ago, having his price set by the offshore fleet? It makes no sense to truck our delicious Maine day-boat scallops out of state to be mixed in with the federal fishery. It’s like pouring a bottle of Dom Pérignon into a vat of Barefoot Bubbly!”

The metaphor is apt. Like wine, scallops from different locations taste different. “When I was at DMR, a woman out of Stonington said to me, ‘You know, a Stonington scallop is the best scallop in the water!’ And I remember thinking she was crazy, there’s no way there’s a difference in flavor, but lo and behold, as I started to get into scallops, I realized she was absolutely right.”

Brawn can tell a Cobscook Bay scallop (“soft, creamy, sweet”) from a Casco Bay (“gamy”), a Vinalhaven (“coppery”), or a Frenchman Bay (“consistently well-rounded”). Gouldsboro Bay, a long, thin, well-enclosed bay with a natural gyre that keeps its larval scallops from mixing with other populations, produces unique scallops with extraordinary depth of flavor.

But who’s going to know? Big Scallop not only controls 95 percent of the resource, it also has an iron grip on the processors, the distributors, and the promo money. And it isn’t about to sing the praises of day-boat scallops, says Brawn. “That would be sort of a tacit admission that their scallops are inferior.”

So the goal of Downeast Dayboat is to cut out Big Scallop and go straight to chefs and consumers, labeling each delivery with the provenance of the catch and the name

In America, scallops are popular more for their versatility than their perceived character. But in France, their greatness is a given, even fought over. So why not in Maine?

of the boat and the skipper. It adds a new dimension to scallop appreciation that can be delightful. For instance, I now know that I’m partial to the robust scallops that captain Alex Todd pulls out of Casco Bay aboard the F/V Jacob and Joshua.

Brawn has expanded what she calls her “David and Goliath battle” to the federal scallop fishery that begins three nautical miles offshore, where Maine territorial waters end. For many years, this fishing area, known as the Northern Gulf of Maine, was little more than an afterthought for Big Scallop, because it took much longer to bounce back than the banks off Cape Cod. But Brawn knew it would eventually, and that it could be a godsend for Maine’s independent scallop fishermen—if it could be protected. The existing regulations placed no limit on the number of scallops the trip boats could take from it.

At the time, it didn’t really matter, but Brawn foresaw the insanity that would result when the area reopened. “One big boat could go in there and wipe out the whole resource before the small boats had a chance!” For years, she lobbied the management council that sets the regulations to fix the problem. “I just kept going back and saying, ‘We gotta close this loophole! This is insane!’ And nobody would listen to me. They said, ‘We’ll deal with it when we need to.’”

They didn’t. In 2016, the scallop population exploded in the Northern Gulf of Maine, and the big boats found it. Over the next two seasons, they harvested millions of pounds of scallops from the tender region while Brawn and others screamed for new regulations.

But this time, Goliath overplayed his hand. The rapaciousness had been so over the top that the authorities finally changed the rules. Today, the first 800,000 pounds per year from the Northern Gulf of Maine is reserved for day boats, and since the current quota is just north of 420,000 pounds, it’s all going to them.

Brawn’s dream of a day-boat-only fishery is real—if she can get consumers to support it. “Maybe I’m just an idiot,” she says as we wend our way through tiny villages on roads that are a terrible match for her and her minivan. “I’ve been

(Continued on p. 107)

Trawlers in Port-en-Bessin after a day of fishing the scallop-rich seabeds off the Normandy coast.

CompanyTown

An enclave of retired spies reveals how New England keeps its secrets.

BY JON MARCUS | ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROSS MACDONALD

e gale of laughter startled jays and sparrows from the woods along a steep road at the hilly inland edge of Camden, Maine.

I had inadvertently provoked this outburst. Riding with a group of local cyclists, I had casually mentioned I was struggling to flush out how this small, idyllic coastal town became—of all things—a retirement destination for the nation’s top spies. My fellow cyclists laughed so hard, I almost managed to catch up to them.  It was not that I was wrong, one explained, not unkindly,

when we reached the top of the climb. It was just that “nobody around here is going to talk to you about that.”

I should have heeded his advice.

Over the course of years, on countless stops in town while visiting relatives who live nearby, I inquired about these enigmatic residents and how they ended up here. I got knowing smiles, and that burst of laughter in the woods, but little else. It was true: Nobody would talk about it.

Here is what I would eventually learn about the spies of Camden: Drawn to the area for various reasons that proved impossible to corroborate, after lives about which there is little in the public record, some indeterminate number of former military and civilian intelligence operatives and occasional diplomats found this Midcoast community a friendly place to spend their sunset years.

Beginning with the man I heard described as Agent Zero, but whose identity I couldn’t conclusively establish, they bought summer homes, then settled year-round, after colorful and itinerant careers. More colleagues followed from the closed and tight-knit fraternity of secret agents, and wove themselves into the fabric of the place. They joined the garden club, the Rotary club, and the Episcopal church. Even the former library director once worked at the CIA, I discovered from a mention buried deep in her biography; she at one point agreed to speak with me, before apparently deciding better of it.

Invisible in life, these spies were often revealed only in death. Their obituaries divulged a pattern: A dispropor-

tionate number of them died in Camden. That had been the clue that set me on my seemingly futile quest.

Then came my epiphany. I had it all wrong, I finally realized, after years of fruitless prying.

The real story wasn’t who lived behind the tidy brick and wood colonial facades of Camden, what they’d done before, or how they came to be here.

The real story was about how small towns in New England keep their secrets.

What the former spies had found in Camden was a sense of privacy embedded deep in New England culture. It goes back to the tradition of live and let live, says a former head of the chamber of commerce. “This is a place that people come who want to be left alone.” In a New England town like this, adds the local newspaper editor, “you’re not going to intrude on someone else’s life.”

Of this, Camden is a prime and indisputable example.

The stiff breeze across the harbor is not enough to ruffle the water at low tide, or the fleet of boats that lie at anchor in the shadow of the soaring Camden Hills. The scene looks like a landscape painting. Tourists stroll the picture-postcard main street, the Colonial Revival–style red-brick public library at its crest.

