No one seems to like my gumbo as much as I do but that hasn’t discouraged me from making it. It’s the smell of the roux and the mouthfeel of a rich stew that feels best this time of year. This past weekend the winds started up and I got triggered remembering last year’s bomb cyclone that knocked down trees and cell towers and had us without power for five days. I ran our generator to make sure the battery still worked and thought about getting gas. There’s something thrilling about storm preparation.

I fell in love with wind storms in Oban, that little town on the west coast of Scotland. The view from our rental of the bay as the sky got weird and the winds kicked up, tucked between the isle of Mull and a loch feeding into the Atlantic. I so wanted to feel the brute force of a storm, made more exotic for being Scottish, romantic almost in that rental with the tall, old windows and pulleys, the cast iron weights attached to the sash cords trembling as the winds came on, the boats in the harbor jiggling, that queer light in the sky some not-right orange.

But walking to the local Tesco determined to stock up on supplies for my young family. Invigorated even by the coming storm. Natural disasters in foreign countries, a different form of travelogue. Gathering candles and blankets, waiting. But the storm never came, and rather than relief I felt disappointment.

It was ten years now since we started that three-month tour of the UK: and who does that with two young kids and a used German car, in winter? I was fond of us kooks from a distance, trying to see ourselves for who we were then and to remember.

We would have started off from Germany to first see our friends in Metz, France for a night and then on to Amsterdam, an overnight ferry to Newcastle, and then a slow, counter-clockwise arc from the east coast of Scotland to the top, down to the west, back over to the east, criss-crossing and meandering all over. Down through Ireland from Belfast to Dublin, Galway, Cork, Christmas in the countryside, ferrying to Wales for New Year’s and up to Chester, Stratford, London, Bath, exiting at the bottom not far from where we started. It was one of the greatest things we’d ever done as a family, every bit of it perfect, all of us so young and dumb. I loved us for it, for thinking we could go anywhere.

There was a part of winter that was comforting, burrowing into a blanket and lighting a fire. Cooking a gumbo was a salute to the season and every stew I’d ever made, from the creamy Cullen skinks of Scotland with their smoked haddock to the classic beef chilis or red lentil dishes I loved.

I started to leapfrog holidays and yearn for Christmas, for getting the family back together and heading off to an island on Boxing Day, for carting a stew and warming it in somebody else’s house, a rental with board games and clean cookware. If a storm came, even better. We’d be ready for it.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Nostalgia, travel