The summer between my second and third years of college, I was working in Ketchum, ID. It was not my first time there. I loved the beautiful, small town feel as well as the hustle of needing more than one job to make enough money to live and save for school.
That summer I was working in the kitchen at a local restaurant, one of the nicer places. I would come in for the lunch service. It was definitely Ketchum’s version of a ladies-who-lunch kind of place. My station was salads, desserts, and bread. One of my most important responsibilities was to make all the dinner rolls and baguettes fresh each day. The owner spent an entire shift with me to teach me how to make the dough and demonstrated with impossibly quick hands how to shape the dinner rolls. He could do two at a time. I never met his level of mastery.
My other job was working in an art gallery. The quiet of the gallery and the people who worked there could not have been more in contrast with the noisy, claustrophobic restaurant kitchen. The space was filled with beautiful objects, including cases of one-of-a-kind wearable art. The woman I reported to, dressed in the earthy, monochromatic tones, now referred to a quiet luxury. As busy and sweaty as I was when I worked in the kitchen, I spent most of my time at the gallery reading about the work and the artists while wearing a sweater to ward off the chill of a perfectly temperature-controlled environment.
When I wasn’t at one of my two steady jobs, I helped to cut willow branches. The branches would be sorted into kits. The woman who owned the house where I lived for the summer, because I was a friend of her children, taught willow furniture-making courses. She was unlike any person I had ever met. She could cook anything. (Many years later, the kids and I arrived late at her home for dinner, delayed by holiday travel and snow. In honor of my middle son’s birthday, she magically produced a Baked Alaska.) As a river guide, she would pilot the oar boat filled with coolers of food she had prepared in the hours before, all the while rounding up the city slickers looking for a white water adventure. At any given moment, three to five dogs vied for her attention, only getting the snuggles they craved when she finally went to bed on the deck outside in a mass of sleeping bags and blankets.
Traipsing along the river banks in search of just the right mix of thick and thin willow branches allowed for the two of us to talk or not. I was just as hungry for her attention as the dogs. She had lived so many different lifetimes, endless stories. I idolized her. I marvel at the amount of life that was crammed into each summer I spent in Ketchum. Like an amazing buffet, the kind where each of the chef’s star dishes are on display, and you eat a wild melange of dishes, normally not served together. It would not have been possible, if not for Starr, thank you.