Camden is consistently ranked among the nation’s most beautiful small towns. What began as a hardscrabble

assortment of shipyards, factories, and water-powered mills became a summer destination at the end of the 19th century for people who found Newport and Bar Harbor too ostentatious, but who still had money enough to put up grand vacation “cottages.” They also built the Camden Yacht Club and Megunticook Golf Club, the iconic harbor park and amphitheater, the four-story opera house with carved wood trim and chandeliers, and a toll road to the top of Mount Battie, from which spreads a hypnotic panorama of thick woods pierced by white church steeples against the backdrop of Penobscot Bay.

Neighbors here look out for each other, says Nancy Harmon Jenkins, 87, a noted food and cookbook writer, who grew up in Camden and now lives in an 18th-century yellow wooden house with white brick chimneys near downtown. “People are very private, but on the other hand they are watching all the time,” she says in a conversation on her front porch. When she drove her parents’ car into a ditch at 16, she recounts, a stranger took her in and offered to call her father. “But I haven’t given you my name,” said Jenkins. “I know who you are,” the stranger responded.

The 5,000 or so residents spread across 18 square miles of land continue to protect each other’s privacy. Only the most egregious behavior seeps into the open, such as when the head of a local charity was found to have embezzled several million dollars over more than a decade, or when a wealthy

When one Camden physician asked his retired patients what they’d done in their careers, many would answer, cryptically, “Worked for the government.” “Doing what?” he’d ask.

“I can’t tell you,” they’d reply.

summer resident in 2021 poisoned a thicket of oak trees on an adjacent property owned by the widow of the president of L.L. Bean because they blocked her view. “Every now and then somebody breaks the rules,” says Jenkins.

Among the more dubious chapters in its long history, Camden was the backdrop for the 1957 movie Peyton Place, based on a best-selling book of the same name, which exposed the darkest gossip of a fictional New England town—adultery, illegitimacy, domestic abuse, murder, suicide, even incest. In Peyton Place, “two people talking is a conspiracy, a meeting is an assignation, and getting to know one another is a scandal,” one of the principal characters observes.

The movie starred Hope Lange and Lana Turner, looking unhappy to be playing a teenager’s mother. It reveals how astonishingly little Camden has changed in its appearance in the nearly 70 years since. Neither has the murky sense of mystery just below the surface. Its seamy subplots, the Camden Herald review said when the book came out, were “recognizable because they are universal.”

They still are, says Lynda Clancy, editor of the Penobscot Bay Pilot, which covers the town today. Camden “is more like Peyton Place than it thinks it is,” she says.

Soon it would have a new secret to keep.

(Continued on p. 110)

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Thanksgiving in 7 Ingredients or Less

(Continued from p. 46)

drizzle some gravy or pan drippings over the dressing before serving. And if you are willing to add an eighth ingredient, 2 teaspoons of dried sage are a nice touch.

1¼ pounds sourdough bread cut into ¾-inch cubes (makes about 13 cups)

2 tablespoons salted butter, plus more for baking dish

1 pound fresh mild Italian sausage, removed from its casings

2 medium onions, diced

2 medium celery stalks, diced

1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

½ cup plus 2½ cups chicken or turkey stock

2 eggs

Preheat your oven to 275°F and set a rack to the middle position. Arrange

Sausage and Onion Dressing

the bread cubes in a single layer on a large rimmed baking sheet. Toast the bread, stirring halfway through, until toasted and completely dry, about 50 minutes. Pour into a large bowl. Increase oven temperature to 350°F and grease a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with butter. Set aside.

In a large skillet over medium-high

heat, cook the sausage, breaking it into small pieces with a wooden spoon, until it begins to brown. Add the 2 tablespoons butter, then the onions, celery, and 1 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring often, until the onion is translucent, about 6 minutes.

Add ½ cup stock and use a wooden spoon to scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Pour this mixture into the bowl with the bread. Stir well. Taste and add salt if needed.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining stock and the eggs. Pour over the bread mixture and gently stir until all liquid is absorbed. Transfer dressing into the prepared baking dish. Cover with foil and bake until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of the dish reads 150°F, 35 to 40 minutes. Remove foil and continue baking until the top is golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes longer. Yields about 10 servings.

IMPOSSIBLE PUMPKIN PIE

Anyone remember this retro pumpkin pie? It doesn’t have a pastry crust, but the Bisquick gives the custard enough structure that it slices easily and feels substantial. For the perfect finish, top with whipped cream and a sprinkling of pumpkin pie spice.

1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin puree

¾ cup heavy cream

½ cup water

2 large eggs at room temperature

½ cup firmly packed light brown sugar

½ cup Bisquick baking mix

2½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

½ teaspoon kosher salt

Preheat your oven to 350°F and set a rack to the middle position. Spray a deep 8-inch pie plate with cooking spray and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together all ingredients until blended and smooth. Pour into the pie plate and bake until a knife inserted into the center of the pie comes out clean, 55 to 60 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for at least 30 minutes before serving. This pie may be served warm or cold. Yields 8 to 10 servings.

(Continued from p. 56)

specialty, and a schedule of group classes helps guide participants in practices such as meditation and sound bathing. thespaatnorwichinn.com

WATER’S EDGE RESORT & SPA, Westbrook. Enjoying a prime spot—and a sandy beach—right on Long Island Sound, this grand resort offers guest room, villa, and even whole-house accommodations. Day and overnight spa packages are available, with treatments ranging from a citrus salt body polish and seven different facial options (including one for men and one for teens) to seasonally available treats such as an exfoliation and shea butter wrap with Swedish massage for couples. watersedgeresortandspa.com

WINVIAN, Morris. This Relais & Château property best known for its luxurious, unconventional cottages is also an enchanting spa destination for overnight guests and visitors. A wealth of massage options is augmented by a special concentration on skin care, with aromatic deep pore cleansing, microdermabrasion, anti-aging facials for mature skin, and a CBD sleep treatment among the offerings. Book a private yoga session, a Tibetan sound bath … or even training in Japanese fencing. winvian.com

