[The dinner party]

Twenty-six degrees in Monson, with a crunch of snow on walkways and roofs. Last night I had dinner with the artists-in-residence, who were gathering for a sit-down dinner at Lulu's restaurant. Usually Lulu fixes box dinners for everyone so that they don't interrupt their work if they don't want to, but periodically they get a restaurant meal, and I lucked in on that last night. Lulu is a magnificent cook--originally from the Philippines but married into a central Maine family--and she won a James Beard Award this year. She insists she's not a chef. "I'm just a cook," she says. Whatever she calls herself, her meals are a delight, and she was especially excited last night because she'd just learned that her daughter had shot a deer for the freezer. As the token central Mainer at the meal, I found myself having to explain what tagging a deer means, how hunting season works in Maine, how to tell a doe from a buck, what people do with the meat, etc.--a somewhat fraudulent position as I have never fired a gun.

[Trigger warning: I ate some of that deer.]

But I enjoyed the bustle of Lulu's orange-clad husband and daughter, striding in and out of the front door among the trick-or-treaters with tubs of this and that for Lulu. And then, to my pleasure, I got invited back into the kitchen to check out those tubs, which turned out to contain heart, liver, and stomach caul. Within minutes Lulu had seared the heart, whipped up a bourbon glaze, and was offering around slices. I've eaten venison often, but I'd never eaten such fresh meat before. I do love trying new foods, and this was spectacular good fortune in that regard: a wild harvest cooked quickly, simply, and skillfully.

[Thinking about the buffalo hunters]

I'd brought Zesch's The Captured with me for my overnight in Monson, imagining I might spend the evening looking through the notes, but the lighting in this apartment is terrible, and the notes are in teeny-tiny type and my eyes are rotting in my head, so I didn't make much headway with that. Instead, I turned on the baseball game, and I sent texts to my family regaling them with the tale of my exciting deer-heart experience, and I found myself thinking about the book's descriptions of how the captured children became immersed in the central ancient business of buffalo hunting, the communal intensity of that work . . . how afterward, when "rescued," some of the children shot their parents' poultry full of arrows or refused to eat cooked meat. I had no conclusions to draw; merely, I was thinking in parallel. I had accidentally stepped into a then-and-now, here-and-there time warp, via historical narrative and my own unexpected present tense. I think such moments are worth orbiting. I think it's dangerous to make easy pronouncements.