Sharing Pie
ANNETTE ON THE ROAD The Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe and Pie Philosopher Kate McDermott, Sharing History in the Pacific Northwest
Note from Annette
You may wonder what pies and
have to do with history, and also with Non-Boring History, but even when it seems like I'm not writing about history, I always am. And since I am writing about the history of the US and Canadian Pacific Northwest over the next week or two, I want to begin today by introducing you to Kate, and also to the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. Kate, pie, and tribes are all connected today.First, thank you to every Nonnie (paid subscriber) for making Annette on the Road posts possible at Non-Boring History. Not a Nonnie? Please jump in! We need you.
There's a book on my Kindle I forgot was there. But this book is entirely relevant to this and several coming posts. That's why I’m now ready and eager to read:
Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians
This book is NOT aimed at the public, well, not directly, anyway, although anyone is welcome to read it. Published by the University of North Carolina Press, it’s for US college (UK uni) history professors who teach the standard introductory course on US history, but who don’t specialize in American Indian history. This book is thus aimed where it will make maximum impact.
Hey, wait, Laing, why would a book for professors have more impact than aiming it directly at the public?
Good question. For one thing, there’s a gulf in knowledge and assumptions about history between academic historians and most of the US public. Bridging that gap should be the job of high schools, but instead it gets punted to colleges for reasons we haven't time to discuss today . . .
Okay, yes, you bet your butt this has to do with poor curriculum, unprepared teachers who are assigned to “instruct” “history” (because anyone can spoonfed a textbook, right?) and, bluntly, a certain defensiveness on the part of too many US history teachers’ groups when professors enter the room, unless we're talking the most old-fashioned kind of political historians, the kind who drone on about Presidents, because that better aligns with the godawful curriculum that teachers should be protesting, not teaching. Hint: The history of non-white people is also US history. Not just “ethnic studies”. Said it.
So that leaves college history professors to interpret the work of scholars, and no single professor can know it all, hence books like this. A history professor’s job, in part, is to translate this stuff for undergraduates who don’t major in history. And pretty much, I do the same for you at NBH, without tests or homework, and as entertainingly as possible (trying to be just like my best teachers and professors).
This book didn't influence me to take my new interest in American Indian history, because, well, I haven’t read it yet. American Indian communities themselves have hooked me. As I travel, I can't ignore the presence of Indigenous people, not least because they now announce themselves in huge neon signs on the freeway. Literally. I mean tribal casinos, in case you’re wondering.
But wait! I digress. Today’s theme is pie, in Washington State, on the Olympic Peninsula. Pie. About sharing pie, making sure everyone is taken care of, rather than requiring everyone to fight, no-holds-barred, over every slice. You read that right!
Ooh, that sounds like communism, Laing.
What, Lenin, massed armies in Red Square, grim tower blocks, that sort of thing? No, it bloody doesn't! You want grim tower blocks? Give developers, good capitalists all, free rein to build cheap housing in your cities and to charge a fortune for every badly-built flat and house. . . Oh, I see you already have. Oh, dear.
Nah, I'm talking something much more American. From the Puritans who farmed individual portions of fields they shared, to the hippies and farm ladies who fed thousands of kids, free, at Woodstock, and the Native peoples who have quietly done their thing all along, I'm talking sharing.
I want you to meet people who are making pies, and sharing them. One is
, my fellow writer of newsletters, who brings us a life philosophy that she earned fair and square, and shares with us. I see pie at its heart.Another sharer? The Jamestown S’Klellam (pronounced sklell-um] Tribe, who are not only making a pie of good living, which, as always, they share among themselves, but which they also now choosing freely to share with the Non-Native community. This is a story about now, which means it's also a story about history.
Sharing What History Is
Laing, no offense, but I’m just here for history.