MAINE

BAR HARBOR INN & SPA, Bar Harbor. Tranquility comes with your stay at this historic property on Frenchman Bay—but it’s enhanced with a visit to the inn’s spa, specializing in a full array of treatments including a vagus nerve meditative massage and a “Hikers Haven” massage concentrating on sore muscles, as well as facials, scrubs, and exfoliations. The spa’s wellness treatments encompass energyhealing, chakra-aligning sessions and half-hour and hourlong assisted stretching sessions to enhance flexibility of movement. (Open late March–Nov.) barharborinn.com

CLIFF HOUSE, Cape Neddick While the bracing salt air at this oceanfront resort is a restorative in its own right, its on-site spa adds a special wellness dimension. Deeppressure massage, aromatherapy, marine mud detox, and therapeutic honey massage with cupping are just a few of the indulgences on offer, and the spa’s HydraFacial treatments take a cutting-edge approach to unclogging pores. Saunas, steam rooms, salt stone therapy, and hydrating wraps are all part of the spa’s holistic “water, stone, earth, and sky” philosophy. cliffhousemaine.com

HIDDEN POND, Kennebunkport. Tucked away from the bustle of Dock Square— and just up the road from lovely Goose Rocks Beach—pond and resort alike are “hidden” in a 60-acre private forest. Hidden Pond’s offerings at its Tree Spa are

capped by a 90-minute signature treatment incorporating aromatherapy, a manuka honey scrub, and a scented massage, with special attention paid to the scalp. An annual four-day wellness retreat features tai chi, yoga, meditation, and meals at the resort’s acclaimed Earth restaurant. (Open May–Oct.) hiddenpondmaine.com

SANTOSHA AT HILLHOLM ESTATE, Kingfield. A historic Georgian Revival mansion is the setting for one of New England’s most comprehensive retreat programs. Santosha’s core offering is built around three daily yoga and pranayama (breath regulation) classes, meditation, and evening talks on the philosophy of yoga. The package includes four locally sourced organic meals daily and handsome accommodations with private bath. Reiki and restorative massages are available, and a bracing dip in the Carrabassett River is a tonic of nature’s own making. santosha.org

SEWALL HOUSE, Island Falls. In a vintage home in the village of Island Falls, renowned yoga instructor Donna Davidge has offered retreats in a quiet, intimate setting for more than 25 years. Daily programs include yoga and meditation sessions, along with three vegetarian meals. Hatha and Vinyasa-Ashtanga practices are taught, as are several therapeutic yoga disciplines; guests of any experience level are welcome. Accommodations are limited to six rooms (two with private bath), so early booking is essential. (Open May–Oct.) sewallhouse.com

WHITE BARN INN, Kennebunk. Tucked serenely south of Kennebunkport’s center, along the road leading to the beach, this Auberge Resorts Collection property invites overnight guests and day users to experience a full menu of spa services including facials, body treatments, and Swedish, deep-tissue, and Thai yoga massages. The spa also offers sessions in spiritual health and wellness coaching lasting 90 minutes to three hours. aubergeresorts.com/whitebarninn

MASSACHUSETTS

CANYON RANCH, Lenox. Massachusetts’s pioneering wellness resort is hardly a ranch–it’s a Gilded Age mansion estate in the rolling Berkshire hills. Like all Canyon Ranch properties, the commitment to well-being here is total, from dining that emphasizes healthful abundance to an exhaustive menu of spa, beauty, medical, and mind-body services including more than 25 massage options. Wellness guides help guests design personalized daily schedules that might include longevity counseling, Pilates, aerial yoga, meditation, mocktail sampling, and even kayaking and pickleball. A reasonably priced, fully immersive day pass is newcomers’ way to sample it all. canyonranch.com/lenox CHATHAM BARS INN, Chatham. Cape Cod’s scenic elbow harbors the Cape’s only spa

to earn a coveted Forbes four-star rating. Along with a full menu of massage, facial, and skin-care treatments—as well as yoga and meditation sessions—Chatham Bars has created surroundings that amount to a total wellness environment. The outdoor Zen garden, outdoor pool with heated deck and hot tub, and relaxation room are all about serenity. Twelve spa suites feature private saunas, steam showers, fireplaces, and access to all spa facilities. chathambarsinn.com

KRIPALU CENTER FOR YOGA & HEALTH, Stockbridge. Celebrated for its comprehensive training programs in yoga and Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of holistic medicine and wellness, Kripalu offers a popular “Retreat & Renewal” experience that allows participants to build their own daily schedules around yoga classes, meditation, seminars in Ayurveda and other healing arts, and even outdoor recreation on the center’s 100-acre Berkshire campus— hiking, guided kayaking, traditional archery, and more. Choose from day or overnight packages, with all-natural meals included. kripalu.org

MANDARIN ORIENTAL, Boston. A pause for wellness in the heart of New England’s biggest and busiest city? A downtown luxury hotel with 148 guest rooms and suites, Mandarin Oriental offers a spa experience to rival the most bucolic settings. Traditional Asian therapy methods inform massage options, and there’s even a “Himalayan Singing Bowls” session, encouraging meditation by means of the soft resonance of metal bowls, placed on and around the body, as they are played by the massage therapist. Three- and five-day wellness retreats combine posh accommodations, nutritious meals, and an extensive program of spa treatments. mandarinoriental.com/boston

MIRBEAU INN & SPA, Plymouth. A Monetinspired pond garden is the centerpiece of this spa resort tucked within Plymouth’s leafy Pinehills community. At this first Massachusetts location in the Mirbeau collection of inns and day spas, the accent is on total rejuvenation, with a selection of massages augmented by facials, wraps, and body treatments employing exotic elements such as Polynesian frangipani monoi oil. After a couples massage or aromatic bath, rent a cabana for poolside relaxation. plymouth.mirbeau.com

MIRAVAL, Lenox. Miraval’s Berkshires property, one of three full-scale resorts in the luxury brand’s collection, centers on an 1894 mansion amid grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. At Miraval’s Life in Balance Spa, the accent is on client-tailored experiences that might include a manuka body peel, lymphatic dry brushing, almondorange body polish, and more. A dozen different massage options are offered, and the 29,000-square-foot spa facility features a sauna, a steam room, indoor and outdoor hot

tubs, and a serenity pool. Day spa packages are available. miravalresorts.com/berkshires

