When Peter and I sold our Cambridge home in 2017, we gave away all of our travel guides, but not before taking a photo of the travel shelf in our bookcase as a reminder of some wonderful adventures.  At the same time, I gave away most of my cookbooks to a former colleague who was thrilled to add them to his collection.

But I held on to some, especially those written by Julia Child.  (Small diversion here:  on one of our first dates, Peter invited me to his place for dinner.  I noted how stained the pages of his “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” were and decided he must be a frequent user of it. Turns out, he was just a sloppy, though great, cook.)

Last week, I grabbed that cookbook off my shelf.  It opened to a two-page spread on turkey-making on which I had recorded the size and hours-to-cook of all Thanksgiving turkeys I had starting in 1976 (12lbs).  In 1984, it was 23.5 lbs; in 2002, the last year I invited a bunch of foreign students, 22lbs.  Etc.

Talk about a walk down memory lane…