Oh, believe me, so am I. That’s what I’m all about. But academic history, proper history, isn’t just facts to memorize. It’s the interpretation of the past, in a way that makes sense of the present. The past doesn't change, but history does, because it's the interpretation of the past, and it is always changing, because we are. Trust me, you wouldn’t like the history that Victorians wrote. Try pioneering 19th century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle’s work on the French Revolution, and you’ll see what I mean. We need historians to keep rewriting history for it to keep making sense. Otherwise, it's fossilized and useless.
Here’s another tip about how academic historians think: One question we always ask ourselves about a potential research project is who cares? What we’re ultimately about isn’t recording every last thing that ever happened, or, for that matter, predicting the future (and shame on scholars who set themselves up as profitable fortunetellers), but in throwing light on how we got to be the way we are.
And that was a question that was bubbling through my mind on a recent day on the Olympic Peninsula, in Washington State, a stunning backdrop for human life, a panorama of mountains, bays, and millions of tall evergreen trees. All those trees made me want to go home and slap Scotland.
Trees? What Trees?
Prepare for a shock. Before we talk about pie and Washington State and
and Indians, we’re going to talk briefly about Scotland. Again, I promise, it matters to this story.I'm a Scot, the real deal, so I can say this: Modern Scotland is an environmental wasteland. Oh, yes, I know it’s beautiful, that the bare, rocky land is charming. It charms me, because that’s my native land. Indeed, the lack of trees created a culture: 18th century Scots who migrated to North America were dismayed to find they could no longer wave to their neighbors, because all the bloody trees were in the way.
But Scotland didn’t start out like that. It started with the fact that takes a lot of thin, rocky soil in the Highlands to support people, and a lot of trees to supply wood for fires for cooking and eating. As people and agriculture spread, trees fell. When the Romans finally arrived in AD 82 (not a typo), half of Scotland’s trees were already gone.
Then came modern life: Not just taking resources for your own use, but to become rich. Here came the forestry industry, in the 1600s and 1700s, cutting trees down for lumber and other products. In the late 19th century, while, in America, buffalo were being hunted almost to extinction, and Scotsman in California John Muir was urgently suggesting it wasn't a great idea to chop down massive old-growth American trees, Scotland’s “who cares so long as it’s profitable” lumber industry was cutting down most of the last of Scottish trees.
By 1900, only 5% of a once heavily-forested Scotland was still woodland. Yes, five percent. What remained of nature was isolated little islands of forest, too small to support the large animals, deer, bears, and wolves. Only the deer remained, and that’s because rich people formed their own hunting reserves with deer herds. Ordinary Scots who hunted deer to support themselves were now prosecuted as poachers.
Oh, and as to the indigenous Highland Scots, who were culturally adapted to this stripped-down land? Many of them were driven out in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, some to work in factories in the Scottish Lowlands, most across the vast Atlantic to Canada, so that wealthy Scots could now raise sheep on what had been their small rented farms.
This was the horrendous episode called the Highland Clearances, when rich Scots’ greed took over. When Americans babble to me about visiting their ancestral castles for a Clan reunion, I remind them that the ancestors of the smiling aristo who is happy to see them and their dollars were the men who banished their families from Scotland. They blink several times. Then they keep babbling. Once again, this is why historians aren’t invited to parties.
Oh, and the clearances continued in other forms. And still continue. Something else I plan to write about for you, from the Scottish Highlands themselves.
And although the Indigenous people of Scotland remain, they are also modern people, but, having been abandoned by their leadership since the crushing of the Highlands in the 18th and 19th centuries, they are not always sure how to proceed, together, to fix the problem.
In one Highland village with which I’m very familiar, maybe twenty years ago, there was an effort to restock the river with salmon. A couple of lowlifes, local men, I learned, dammed the river and stole the salmon to sell. Then there was the local man around the same time who began digging gravel from the riverbank, as people have always done, but with a tractor. I saw him do it. Told by the community to knock it off, he protested that local people had always taken gravel from the river. I suggested he be handed a bucket and spade instead of his modern mechanical machinery.