NEW HAMPSHIRE

CHRISTMAS FARM INN & SPA, Jackson. The oldest structure on the Christmas Farm Inn property is believed to date from the 1770s. Nowadays, this resort—named because it was once a Christmas present from father to daughter—hosts an Aveda facility offering a full range of massages, facials, scrubs, and other popular treatments. Topping the menu is the “Super Taster,” combining an Aveda aroma massage, facial, body scrub, and pedicure. The 30-minute add-on “Extremity Ease,” meanwhile, concentrates on hands, feet, and scalp. christmasfarminn.com

THE INN AT THORN HILL, Jackson. At Thorn Hill’s Senses Spa, choose from a menu of massages ranging from Swedish to hot stone to deep tissue, along with Aveda aromatherapy sessions and Reiki. Exfoliation followed by massaging with CBD oil is designed to reduce stress and anxiety. Top off an afternoon with an hour of tai chi or a 30-minute foot soak, then freshen up for a whiskey tasting, room-service charcuterie, dinner in the inn’s wine cellar … or perhaps all three. innatthornhill.com

THE MOUNTAIN CLUB ON LOON, Lincoln. Loon Mountain’s only slopeside lodging attracts those in search of pampering with its spa, whose lineup of services is highlighted by facial massages with jojoba and a “Reflex Recovery” massage focused on the hands, feet, and scalp. Waxing services are available for all parts of the body. The spa has an indoor lap and leisure pool, a seasonal outdoor pool, and a year-round outdoor whirlpool, as well as state-ofthe-art fitness equipment in a three-level complex. Wellness classes provide training in Kripalu and Hatha yoga techniques, and also strength and mobility sessions and aqua aerobics. mtnclub.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW GRAND RESORT & SPA, Whitefield. Wellness comes with spectacular views at this splendidly restored North Country grande dame. The hotel’s Tower Spa is just that: a top-floor facility where mountain vistas are their own kind of relaxation therapy. Spa treatments include scrubs and wraps, plus massages ranging from deep tissue to warm stone—nearly a dozen options in all. There’s also a choice of threeday retreat programs with activities such as yoga, hiking and forest bathing, meditation, aqua aerobics, and family-oriented creative movement. mountainviewgrand.com

OMNI MOUNT WASHINGTON RESORT, Bretton Woods. The early-20th-century vacationers who spent their summer weeks at this iconic White Mountains resort could never have imagined the wellness options available here today. The 25,000-squarefoot spa facility offers a panoply of massages:

Swedish, mother-to-be, hot stones, and more, including an “Adventurer’s Massage” to restore muscles that have been put through their paces in the resort’s mountain environment. Among body treatments is the “Signature Body Ritual,” a nearly two-hour indulgence involving a waterfall shower and triple exfoliation. omnihotels.com/hotels/ bretton-woods-mount-washington

RHODE ISLAND

HOTEL VIKING, Newport. The Vikings themselves used the word fjör to mean vitality and energy—and the Hotel Viking takes that Old Norse definition literally at its Spa Fjör, rejuvenating guests with rituals built around the therapeutic effects of milk and honey, Himalayan salt, volcanic clay, and infrared sauna. Distinctive massages and facials enhance the spa’s “journeys,” including a “Day of Bliss”—two and a half hours encompassing a custom massage, sugar scrub, and organic facial. hotelviking.com

THE NORWICH SPA AT GRADUATE

PROVIDENCE, Providence. Providence’s historic Biltmore has been reborn as the Graduate Providence hotel. The downtown landmark is home to the Norwich Spa, an urban location of the Spa at Norwich Inn [see p. 56]. Top off a massage session or body wrap by relaxing in the infrared sauna, an alternative to steam saunas promoted for its anti-inflammatory and detoxifying benefits. A popular series of treatments takes its cues from the changing seasons: Through this November, choose a facial, body wrap, or manicure or pedicure with autumnal notes such as cardamom, cinnamon, and tea extract. nspaatgraduate.com

OCEAN HOUSE, Watch Hill. Reborn on the site of its Victorian-era predecessor—in the same style, but even more spacious and luxurious—this five-star resort features the Ocean & Harvest Spa. After a yoga or Pilates class or some vigorous laps in the saltwater pool, choose from an array of massage options headlined by the “Wellness Warrior,” a 50- or 100-minute session whose components include CBD, arnica, and cryotherapy. Full-body scrubs melt away stress, and the “Sun Recovery” treatment soothes skin with aloe and chamomile. oceanhouseri.com

OH! THE SPA AT THE PRESERVE, Richmond.

A resort that has a fleet of Bentley SUVs (used to ferry guests on fly-fishing and skeet-shooting adventures) knows the importance of a first-class spa experience. The Preserve Sporting Club & Resort comes through with its OH! spa. Cap off a day afield with a mud wrap, exfoliation with an application of lavender body butter, a massage with cold or hot stones, a 60- or 90-minute facial (there’s even a gentleman’s version), and a steam or cold plunge shower—or both. ohspaatthepreserve.com

Stroll through the candlelit

VERMONT

THE EQUINOX GOLF RESORT & SPA, Manchester. With a history reaching back more than 250 years, Manchester’s grande dame still beckons travelers today from behind its stately colonnade. After taking advantage of the resort’s many opportunities for vigorous recreation, guests can turn to the full-service spa for working out the kinks. They’ll find aromatherapy massages, Ayurvedic treatments, and more, plus a 24-hour fitness center with an array of body-toning equipment. There’s an indoor lap pool and outdoor hot tub, too. equinoxresort.com

THE LODGE AT SPRUCE PEAK, Stowe Stowe Mountain Resort’s premier lodging destination, tucked between Spruce Peak and Mount Mansfield, is also home to one of northern Vermont’s finest full-service spas. Clientele can create their own custom massage and therapy experiences, choosing from treatments headlined by Cryo T-Shock therapies, in which warmth and cold are cycled to promote muscle recovery, pain relief, and facial rejuvenation. Massages ranging from 25 to 100 minutes include Swedish, deep tissue, Thai, and other techniques. sprucepeak.com/the-lodge MOUNTAIN TOP RESORT, Chittenden. With more than 700 acres to explore, Mountain Top offers plenty of ways to tire out winter muscles—and to ready them for another day’s strenuous fun. Massage offerings include sessions lasting 30 to 80 minutes, with or without hot stones or aromatherapy oils; follow up with a visit to the sauna. mountaintopinn.com

