10 simple pleasures I have fallen in love with during the time in self quarantine.

Taking time for tea. As someone who has never had a cup of coffee in my life, I am particularly in love with tea. I have different favorites, but I always prefer a black tea without flowery or perfumey flavors. My usuals are Irish Breakfast, PG tips, Darjeeling, Orange Pekoe, and Prince of Wales. My current favorite tea in stock is Taylors of Harrogate: English Breakfast. I have in quarantine taken the time to use lovely sugar bowls and creamers to hold half and half or heavy cream.
Lots of lovely old clean dishtowels. My wonderful stepmother always collected tea towels when we would travel. I remember her enthusiasm when we were on trips when I was a child to Bermuda, Ireland, and England. She was thrilled purchasing fun printed dish towels with designs that reflected the destinations. I have continued this tradition. Let’s face it, I never met a dish towel I didn’t like and have a vast collection of colorful, fun, and soft worn treasures. We have stopped using paper towels and every morning I thoroughly enjoy throwing yesterday’s towels in the laundry and selecting new ones for the day. I also love lovely country style knit dish rags for the sink. They are a little dingy in color but they are soft and smell fabulous when I put them out each morning.
Giving the dogs a treat. This has always been my favorite part of the day and one I overzealously have used to create nudgey pups who know they have a softy at their disposal. With time moving at a slower pace, I find myself spending more and more time in the pantry talking to the dogs as I give them treats. Daisy is particularly interested in pantry conversations. Finn really just wants me to get to the point. The treat.
Bleaching the sink. We have a big 3 bay white porcelain farmer’s sink. It is almost the width of our double window overlooking the waterfall out back. I have recently purchased some fantastic Bleach Alternative from The Laundress and my favorite household job has become bleaching the beautiful old sink.
Clean sheets and the smell of clean pillow cases. As a child I attending Camp Avalon, a girls’ sailing camp in Chatham, Massachusetts. Our chore every Sunday was to change our sheets and send the dirty ones off to the local laundry service. (Lucky girls!!) To this day I love changing my sheets. I love getting into clean sheets on that first night, and I particularly love the feeling and smell of clean pillow cases. I am a pillow girl. Clean pillows are the best.
Books. I am a book collector. I have my grandmother’s history books, my father’s childhood classics (including a first edition Winnie the Pooh) and a vast collection of cookbooks. As a single mother I worked numerous jobs at a time to keep my children and I afloat. One of my favorite jobs was working at our local independent bookstore. I made myself a little promise that with each paycheck I would purchase one art book. Reality took over wishes, but over the course of 7 years I did acquire an amazing art book collection. There are decades of novels collected over the years, and over the past 20 years I have collected shelves and shelves of interior designs and architecture books. My husband joined our marriage with his own large collection of books. A Buddhist and meditation guru, Don has collected rows and rows of spiritual books. Also known as Doctor Doolittle and Indiana Jones in our house, my outdoors enthusiast has a vast collection of bird and animal field guides. Golf and garden books are a regular gift for my guy. Together we have added a vast collection of travel guides and travel lit gems. When we bought Starlight Farm it came with a fabulous little library surrounded on two sides with floor to ceiling sturdy built-in bookcases. We have filled every inch of shelf space. Don and Courteney and I are loving rereading and exploring our own library.
Morning Fires. Starlight Farm has two fireplaces. Our living room has a tall brick architecturally unique and interesting structure. Our kitchen has a fireplace which I think looks Southwestern with its white stucco exterior and rustic wood mantle. In the winters when the house is full of revelers we have the fireplace going at all times. Our soon to be son-in-law and my great girlfriends Amy and Kari are the house fireplace stokers when they are in our nest. In the car heading from Florida to Vermont I began my mental “checklist of Hugge”. What were we going to need to feel really at home for weeks on end? Needless to say we called our favorite wood source and had a half quart of cord dry wood delivered in our driveway for our arrival. Morning fires are a luxury in chilly April, one I treasure greatly. Something so simple brings me such joy.
Everything old. I am a magpie. (Insert my entire family rolling their eyes.) I collect oddities. As the youngest children in both of our families both Don and I each entered our marriage with a collection of beautiful family hand-me-downs and treasures. This includes Don’s gorgeous thin narrow red hutch which has become the family trophy cases and houses all of our children’s beloved childhood clay projects. In our dining room sits my family’s dining room sideboard from Bronxville, an English Antique my mother bought with her friend and interior designer Jane Mitchell in the early 1970s. Other family treasures include lamps, side tables, gorgeous desks, piles of dishes, candlesticks, andirons, fireplace screens and tools, and a great deal of art. I have added to these treasures over the years with things like a wall size Union Jack, antique toy horses, a child’s saddle, a life size carved Indian head, and a very large wooden bear. Tag sales and consignment shops have been my source for midcentury dining room chairs, mixed matched 3 Bears style kitchen chairs, the most comfortable Swedish living room chairs on the planet, and old games to hang on the walls. I really like the quality of old pieces, I love the pantina and the uniqueness of the items. And the prices can be fantastic! For me the hunt for these items is a big part of the pleasure. I have had great joy over the past few weeks cleaning old wooden tables, fluffing cushions, rearranging basically everything in my house, remembering loved ones that acquired them, and reimagining how to you use old pieces in new places. Last week Courteney painted our powder room and Don and I moved his grandparents’ gorgeous ornate antique gold mirror into this simple space. My favorite piece in our house now adorns the smallest space.
Cooking. I can cook. I’ve always been able to cook and do it well. I haven’t always chosen to do it. I have over the years gone from making delicacies to mess hall cook for a family of 9. Our eldest son Jasper is an incredible cook and when he’s in the house I happily step aside or work as his sous chef. The past few years Don and I have really gotten into eating out and can often be found at the Pink Elephant on our favorite tiny island. Over the past few weeks acquiring groceries has been a bit of a challenge, and I have reclaimed my title as head chef. I do not like going on the grocery store and exposing myself to the other shoppers. I have come up with some routines to bring regular and varied groceries into our home. We have joined a CSA, arranged for occasional curbside pickup at our small independent health food stores and at times visited our small independent country stores for items like butter. Last week we added our first ever meal delivery boxes and are currently testing and comparing Martha Stewart’s Marley’s Spoon and Hello Fresh. Although this seems like a lot when I write it, it’s not. When you are navigating 3 meals a day for 3 people, it’s just about perfect. My cooking journey is joyful, nutritious, and another creative outlet. I was absolutely delighted when our youngest son called and asked for some of my recipes. I’m thinking of creating a cookbook for our children.
Inner Clock. I was a big night owl as a child. My parents would put me to bed and I would play, talk to myself, and entertain myself for hours upon hours in my nursery off their master bedroom. When baby sitting me, my teenage older sister used to go to bed long for before her charge. Boarding school and college were a night owl’s dream. Motherhood of school age children and being a teacher was a huge sleep struggle. Nothing like an early morning school routine to buzz stomp a night owl life. I find myself thriving in the world without days of the week and clocks. I literally have to make myself go to bed between 2 and 4 am. Our friends in Barcelona would be so thrilled to see my ditch my American schedule. I have graduated to someone who can eat very late dinners and thrive.