Scotland, to repeat, is an environmental wasteland. Which finally brings me to faraway Washington State, in the US, which is some five thousand miles away, and yet, in so many ways, might as well be next door.
Sharing the Pie: Not.
In the car on our way to see
in Port Angeles, on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, we were all three eager to see the beaches and bays of this coastal area that runs between the massive mountains and the sea.Three of us? Why, yes! My son Hoosen, Jr., had flown all the way from the OTHER Washington (DC) to join his Mum and Dad for a long weekend. None of us had been to the Olympic Peninsula before.
Taking a back road to a sparkling bay, our view was blocked constantly by trees, until the road finally brought us to this:
Unfortunately, what that photo doesn’t show you is this:
Oh, and there was also a sign warning us not to park, not at all. Basically, here was the only access we had found to a fabulous beauty spot, and the message was “Bugger off.” As I always do when I run into this sort of thing, I got angry. In Scotland, the right to roam freely is now sacrosanct: Scots have too much of an awful history of a handful of people claiming to “own” the land, and booting the rest of us from even a peek at it. And we have fixed it, big time.
How did a little group of people get rights to this beach, even this view, and to tell the rest of the world to get stuffed? “Members and guests only” “Permit required” , “No trespassing”, and that pathetic chain between us and the beach.
Conservative readers: I am well aware you’re getting annoyed at me right now. Don’t forget that I (and history) promise to annoy everyone in the end. But I hope you will keep reading today. That’s because, while I’m not telling you what to think, we should all be asking questions about how such ownership comes about, before we find ourselves being booted from our own property, our own homes, the ones we think *we* own, that we worked hard for, because we are in the way of a tiny handful of people who want it all. All of it.
Think it won't happen to you? I think of James Vann, 19th century Cherokee leader in Georgia. He embraced capitalism, slavery, and the political establishment. Yet not even his wealth, his owning a hundred enslaved African-American people, or being half-Scottish could save him. Not having generously hosted and fed US President Franklin Pierce in his home, a huge Gone With The Wind mansion. Nothing helped.
None of this prevented James Vann from being deprived of all his real estate, and sent on the Trail of Tears with all of Georgia’s Indians, to exile in the wastelands of Oklahoma, so white Georgians could have their land.
See, this isn’t me predicting the future. This is me, a Scot from a land with a hard history, predicting the past. I’m talking about the light that past throws on the present. History has a lesson: Things haven’t always been this way. They have changed. And although we can’t predict the form change will take (and I can’t emphasize that enough) we know things will change again.
So the boys and I left that beauty spot on the Washington coast, feeling disappointed, and powerless, and maybe a little embarrassed at having assumed (based in part on our shared knowledge and love of Scotland) that we would be allowed a glimpse. We had only wanted to take a quick look, maybe walk a couple of minutes, and leave. Instead, a massive portcullis of signs had slammed down on us. Instead, we drove back to the main road.
Then, I thought uneasily of the lovely and non-posh timeshare in which we were staying. It, too, had a private beach. It, too, had gates and parking permits and “no trespassing” signs. Maybe it’s time we think less about who we blame, less about making everything about personal responsibility, and think more together, all of us, about what we share.
Sharing the Pie: The Welcoming Village By the Bayside
As we continued toward Port Angeles, I mentioned to Hoosen, Jr. that the 7 Cedars casino was ahead, and that it’s operated by an Indian tribe. He wondered aloud, given the poverty of so many Indian reservations, if the casino would be in a shed. I assured him it was not.
Even before we got to the fabulous casino, we saw something that had Hoosen (Sr.) hitting the brakes, and Hoosen, Jr. and me sitting up. We saw a charming village of modern buildings large and small, all in natural colors, with bright totem poles and painted carvings, and behind it a small park, and a large and breathtakingly beautiful bay.
This is the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Center. Nobody lives here, as in staying the night or owning a house, but all are welcome to live here, to enjoy this place. Parking is ample. A bicycle trail runs through, there’s a bus stop, and there are plenty of places to park a bike. Restrooms are available right off the road, and also in the village. Visitors are reminded over and over in signs and smiles how very welcome we are.
