Who knows? This is the one that led me into a short trip down Boutique Lane.ad actually it wasn’t a swap. I found a book in the Boutique and I took it. It’s a big one—750 pages—and unused, i.e. unread. It is “a compilation of the works of (Mary Frances) M.F.K. Fisher, first published in book form separately under the titles: Serve It Forth; Consider the Oyster; How to Cook a. Wolf; The Gastronomical Me; and An Alphabet for Gourmets.” I guess it was a gift, a bit daunting for the recipient to read, but thoughtfully placed in the Boutique for someone like me to keep and cherish and re-read, rather than in the apartment library with a relatively short shelf life before it would be sent to a book sale or/and destroyed.

I own several of M.F.’s other books and I have longed for these titles, but never felt justified at my present stage of life to buy them. So I am grateful and spending too much time after I should have gone to bed, reading and dipping and enjoying.

And this explanation has taken too much time, too.

I’m going to bed NOW.

My next swap was both practical and sentimental.

Years ago, a long time ago, when I was living at home, working on my Master’s degree, engaged to be married when I graduated, and collecting what used to be called a trousseau, my brother gave me a bean pot for Christmas. I love baked beans, though at the time I didn’t know how to prepare them. I wasn’t a cook, I was an academic. Time enough for that. I was pleased to receive the pot, a big family size, brown, of course, with a lid.

My brother was apologetic. He said he felt guilty because the pot cost so little—one dollar.(. (He got it on sale.) After Christmas he bought me another Christmas present to make up for it. I don’t remember what he gave me. It’s long gone. But I kept the bean pot and I learned to use it. I made Boston Baked Beans but I also learned to make my Icelandic grandmother’s Bena Supa (bean soup) and I served it at parties. Actually, I sort of made it up. My amma’s recipe read: “Boil beans and mea.t.” I developed it from there. My recipe can be found in my book, Letters to Icelanders, which is about to be re-published in October.

I’m sill talking about a Boutique swap.

Over the years, my brother’s bean pot had a lot of use. The lid cracked and broke and I used aluminum foil as a cover. Fast forward to my present home, a comfortable apartment for one, with an office, and with greatly reduced contents from my Other LIfe. But I still had my brother’s bean pot, with no lid and too big for me to use but I still loved baked beans and Bena Supa.

I found a new, intact, smaller, brown bean pot in the Basement Boutique. So I swapped.

Happy ending.

I can now bake memorial beans in my new-old pot. I might have a party.