What simple joys have you refound during this time? Please feel free to include them in the comment section.

Kitchen cleaning has become more fun with sink bleaching.

I’ve raised the bar in cleaning and laundry with products from The Laundress.

First CSA box arrives to an enthusiastic household.

Working on a daily vegetable sauté to use during the day to enhance our menu and nutrition.

My poached egg pan is one of my all time favorites. You fill the bottom with water and each egg has it’s own little cup.

Don participates in the Heaton family pop tart making party on zoom.

Some of the wood delivery is stacked at the left. The burch logs were found on the side of the road two years ago and are getting used as well.

In 1973 my widowed father married my wonderful stepmother. I was 8 at the time. My stepmother came into our lives with great love for my father, a yellow VW Bug, half a house in Vermont (which she owned with her sister and brother-in-law) and 12 new cousins for me. I’d only been to Vermont once before. And I’d only been on one ski vacation to Lake Placid before Vermont became such a huge part of our lives. I was the child of a sailing family. I knew nothing about life in the mountains. Nothing.

My mother had died a year and a half before I started skiing with my new cousins. I was the baby in my family, and then the baby in my family who lost her mother at 7. I was doted on and spoiled...by my father, my two older siblings, my grandmother, and many others....and then I wasn’t. When I joined all these new family members at this house in Vermont I was thrown into the pack. All of a sudden I was in my Lanz nightgown in an old farmhouse, bunking in the same room with all the girl cousins, waking at the crack of dawn, eating a hot breakfast I did not like, and tossed into the way back of a cold but fabulous vintage Landrover with my packed lunch and hand me down ski sweaters on the way to catch the first Okemo chairlift. And it was fun as hell. Yes, fun as hell! (For clarification purposes, it’s important to note that the “hot breakfasts I didn’t like” were lovely spreads of pancakes and eggs made by my aunt and uncle. I was Lucky Charms and Poptart girl. The issue was all mine.)