We wandered round the little park, across the stream on the bridge decorated with Northwest Indian art. Children were playing on the slide in the playground. A couple was sitting quietly together on a bench, gazing out on the bay.
Hoosen, Hoosen, Jr. and I took a respectful inspection of the Jamestown S’Klallam veterans’ memorial. As we looked around us, we were gobsmacked. What a massive contrast from the selfish little village at the previous bay, with its massive “get stuffed” aura. I felt peace descend. And yet this village is a very practical as well as beautiful place: Here are Tribal medical and dental clinics, a gym, a brand new library, administrative offices for Tribal government, and even a building for environmental research. Public loos are right on the main road, with parking, open to all who pass by. A large community center looks down over all from across that main road, and the Elder Lounge is prominently signposted.
There’s no housing here, because the Jamestown S’klallam people live throughout the area. But this is where they come together. And although—fair enough—many facilities and, I assume, some events are reserved to the tribe, everyone is warmly invited to be in this place.
We popped into the Native Art Gallery, expecting steep tourist prices. But the prints, knick-knacks, and original art by local Native artists was all very reasonably priced. I splurged on an artist-made life-sized metal salmon for Non-Boring House. Salmon reminds me of Hoosen’s dad, a keen salmon fisherman and salmon cook, and of my native Scotland, where salmon are now mostly reduced to “farms”. That's why I don’t eat Scottish salmon if I can help it, preferring wild-caught fish from Alaska, on the rare occasions I eat salmon at all. And now my artist-made salmon, hanging on the wall, will remind me of the Jamestown S’Klallam people, who welcomed us to coastal Washington, and removed the bad taste the nameless beach hoarders had left in our mouths.
The woman working in the gift shop wrapped my art salmon for the journey. She was Non-Native (I asked), and I remarked on what good the Tribe seemed to be doing. They’re wonderful, she gushed, without a moment’s hesitation, and they have done so much for the whole area. She mentioned the Chief of the Tribe, and referred to him fondly as “my Chief”, and then smiled at what she had said. “Well, I call him my Chief.”
We left the village, regretfully, and passed the casino, and I said to Hoosen and Hoosen, Jr., “That’s where the money comes from”, and I’m sure that’s true. But it turns out that the casino is only part of the story. It’s a story that goes well beyond the scope and sources of this post. But I bought a book, and we shall see.
An Evening at Pie Cottage
I first met
on a Christmas Zoom call with others of my Baking Ladies (professional food writers who also write on Substack). It was very jolly. Southern food writer, journalist, and cultural commentator was there from Nashville, wearing reindeer antlers, and , from Chicago, was trying to convince us that the handsome twentysomething male she had put on screen ( her nephew) was actually her. Smiling Kate, I learned, was the self-taught cook and talented writer who had been nominated for a James Beard Award in food writing.It turned out that I was the only one of us four who had never met Julia Child. “But,” I pointed out pitifully, “I have seen Julie and Julia four times.”
Well, I say “met” these women, but I had never actually met them in three dimensions. So I was thrilled when Hoosen, Hoosen, Jr. and I were all three invited to Kate’s Washington State home, Pie Cottage in Port Angeles. Port Angeles, not to be confused with Los Angeles, is a town best known to me as the place from which ferries depart twice daily for Victoria, which in turn is a town in Canada noted for its being more British than Britain, with authentic and pricy afternoon teas on offer at the Empress Hotel.
We had something more authentic planned, though, than tea in Victoria: An invite for a potluck Sunday supper with Kate, her neighbors, and friends. I assured the boys that pie would almost certainly be involved.
We couldn’t miss Pie Cottage on the street. In April, pink tulips mark the spot. But, it turns out, there’s so much more to Pie Cottage than the colorful front garden and facade of this lovely little house. Pie Cottage is actually a not-quite-tiny house at the center of a tiny estate, like the Kennedys’, only smaller, and (I suspect) much nicer.