SETU, Brattleboro. Ayurveda, a holistic system of medicine developed in India 5,000 years ago, guides the retreats and wellness packages offered at Setu. Incorporating meditation, massage therapy, herbal medicine, and especially diet, the center’s Ayurvedic program concentrates on balancing the well-being of body and mind. Scheduled overnight retreats focus on meditation, self-care remedies, and rejuvenation and can be personalized to focus on individual concerns. Daily yoga, sauna, and hot-tub relaxation—plus a spring-fed swimming hole—round out the spa experience. setuvermont.com

TOPNOTCH RESORT, Stowe. Vermont’s most popular waterfall? Some might say it’s the one cascading into the big indoor hot tub at Topnotch. That’s just one of the enticing features at the Stowe resort’s spa, where guests take a day off from the slopes for restorative massages—CBD, deep tissue, Reiki, Thai, etc.—as well as dips in the outdoor and indoor pools. Thirty treatment rooms and luxurious men’s and women’s private lounges with fireplaces make this one of the most spacious spa facilities in the Green Mountains. topnotchresort.com

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(Continued from p. 87)

doing this for 13 years, and I’ve still never made a profit. I’d like to think that at some point in the future, people will realize just how special Maine scallops are. I don’t quite get why it hasn’t taken off yet.”

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e check into a giant seaside Airbnb nestled between two old German gun emplacements, the black North Atlantic crashing against the stony beaches where World War II turned, and hustle to a meeting on the Port-en-Bessin harbor with four men who know as much about scallops as anybody in France. Arnauld Manner, Dominique Lamort, and Eric Foucher are scientists in charge of managing Normandy’s scallop fishery. Dimitri Rogoff is president of the Normandy fishermen’s association. The scientists are rail-thin; the fisherman is Falstaffian. From offices overlooking a medieval harbor where small fishing boats bob behind a stone breakwater, they sketch out a system that is straight out of Maine’s deepest fantasies.

In France, they explain, there are no trip boats. There are no scallops soaking in ice water. There are only small boats and day trips. Everything comes to port live, still in the shell. Everything gets sold for a premium and whisked to market that same day.

How, we ask, is such a thing possible?

“We are a country of gourmets,” Rogoff points out, as if nothing could be more obvious. Nobody would accept anything less.

We all nod knowingly and try to convince them that Maine is, too. The landscapes, the seascapes. Everybody knows a fisherman. Everybody cares.

The Frenchmen look dubious. “Don’t Americans just eat fast food?”

We argue our case, and as we do, the parallels keep growing. Normandy rotates its open areas, just

as Maine does. The quotas are very conservative—short-term pain, longterm gain—but here, again, nobody argues.

Yet they also have their own Goliath to deal with. French territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from shore, but the scallop beds they so carefully manage extend farther than that, and big boats from England fish them hard year-round with full support from the U.K. government. Every few years, another battle in “the Great Scallop War” flares up. The most serious came in 2018, when 40 of the small French boats intercepted the British boats and turned them back. Vessels collided, hardware was thrown, windows broken, outrage registered. “For the Brits, it’s an open bar,” Rogoff complained to the BBC at the time. “They fish when they want, where they want, and as much as they want.”

By the end of our meeting, the two groups are fully bonded in their outrage and passion, and we pop our big question: Will they join us for dinner at our place? And perhaps they can bring some of their own scallops for a little friendly competition?

Game on.

In 1976, the world of fine wine was rocked by a tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. A band of upstart Napa Valley winemakers brought their best bottles to Paris and had them judged blind against the best of Bordeaux and Burgundy by a panel of top critics, both French and American. At the time, it was widely believed no U.S. wine could ever compete with the French classics, but American bottles carried the day. Although the French protested loudly, the Judgment of Paris marked American vinology’s coming-out party.

Could our Judgment of Normandy do the same for scallops? There’s no way to make it blind, but that just makes it more fun. The Frenchmen arrive with scallops and cider from family orchards. Rogoff dismisses the cider and Calvados we’ve picked up with a wave of his Gallic hand and replaces them with his. We toast friendship, France, Maine, and of course coquilles Saint-Jacques.

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Then we get down to business. Manner reduces the cider until syrupy, then sears his scallops and nestles them into a bed of caramelized apples blanketed with the thick, bubbling syrup. For Team Maine, Dumas sears our day-boat scallops on a griddle and covers them in a sauce made from shallots, mushrooms, butter, Calvados, and crème fraîche. Both American and French scallops also get the crudo treatment, served thin and raw and sprinkled with sea salt that Morse evaporated on his woodstove back home. We fill our plates with the bounty of this bountiful place.

By the time the scallops are gone, the sauce mopped up with baguettes, and the bottles of Calvados are out, Brawn and Rogoff are old drinking buddies, swapping notes on merroir, and this president of Normandy fishermen has convinced us that Maine must stay the path at all costs. (“Togue, you and I defend more than seafood products,” he writes her in a follow-up fan note. “We defend seafarers and the coastline on which we love to live and work.”) The only thing they don’t see eye to eye on, predictably, is who has the better scallop. To a person, the Frenchmen prefer their scallop. To a person, the Mainers like theirs.

But I have no dog in this hunt, so I can tell it straight. There is something sweet and dreamy about the sea, a collective memory of brine and tides we’ve long forgotten, but every now and then something triggers a half memory: a fish on your line, a rock in the breakers, a tidepool of urchins, a salty cottage. To me, scallops have always been the finest emissary of that primordial bouillabaisse. Yet the rich kiss I’d assumed to be the essence of all scallops turns out to be the signature of Placopecten magellanicus, the Atlantic sea scallop. I’ll never take it for granted again. But I will, if need be, throw on a yellow cape in celebration—accented, perhaps, with an orange ascot and a necklace of a few dozen blue beads. And wherever the day-boat scallop needs a champion, I and my brochette will be ready.

