The Kitchen Goddess must have been all worn out from writing at the time of the original posting, in which she forgot to include the potatoes in the directions. It’s now corrected.
I’ve spent the last four days on a “writing retreat” with my best friend, Joy, from high school. We lost touch for many years after graduation – we both left Texas, but she went west and I went east. But aside from a few minor details (she has one more marriage and three more degrees than I have), we’ve remained strikingly similar in our directions in life; and the fact that we both became writers still astonishes me, as neither of us had such inclinations as teenagers.
We go to a place called Port Aransas, a tiny fishing village at the north end of Mustang Island, off the Texas coast. It’s where we went to blow off steam in our teens, and aside from the movie theatre closing and a few decent restaurants finally appearing, not much there has changed. It’s still the sort of place where “dressing up” means a clean shirt and leather sandals instead of flip-flops. The sort of place where you can truly disconnect from the world at large.