In the cottage next door, which shares Kate’s lot, live Kate’s son and his wife. Their shared property includes organic veggie gardens, a small outbuilding for which plans are yet to be made, a guest cottage,and a large henhouse. Dogs and hens dash about. In a nutshell, and this will sound crazy, but the word to describe this scene which came first to my mind was “medieval.” Which I mean in a good way.
Kate is not medieval. She is a modern person, in a modern neighborhood, in a modern small city. But her veggie garden, her hens, the cozy joy of Pie Cottage, with its many books, and its surprisingly compact kitchen known worldwide to Kate’s students and fans, its open and inviting space, immediately made me feel connected to the way most of the world’s people lived until very, very recently. Let me be clear: This is not an ostentatious estate, or a second “home” I'm describing. This is Kate's home, and she shared it with us.
There’s an aura of contentment about this place, of a life lived simply and well, yet connected with modern life in the best ways. Best ways, like the communications technology that explains how Kate and I had already met long before, and how, from thousands of miles away, she had taught me to make the best pies of my life, and shown me why that matters.
Oh, and Kate has done something for Hoosen, Jr., through her first book, The Art of Pie, that his mother had failed to do: Taught him how to make pie crust (and very, very well), and how to bake excellent pie. Hoosen, Jr. already loves to bring together people over food, and now his reputation as a host is on the road to greatness in Washington DC, with help from Kate in the other Washington.
So Hoosen, and Hoosen, Jr. and I had an absolutely delightful evening in the company of Kate, Kate’s adorable dog GretaPie, and Kate’s potluck family of welcoming and vivacious and fascinating friends and neighbors. Kate brings everyone, locals and visiting friends, together at her Sunday Suppers, potluck dinners that involve more skill than luck, home cooks showing off food that's really food, not factory junk, and absolutely delicious.
Potluck is a very American thing, a supper in which both guests and host provide food. I looked it up, and to my disappointment, the word doesn't come from the Native word potlatch. Potlatch is an occasion celebrated by Indigenous people in the US Northwest and Canada. Its meaning varies, but the one that leaps out to me is that Natives who had become wealthy called everyone together, and gave away possessions, to build loyalty and community, and when there was just too much, the stuff was even burned, to show off wealth, and also to show that, yes, it's possible for one person to have too much stuff. So different from potluck, yes, but also about sharing.
At Kate's potluck, our main course was either lamb chili or veggie chili, salad, and at least three varieties of cornbread. The blue cornbread, made with natural blue corn— of which the baker was justifiably proud— somehow became separated on the buffet table from its siblings, so there was a danger of diners no longer having room on their plates before they spotted it. Noticing this, one of the other guests quietly moved the blue cornbread to be with the other cornbreads. That's a human consideration, the kind of act that brings us together, that forms and reinforces community, as is making and sharing food, all human habits with a past and a diverse history.
Now, I thought of 17th century Hurons in what's now Canada, bringing dishes to share at their festival of death. I thought of the neighbors who brought homemade food to share at my father's funeral in Scotland some dozen years ago. I thought of how sharing of food brings joy even in sadness.
is a great sharer of food, and especially pie. Pie is not just food, not just a means to satisfy a basic human need to feed and be fed. In Kate's view of life, pie means appreciation, and love. In American culture, unless we're talking single-serving pie, or Kate's brilliant pie lollipops, it's a food meant to be shared.Thinking of potlucks and potlatches, I thought of the community street festivals of Madison, and America, where food is not shared, but sold. Sometimes, even admission, the right to be present at a festival, involves a commercial transaction, and apart from the music, which, in an open air event, cannot possibly be limited to paying customers only, almost everything else is for consumption, and must be paid for. Little or no entertainment is provided by ordinary members of the community. How unsatisfying, how joyless, how very non-festive, I find such “festivals”: We come as strangers, leave as strangers (our pockets lightened). We bring nothing, except money, and we leave, perhaps toting some art or craft object about which we know nothing, and almost always still as strangers.