(Continued from p. 91)

The biggest unknown about the spies of Camden is what brought them here, beginning in the 1950s. In answer to that question, I uncovered only speculation.

The most intriguing centers on a shadowy research center set up by a former Army scientist to study extrasensory perception. One of the heirs to the Borden milk fortune, who heard him speak at Harvard, invited the scientist to visit her and her husband in Camden, where they owned a farm. With their even wealthier fellow residents, they set up a lab for him in a 45-room mansion in the neighboring village of Glen Cove. It was called the Round Table Laboratory of Experimental Electrobiology.

Before the operation shut down in 1957, military officers interested in potential Cold War applications of ESP visited Glen Cove to learn more about its work, according to Annie Jacobsen, a national security expert who has written about it. Among them was the Army liaison to the CIA. That exposed them to the charms of the Maine coast, this theory goes, where they returned to vacation in the summers and eventually settled.

There are other suppositions. That intelligence agents knew Maine because they kept safe houses there. That it was comfortably distant from nuclear missile targets.

But the most likely reason that spies retired to Camden is probably the simplest. Unlike its wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS—whose disparate agents included Julia Child, Black future civil rights activist Ralph Bunche, and Jewish Major League Baseball player Moe Berg—the CIA was made up largely of white male Ivy League graduates, often from families with money; even today, more than 60 percent of agency employees are men, and nearly three quarters are white. They knew New England from vacationing or attending summer camps there.

High-level military intelligence men were already summering nearby even when Glen Cove was operating, Jacobsen reports—so many of them, in fact, they crept quietly into popular culture. In the film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, for example, fictional CIA analyst Jack Ryan chooses to hide a stolen Soviet submarine in the Penobscot River, a beach pebble’s throw from Camden, because he’d grown up and fished there.

“The CIA and the State Department were the domain of WASPs. They went to Yale. They liked to sail. They had an affinity for Maine,” says

“You know you can tell the status of a CIA man by where he retires to. The low-level guys go to Bethesda, the mid-level to somewhere in Florida, but the really top men retire to Camden.”

Matt Storin, a former foreign correspondent and newspaper editor who also retired to Camden, explaining with a shrug the less complicated truth that likely led so many spies here.

The CIA man who covertly recruited those Ivy League graduates also may have had a hand in this. While no one will admit to remembering his name, insiders describe him as an avid sailor from an old Gloucester, Massachusetts, family and credit him with luring some of his confederates to Camden.

Then there was Robert “Bob” Tierney, a West Point grad and Strategic Air Command pilot who joined the CIA and was posted to Laos,

Japan, and Singapore before he also ended up in Camden, where he made an unusual decision for a retired spy: to start a bed-and-breakfast inn that welcomed former colleagues.

More fatefully, Tierney helped create an annual foreign affairs conference that filled guest rooms in the dark and gloomy month of February even as it cemented the town as a destination for still more international intelligence experts. He and others “had not only seen the world but had helped to run it,” an official history of what became the Camden Conference notes. “In retirement, they wanted to bring that world to Camden for one weekend a year.”

The conference, which debuted in 1988 in venues ranging from the town library to a local church, has managed to attract a number of marquee guests. Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft showed up at the first one; so did future Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and future Defense Secretary William Cohen, then Maine’s senior U.S. senator. In subsequent years came Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, and Nicholas Burns, who currently serves as U.S. ambassador to China.

Even the conference’s executive director, Kim Scott, doesn’t know for certain which members of her board are former civilian and military intelligence operatives. But, she says, “you can’t just call these people up and get them to come here unless you have connections.”

Speaking at the Camden Conference one year, former CIA Director John Deutch made waves not by disclosing some national secret, but by quipping, as he looked out at the audience (the event is open to the public): “I see there’s a lot of CIA.” Everyone “started looking around furtively,” remembers Daniel Bookham, the former chamber of commerce director.

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So big did the conference grow that it eventually made its home at the Camden Opera House (though many of its founders “would just as soon go back to the library and keep it kind of quiet,” Scott says, smiling). It began to draw more visitors from the ranks of the clandestine services, too.

“Word of mouth was circulating around Langley and around Foggy Bottom that you ought to check out this Penobscot Bay,” one told me, in the wood-paneled study of his Camden home, on the condition that I not disclose his name. “We came up to these conferences two years in a row and we would sit in the audience and my wife would go to the ladies’ room during breaks and meet the other attendees at the conference, who said, ‘You ought to come [and move here].’” Already familiar with Camden from summer visits in his youth, he did.

In part because of its high-level policy focus, the Camden Conference attracted mostly senior intel -

“We have each other’s backs here. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of gossip— very little goes unnoticed, much less unremarked upon. But there are certain quiet community ways that still prevail.”

ligence officials. Nancy Jenkins has a journalist friend who mentioned this small town in Maine to a highranking CIA official he was interviewing for a documentary about the Vietnam War. “‘Ah,’ said the very high-up gentleman, ‘you know you can tell the status of a CIA man by where he retires to,’” Jenkins says.

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“‘The low-level guys go to Bethesda, the mid-level to somewhere in Florida, but the really top men retire to Camden.’”

This influx wasn’t in itself a secret. “We used to say there must be a sign down there at the CIA telling them all to come here,” Barbara Dyer, a former member of the select board and official town historian, told me before she died in 2022, at 97. The locals didn’t care where they’d worked. If there was friction, it was over “people from away” trying to change things.

“They would join a committee and they would say, ‘We should change this and change that because that’s the way it was where I came from.’ And that didn’t go over big with the natives,” Dyer said.

Otherwise the natives kept their feelings to themselves, in the New England tradition.

New Englanders were not always so restrained. Puritans informed on newly arrived Baptists and Quakers for working on the Sabbath. Neighbors turned against each other in the hysteria of the witchcraft trials. “If you weren’t the accuser, you could become the accused,” says David Allen Lambert, chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

All that changed dramatically in the 18th century. Lambert traces the shift to the abolition era, when communities conspired with their silence to protect escapees from slavery. So circumspect are small New England towns today, he says, “I think of them as the perfect places for people in the witness protection program. You can keep a really low profile.”