I didn’t want to take ski lessons. I’d done that for a week at Whiteface the winter before. I felt like a dork and hated being that baby in lessons. I’m a youngest child, youngest children do not like to be left in the dust by kids who know more. For some reason my parents and aunt and uncle all thought that given my aversion to ski school... it would be a great idea for my youngest two cousins to teach me to ski. They were excellent skiers. The whole family was. It apparently never bothered any of the adults that my new cousin ski instructors were 9 and 11! I seem to remember them receiving about 3 sentences of instruction with the basic theme of “don’t loose her.” Both of my cousins happily took me off to ski with them. If they weren’t happy to have me in tow, they never let on. They made me feel like one of the pack. They also didn’t allow this tag along to alter their plans. I was going to ski, I was going to keep up with them. I was going to quickly learn to navigate all forms of lifts. And we were going to start our lessons at the TOP of the mountain. It’s actually a brilliant, although crazy idea. I was forced to learned quickly. There was only one way to get down to hot chocolate. To this day, I can keep up with anyone and I’m not afraid. My form is not so beautiful but I’m smiling with glee all the way down the mountain.

This theme of kids going off on adventures continued.

This is the dairy farm which was next to our house. We were all told never to go over there. We were also told we were not allowed near any of the cows. Although these two rules are actually the same message delivered twice, we didn’t listen. One day when the parents were otherwise occupied or most likely not home, we walked right over there and crawled into the closest pen with the cows. Somehow, real or imagined we decided one of the cows was “charging us” so we ran and dove under the rusty barbed wire fence. Being the slowest runner and fearing for my life, I didn’t notice that the barbed wire was cutting a line across my lower back. This created a new predicament, I was wounded, there was no possible explanation for the parents. Again the youngest cousins... who were about 10 and 13 at this point became my medics. There were secret rubbing alcohol cleanses and smearing whatever else we could find in the medicine cabinet on my wound, one that I could not reach nor see without a mirror. It’s amazing now that I think about it, that the 3 of us in the bathroom together did not alert one of the mothers to trouble! The horror of the issue at hand was on the light side of the scale of justice, when we considered the consequences of the parents finding out we had been in the cow pen. I remember leaving that Sunday eve promising my cousins I would hide my wound from my parents when I got home. I don’t think any of us told anyone until we were in our 30s! I will be forever grateful I never got lockjaw or anything else you can get from rusty wire in a dirty cow field!

These adventures continued. Suburban children in the mountains with their parents. Shooting cans, playing in the fields, riding tractors, hiding up in the trees from wildlife creatures. It was my own version of “Little House on the Prairie.” My wonderful new stepmother and her very fun sister made sure we did it all, some experiences were new and some were to keep the family rhythms flowing. My father and I were the only Protestant members of this large devoted Catholic family. Saturday mass happened on the way home from the mountain in ski boots and the ski sweaters. I often wondered what I was doing in this new church while my father and uncle were in the car reading the newspaper while the women and children were inside. I was told by my father I was welcome to join them in the car if I didn’t want to participate in mass. I tried this once or twice and decided an hour with old men reading the paper was 9 thousand times more boring than giggling with my cousins in the pews. As a result of years of family time in Vermont, I am as comfortable now in a Catholic Church as I am on a ski mountain.

I grew to love the seasons in Vermont. Winters were spent on the mountain, cozied up reading books at night, and family dinners around the table or at local Inns. I learned to quickly love pre dinner cocktail time around a fire at an old Vermont Inn. An Inn with a dog and board games in a real win! Summers were spent visiting the Jelly Mill, riding the Bromley slide, and swimming in Emerald Lake. All things my own children would grow up doing

We were weekenders... we left Bronxville on Friday nights after my father came home from work in New York City. We drove our family wagon to Vermont. No seatbelts. Sleeping bags in the way back of the wagon. We left after a full day of activities on Sunday. I remember feeling so tired when I crawled into my comfy Snoopy sleeping bag. Now I realize, my parents must have felt even more so!

I moved to Vermont 17 years ago. A soon to be divorced mother with five small children between the ages of 3 and 9. A girl from Bronxville came via New Canaan and Houston. My husband Donald came 30 years ago from Michigan via Palo Alto and Santa Fe. We both found Vermont through Aunts, Uncles, and cousins. We met here, married here. Our children are not weekenders. They are the real deal. They have Vermont in the hearts. And so do I.