Consumption and commerce-based festivals are very American, but so are warmly hospitable potlucks like Kate's. Most Brits (and, I learn, reading here in Vancouver, most Canadians) don't like strangers or even casual friends in their homes. One lovely thing about Americans is your hospitality. You invite casual friends, acquaintances, workmates, even strangers into your homes, often as overnight visitors. You feed them, and often they bring something to feed you, even just a bottle of wine. A potluck is even at the heart of national mythology, the first Thanksgiving, a wishful thinking that somehow, if you all came together over food, the Indians wouldn't notice that the invasion had begun.
Watching Hoosen, Jr quickly relax in Pie Cottage, in a group in which he was by far the youngest, I thought of myself, forty-plus years ago in California, where I somehow ended up a member of a group of older adults who met for potluck suppers on Friday evenings. The wine was served in gallon jugs, dessert was always dreadful (supermarket celebration cakes, mostly), and the room was foggy: practically every adult smoked copiously.
But my most warm and important memory of those Friday potlucks in California is of sitting quietly, bonding simply by being there, finding out how interesting older people could be, how they were people like me, and how, despite my being so young and a foreigner, I knew things they did not, learned that I was also interesting, and adding to the diverse perspectives in the room. I could connect with people old enough to be my parents, grandparents, even great grandparents. It was more than 40 years ago. It is now.
Now, because what a joy to see Hoosen, Jr. do the same, connecting across generations in an age in which older people are being dismissed and disrespected everywhere in America. Everywhere, that is, except on Native lands, where Elders are given careful and genuine respect, even special parking spaces—even at Tribal casinos!—and the generations often congregate together.
The meal at Pie Cottage was delicious —heavens, this picky carnivore enjoyed the vegan chili and blue corn bread! And to crown it all, yes, here was Kate’s pie, a delectable slice of a wondrous confection, a new recipe, not yet published, not too sweet, light as a cloud, brightly exotic with toasted coconut and rum-scented cream, which we had seen Kate add as the finishing touches.
I reminded myself that times are always changing, and it's this change that history is all about. The members of this group, including me, are the ages of the children, even grandchildren, of most of the generations I met on Friday nights in California all those years ago (but that was yesterday). Many of this group, Kate included, are themselves originally from California, but here we were in Washington State, because we're in a very fluid society now, whether that's what we really want or not. We move, we make new friends, we carry on, bringing our cultural baggage with us everywhere we go, adding new pieces and discarding others, working always to keep the ties that bind us with others from fraying and snapping, by sharing.
I thought for a moment of the Jamestown S’klallam people and other Natives who have lived differently from us wanderers, most of them remaining, against the odds, with their lands, over thousands of years. Against the odds? Oh, yes. This is a subject which I'm only just starting to learn, and I'm bringing you along for the ride. If I get this right, we'll all see the relevance of American Indian history, and how modern Natives can help us.
Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians, indeed.
Sharing With Those Who Would Not
The first I had heard of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe was on an info panel about historical local fires I photographed a few days earlier, outside the local museum in Port Townsend, part of which was once the fire department.
I snapped it because it records the burning of a S’Klallam village in 1871, by the US federal government, for reasons unstated. That got my attention, because arson by the US government of an entire Native village is way more interesting than, say, yet another grand wooden Victorian hotel long ago burning down, which is what most grand wooden Victorian buildings did.
This info panel is clearly recent, and that’s interesting too: Info panels can turn an entire city into a museum, reaching new people in the process, but they need to be renewed and rewritten every generation, or they become irrelevant clutter, like those old roadside historical markers I almost always regret stopping for.