David Watters cites the “craggy individualism” preached by Protestantism, which he calls “inseparable from the notion of privacy.” Around the Civil War, New Englanders began to answer questions with questions, says Watters, former director of the Center for New England Culture at the University of New Hampshire and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of New England . “How are you?” one

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The Promise

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might inquire. “Why do you ask?” the other would reply.

“There is a recognition of boundaries,” Watters says. After all, he says, quoting Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

And Camden “is New England writ large,” says Philip Conkling, author of the town history Where the Mountains Meet the Sea . “People go to incredible lengths not to ask directly what you do. They’re no less curious than anybody else. But it’s considered really poor form to say, ‘So, what did you do?’”

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Most Unusual Gift of Love

THEPOEMREADS:

“Across the years I will walk with you— in deep, green forests; on shores of sand: and when our time on earth is through, in heaven, too, you will have my hand.”

Dear Reader,

The drawing you see above is called The Promise It is completely composed of dots of ink. After writing the poem, I worked with a quill pen and placed thousands of these dots, one at a time, to create this gift in honor of my youngest brother and his wife.

Dear Reader,

“Across the years I will walk with you— in deep, green forests; on shores of sand: and when our time on earth is through, in heaven, too, you will have my hand.”

Now, I have decided to offer The Promise to those who share and value its sentiment. Each litho is numbered and signed by hand and precisely captures the detail of the drawing. As a wedding, anniversary or Valentine’s gift or simply as a standard for your own home, I believe you will find it most appropriate.

Peter Ralston chronicles life in Midcoast Maine as a professional photographer whose gallery is in an 1835 wood-and-granite building overlooking Rockport Harbor. When he was a boy, Ralston’s family lived next to the artist Andrew Wyeth in Pennsylvania; years later, Ralston would stay in a guest house at the Wyeth summer home in Maine. “[Tourists] would stop and ask, ‘Where do the Wyeths live?’ And we, of course, would send them miles in the opposite direction. We have each other’s backs here,” Ralston says. “That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of gossip— very little goes unnoticed, much less unremarked upon. But there are certain quiet community ways that still prevail.”

Measuring 14" by 16", it is available either fully-framed in a subtle copper tone with hand-cut double mats of pewter and rust at $145*, or in the mats alone at $105*. Please add $21.95 for insured shipping. Returns/exchanges within 30 days.

The drawing you see above is called “The Promise.” It is completely composed of dots of ink. After writing the poem, I worked with a quill pen and placed thousands of these dots, one at a time, to create this gift in honor of my youngest brother and his wife.

My best wishes are with you.

Now, I have decided to offer “The Promise” to those who share and value its sentiment. Each litho is numbered and signed by hand and precisely captures the detail of the drawing. As a wedding, anniversary or Valentine’s gift or simply as a standard for your own home, I believe you will find it most appropriate.

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Measuring 14" by 16", it is available either fully framed in a subtle copper tone with hand-cut mats of pewter and rust at $110, or in the mats alone at $95. Please add $14.50 for insured shipping and packaging. Your satisfaction is completely guaranteed.

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This can confound newcomers. When Tess Gerritsen moved to Camden more than 30 years ago, after living in California and Hawaii, she thought the reason locals seldom asked her anything about her life was because she was one of only two Asian residents at the time. Then she realized, “No, they’re like that to everybody. It’s Yankee reserve. They know things, but nobody talks about it.”

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Gerritsen, the best-selling author behind the Rizzoli & Isles mysteries, learned about the spies around her in a typically roundabout way. In a town where a third of the population is 65 or older, her physician husband asked his many retired patients

(Continued on p. 118)

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(Continued from p. 114)

what they’d done in their careers. “Worked for the government,” they would answer, cryptically. “Doing what?” he’d ask. “I can’t tell you,” they would say.

One night Gerritsen was talking to a neighbor at whose house her son was attending a sleepover. “Oh, you must be one of those retired spies,” she joked. There was a long pause. “Who have you been talking to?” the neighbor asked. Gerritsen still isn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke, too.

late 1960s (and who screenwriter John Milius said partly inspired the character of Colonel Kurtz in the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now). Both retired here.

“They just didn’t talk about it. Whatever had happened, happened,” Chrisso Rheault says. That was the sentiment among their neighbors, too, says Rheault, who still lives in Camden and helps run the Atlantic Challenge youth rowing and sailing program. “No one talks.”

7 6/13/19 1:38 PM Statement of Ownership

(Required under Act of August 12, 1970, Sect 3685, Title 39, United States Code.)

September 1, 2024: Yankee-Bi-monthly, published at Dublin, Cheshire County, New Hampshire 03444. Published by Yankee Publishing Incorporated. Yankee Publishing Inc. Employee Ownership Trust, 1121 Main St., Dublin, NH 03444. Average preceding 12 months: Press run: 275,693. Paid sales through dealers: 8,583. Paid/req. subscriptions: 238,158. Total paid: 246,741. Office use, etc: 1,104. Total distribution: 249,966. Returns from news agents: 25,727. Total: 275,693. September/October 2024: Press run: 243,622. Paid sales through dealers: 4,698. Paid/req. subscriptions: 223,259. Total paid: 227,957. Office use, etc.: 1,175. Total Distribution: 230,027. Returns from news agents: 13,595. Total: 243,622.

I certify that the above statements made by me are correct and complete.

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Gerritsen’s experience would eventually lead to a novel, The Spy Coast , about a group of retired CIA agents living in a thinly disguised stand-in for Camden called Purity, Maine; a sequel is due out in spring, and a TV adaptation is planned. In the book, “old friends from Virginia” is code for former CIA, a reference to the headquarters of “the company” in Langley. “This village is our DMZ,” one character says. “It’s the reason we live here, to be left alone.”

“You don’t really talk about these things,” echoes Les Fossel, whose late father was in the OSS and then the CIA. His mother probably wasn’t, but wouldn’t have told him either way, he says.

“You don’t really talk about these things,” says Les Fossel, whose late father was in the OSS and then the CIA. His mother probably wasn’t, but wouldn’t have told him either way.

