Cookies are great to bake any time of the year, but my fondest memories of cookies are those my mother made for Christmas. The smell of butter and sugar, cinnamon, and ginger snaps will be forever embedded in my memory of the Holidays. Mom would begin to bake her cookies a couple of weeks before anyone else in the neighborhood even thought about getting started with making the holiday treats.
Some years ago on a field trip with other mystery writers I visited the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. I took the Metro North Train from Grand Central Station to Ossining where the facility is located.
In my mind fall is apple time. I grew up on a farm in Washington State and my most favorite thing to do in the fall was to sit in the old apple tree growing on the edge of our property when the apples came ripe. I would sit in a low-slung branch, bent like a welcoming arm and dream for hours about what I would do when I grew up. I looked into the branches overhead, listening to the gentle breeze rustling the leaves making them tickle the fat, red apples. Back then I believed anything was possible.
Most people picture houses when they think of something haunted. They see dark, old creaky, rotting wooden stairways, and locked rooms that groan and whisper in deserted houses overgrown with weeds and twisted vines crawling up the sides of the walls. These are the places people usually think are haunted. I used to believe that too, but not any more.
In the middle of the Bronx, situated on a triangular shaped spit of land named Poe Park, bordered by three busy streets, sits the last residence of Edgar Allan Poe. This month will mark the 162nd year since his death and yet this clapboard cottage still stands and is now under the custodial care of the Bronx Historical Society. In 1980 the cottage was placed on the National Register of Historical Places.
Pumpkins frequently appear in literature, too, and here are just a few instances. There is of course, Cinderella and her grand pumpkin carriage. For many years Charles M. Schulz delighted us with his Peanuts cartoon strip and Linus’ belief in the Great Pumpkin. There is the pumpkin throwing Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hallow. And most recently pumpkins have appeared in the Harry Potter books and movies where the students of Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry partake of a favorite beverage, pumpkin juice.
Fette Sou (fat pig in German) is a BBQ joint wedged between a graffiti scrawled apartment building and the parking lot of Frank’s Auto Repair Shop in New York. I’d describe it as a Brooklyn Hipster hangout with an attitude of ‘we’ll do it our way’.
Like most New Yorkers I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when the 9-11 disaster occurred. It is etched in my memory forever. So much has happened in my life since then I thought perhaps the impact of that day might have lost of its potency.
When my sisters and I were nine and ten years old it became our job in late summer to follow mom into the steamy pathways between the rows of corn. My sisters and I each dragged a huge metal bucket, kicking up dust, while we filled those heavy containers with the ears of corn mom said were ‘ready’.
The sky was heavy with storm clouds when I got into my old Toyota and headed for the Village. The temperature had been miserably hanging around the 90s in New York City for over a week and I looked forward to a good rainstorm to cool things down.