At Kate's potluck, I mentioned our stop at the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Center, and immediately, everyone raved about how wonderful the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is. Nothing polite about this: This was genuine enthusiasm: How much the Tribe have done for everyone. How they are the pillar of this mostly non-Native community. How they cleaned up the bay and put in the park, and opened up the view. How they have reintroduced salmon to Jimmy-comelately (sic) Creek. How they employ so many Non-Natives as well as Natives. How all members of the community, yes, non-Indian, too, are welcome for affordable care in the Tribal health and dental clinics. In a time when Americans, and only Americans, can be bankrupted by illness, this got my attention.
The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is not a big Indian nation. Its share of the American pie is small. But it is making the most of it. The casino, of course, brought in much of the capital for all these projects.
But Ron Allen, the Jamestown S’Klallam Chief (aka Tribal Chairman) since 1977, is very focused on making other Tribal businesses a greater focus: The Tribe harvests and sells seafood, and boosts fish stocks. They run a gas station with low prices, and the most upscale-looking cannabis shop ever, although this was not without debate on the Tribal Council, since some elders were understandably concerned about marijuana being a gateway to stronger drugs. The Chief is not an autocrat, but a first among equals, and his popularity is evident. And so is the Tribe’s sharing of the pie: Sharing among members of the Tribe, sharing with the community at large, with even the descendants of those who burned down the village.
Speaking of pie, and sharing, and forming human bonds, Kate presented Hoosen, Jr with his very own signed copy of Pie Camp, the second of her three cookbooks.
Hoosen, Jr., who was already a fan of Kate and thrilled to be invited to Pie Cottage, was delighted, and already plans to share back to Kate , to give copies of her books every chance he can to his young friends.
Perhaps as his and their cooking skills and confidence progress, Hoosen, Jr.’s famed wine and cheese gatherings will morph into potlucks where the food is homemade, not purchased, and the centrepiece is Hoosen, Jr.’s pie.
Perhaps, one day, some young stranger will sit down with others of all generations in the home of beloved community elder Hoosen Benoti, Jr., after sharing a satisfying dinner made with love, listen to the old people’s stories, and munch on a slice of pie. I like to think so.
Like Non -Boring History, and history itself, we each remain the same and yet always changing. I know that reading
has affected how I think about life as well as how I bake. My fond hope is that Kate has found inspiration and interest in . A good life is all about sharing, about exchange, mutual respect, relationships, and love.People who share, I note, and who surround themselves with others who think like this, and—this is important- whose basic needs are met, find more contentment and happiness. I just read about violent gangs of kids from wealthy families, and how life has been ruined for them by a culture that sacrifices everything and everyone to the relentless and general pursuit of wealth at any and every cost in these times. Clearly, it's not working.
History tells us we're part of something much larger, much less predictable, than we can possibly imagine. That's what NBH has in common with
and why I encourage you to subscribe to Kate and get her books. Want to learn to make pie? Kate offers classes at Pie Cottage, and online, and (posh people, note) even in your home. Her books, all three, including a volume on home cooking, are easy to find. We may seem very different in our interests and work, Kate and me, but we share a major interest with each other and with the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, and I hope, with you, and that interest is sharing.Sharing, by definition, must involve more than one person. That's why I'm so grateful to the Nonnies, my paid subscribers. They share, not to enrich me, but to allow me to share my writing with readers. That's always been my goal: To have enough to share, to show young writers that we may have a future after all. That's why all I ask is for you to give back as little as $5 a month, if not to me, then to another hardworking professional writer who's not a rich celeb. Pay Kate. Pay me. Pay someone or, if you can, several someones, because when you do, you're sharing back.
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Love all of this! Thanks for the shout out, we need to do it again. I’ll bring my nephew 😆
Dearest Annette, thank you so much for this piece today and coming to Pie Cottage for Sunday Supper! It was wonderful to meet you and your lovely family. I have worked hard to create a sanctuary of contentment which is what I hoped it would become decades ago when I first bought it as nothing more than a piece of land with a house and a landscape of unruly field grass. I’m honored that you see my it now as a “peace” of medieval heaven. There’s always room at my table for you and yours. Please come again. ❤️