Since the book came out, people have started to confide in Gerritsen about the spies, she says, sitting at the heavy wooden table in her dining room overlooking Penobscot Bay. “‘My dad was one,’ or, ‘My grandpa was one,’” they’ll whisper, in line at the Bagel Café.

It’s that younger generation asking questions now. Some have realized they don’t know much about their parents’ work lives, either.

Chrisso Rheault’s father, Andre, was a CIA agent—recruited by that Gloucester sailor—and his uncle, Robert “Bob” Rheault, was a Green Beret officer in charge of Special Forces in Southeast Asia in the

Fossel, who owns a Midcoastbased company that restores old houses, took the extraordinary step of hosting townspeople at the Camden Public Library to see if they could fill in the blanks about his father. Someone joked that the windowless room was a good place to have the conversation, and Fossel had to promise that the video camera recording the session wouldn’t swivel and show any faces.

The session at the library didn’t unearth much more than Fossel already knew—which wasn’t a lot, considering that the file on his father that the government had relinquished to a Freedom of Information Act request was, not surprisingly, extensively redacted.

Piercing those defenses would test the most accomplished spy. And the results might be like something out of Peyton Place , says cultural historian Watters .

“If all the skeletons in the closet rattled at the same time,” he says, “you could probably hear it on the moon.”

Life in the Kingdom

(Continued from p. 120)

there’s still a lot of wood to be cut. By mid-November, enough whispers have accumulated that the season has found its voice. The grass and muddy ruts are covered, though the ledge still pushes through where the stone has absorbed the heat of the sun. Soon, though, that will be covered, too—there’s not much sun to be had these days, not many shadows to be cast in a landscape that feels mostly like it’s all just one big shadow. You and your friend Dirk drive to the top of the mountain, where the snow is a bit deeper still. You strap on your skis for the rst time this season, and the two of you skitter through the forest atop the loud, unforgiving rime. It’s not great skiing. It might not even be wise to be out here, with the daylight fading and the icy surface making it di cult to control your trajectory and pick your way between the unforgiving boles of maple and birch. So you make your way back to the untreed logging road and pick up the pace a bit. It’s time to get home.

You get a call from the boy. He’s off the road, nose down in a treacherous ditch: Can you come pull him out? You gather the chain o the tractor and get in the truck. Your route down the mountain is mottled into patches of half-frozen mud and sheer ice. The truck feels loose on the road. The sky is clear, and you spot stars between the outstretched tree limbs and you want to keep watching those but the road needs your attention. It’s barely 6 p.m. and pitch-black. You count the days until the solstice and then count that many again until you arrive at nearly the end of January. January 24, to be exact. That’s when you’ll see this much daylight again, and there’s something about this simple hard truth that makes you start to pick up the pace a bit, as if you could arrive at January 24 a little sooner. But the ice on the road says otherwise, so you don’t. You’ll just have to wait it out like everyone else. Back in the woods. Coldest morning of the season thus far, though it’s well above zero, and only the top-

You’re 52 and yet here you are, still plowing the heavy snow with aplomb, old as you are, with that little gray prow atop your forehead and all those smile lines.

most layer of soil is frozen. You split wood for nearly two hours, swing after swing after swing of your favorite long-handled maul. It’s nearly dark by the time you finish—these days, it seems as if it’s always nearly dark—and you stop to ll the tractor bucket with split wedges of wood. It’s so quiet up here. e air is still, and you stop for a moment just to feel what it’s like to be still, too. But the moment soon passes, and now, having taken it, you’ll need to work just a little faster to make up for

lost time. You’re always making up for lost time, aren’t you?

The first storm of consequence arrives shortly after anksgiving, which this year happens to coincide with your birthday. You’re 52. You look in the mirror and mouth the numbers. Fifty. Two. You notice how your lips purse on two You notice the lines at the corners of your eyes, the tuft of gray right at the height of your forehead, like a little prow announcing ... what, exactly? Your impending decline, probably. Ha ha, you think, funny, funny. You step away from the mirror. e storm brings nearly 10 inches of moisture-laden snow. You plow with the bucket of the tractor and don’t get stuck even once, and this is pleasing to you. You’re 52 and yet here you are, still plowing the heavy snow with aplomb, old as you are, with that little gray prow atop your forehead and all those smile lines.

And you think: With any luck, there’s still plenty of birthdays to come. Still plenty of snow to plow. But definitely less than there was last week. Maybe I should just slow down and enjoy it.

Winter, Fast and Slow

Finding that rare moment to pause in a season that urges us to hurry up, hurry up.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM HAUGOMAT

Winter comes in its usual way, in ts and starts that begin as whispers of what’s to come, quiet enough that it’s tempting to pretend you don’t hear them. You’re up in the woods, cutting rounds o a big maple that you’ll burn down to ash and chimney smoke in another year, when you notice that the rain has changed over to snow. Or perhaps to something on the spectrum between rain and snow—and suddenly it seems to you as if there should be a name for this type of in-between precipitation, this stu that’s not quite rain, and not quite snow, but also not sleet nor freezing rain, so

you decide on the spot to call it snain. ( is is how you amuse yourself when you’re cutting wood.)

The snain does not fall for long. Somewhere high above you, in whichever atmospheric layer determines exactly which flavor of precipitation will fall, circumstances change, and now it’s just plain rain again, a cold and drizzly sort that you’re pretty sure you can work through if you can only stay moving fast enough to keep warm. So you pick up the pace a little. ere’s a lot of wood to be cut.

e next whisper is louder. is time, it’s snow for sure, though not much of

it—barely a dusting, not even enough to hide the colors of everything that lies beneath it: the tawny-green hue of the last, frost-nipped pasture grass; the dark brown of the muddy ruts left in the tractor’s wake; the steely gray of the exposed ledge that juts through the forest soil in a long, proud ridge that serves as the primary demarcation line between the conifers below and the hardwoods above. It’s early November by now; you’d be a fool not to heed the warning half-hidden in that thin scrim of snow. So you pick up the pace a little. Because

(Continued on p. 119)

A reason for thanks

Come to where everyone has a seat at the table.

Photo by Kathy Tarantola/Plimoth Patuxet Museum, Plymouth, MA