Widow Warren House/Lion Fat

In Boston visting my sister and mother and also just spent a weekend in Plymouth down by Cape Cod, the town I grew up in. My childhood friend Rose recently relocated there and she purchased an incredible old historic home that is very reminicent of the house she grew up, down the street from my old homestead. The picture was taken in her foyer. Her front door opens up onto the oldest part of the home and the hearth was built in the 1600's. Not sure you can grasp the scale from the photo, but those early fireplaces were enormous, the hearth was the heart of the home where all the cooking, eating, baking, and socializing was done.

When I was a teenager I worked as a guide in an historical house, The John Howland House, and the fireplace is almost a clone of Rose's. I was often assigned duty at the hearth, cooking for the benefit of the tourists things like cornbread made in a dutch oven that I lined with leaves so the bread wouldn't stick to the cast iron. We buried the dutch oven in coals and banked more coals on the flat lid so the bread would "bake". There was always, in the old fireplaces, an oven in the very back that was nothing more than a hole in the bricks into which loaves of bread could be slid. Rose knows her fireplace predates the late 1600's because at that time there was a law passsed mandating all new construction to include the fireplace in the side of the hearth versus the very back - apparently too many colonial women were being asphyxiataed by fireplace fumes.

Growing up in Plymouth Mass was a trip. In many ways we just took for granted the onslaught of tourists every summer and if you were a teen in need of a summer job, you donned the Pilgrim costume and worked at one of the historical house, on the Mayflower (a replica of the ship that brought the Pilgrims from England), at Plymouth Rock (which is really an old scam - the rock really has no historical significance) or at Plymouth Plantation, the fabulously recreated Pilgrim village that is a museum. Or, if you weren't a Pilgrim tour guide, chances are you worked in a seafood restaurant or at an ice cream joint. I did all three. 

And we were bad. I remember my sister and I both working in the John Howland house one summer. By the end of the day we were so tired from all the clamboring tourists asking the same questions over and over again, tired of our spiels that we recited exactly the same over and over again. Being mischevious girls, we entertained ourselves and each other by making up ludicrous stories to tell the tourists, always trying to outdo each other. That oven in the back of the hearth? As I told it, it was where they stored dead bodies in the winter when the ground was too frozen for burial. Not one tourist questioned the wisdom of storing a corpse in a hot fireplace. One tourist, when told about the soap the Pilgrims made from lye and fat, heard it as, "lion fat". Well that got me to thinking and soon a story was born. Everyone knows abouot the triangle of trade in the New World where slaves, molasses and rum were traded but did you know that there was another triangle of trade where colonists traded for lion fat which they needed to make high quality soap?  And those fingerprints on the wall? "Yes, they are significant, put there by John Alden!" we told the tourists (not my sister who hours before ate a Reese's cup and made chocolate imprints on one of the old walls!)

Anyway, Plymouth was a blast from the past. We drove past my old house, a huge southern style mansion of a house perched high on a terraced hill. We went to a clothing store owned by a classmate of mine whom I hadn't seen since I was 18 - we were stunned to lay eyes on each other. I ran into a boy I had a crush on who sat behind me in homeroom cuz we were alphabetical, me Britton, he Browning. He is now Rose's boss, a director at the local hospiital. Yesterday, I picked the meat from a half dozen lobsters for Rose who wanted lobster salad. I haven't done that since I was a child but it was quickly second nature: first you rip the tail off, remove the tiny fins, with shears cut the underbelly and remove the tail meat, then pull off the large claws and the little pincher claw as well as the knuckles. The claw is cracked and the large piece of claw meat extracted. The remaining corpse may or may not contain delicious tamale and roe (if it's a breeding female) which should be scooped and treasured. Then with a tiny pick the little pieces of meat from the pincher claw and the knuckles are extracted. Some people try and suck some goodnes from the tiny fins but I just threw those away.  

And I remembered one July 8th, my youngest brother's birthday. I surprised him with an enormous five pound lobster when he woke up - it crawled all over the kitchen table. There was barely a pot big enough for it.  But I managed to cook it for him closing my ears to the lobster's shrieking as it hit the boiling water. I sat with him, just he and I at the kitchen table on the morning of what must have been his 7th or 8th birthday. I cracked the lobster and picked the meat and he ate the entire thing, dipping each piece in melted butter.  I hope he remembers that day as vividly as I do.

All for now. It's a great vacation so far. Thanks to Landmark I am happily reuited with my mother and finally spending quality time with my sister and friend Rose who is my Landmark muse - she is the one who pushed me to take the course.

Your challenge today could be thinking whether there any trips you might take and people with whom you might reconnect.

Peace,
Sarah