In their truest form, cookbooks are about deliverance. As the mother of two teenage daughters with 21-ish meals to make and consume each week, I thumb through spattered pages for inspiration (even if sometimes aspirational) and for help with all those meals. But there’s a broader motivation at work as well: The pages of my cookbooks have become markers of time and memory.

I have hundreds of titles: They line the kitchen counter, are piled near my desk, languish on my bedside table, and have taken over a closet that my family now refers to as “the library.”

These books are old friends. I read them like novels. I dog-ear and add sticky tabs to their pages. I write in them—not just edits like “more lemon zest” but also the dates and occasions they were paired with: birthdays, dinner with friends, first days of school. These notes, and their corresponding dishes, immortalize moments and quickly return those memories to hand. I picked up this habit from my mom, who has been annotating her cookbooks and tucking mementos between the pages since before I was born.

I don’t know when I started doing the same (osmosis?), but I love opening a cookbook and discovering a reminder of a dinner party or an elementary school scribble from one of our daughters. Over time, and inadvertently, I’ve repurposed the souvenirs of a life lived—a tattered postcard, a note from a cherished friend—as bookmarks of sorts. I don’t have a method; I just slip them into the pages of books and rediscover them later as you might when browsing through a scrapbook.

Whenever we road trip somewhere, I always pack a stack of cookbooks. The titles rotate but nine times out of 10, My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichl comes with us. The editor in chief of Gourmet published her recipe-memoir hybrid in 2015 as a means of healing from the sudden closure of her beloved magazine. I happened to buy My Kitchen Year in 2016 when I left my post as food editor of Denver’s city magazine to move to the mountains. In truth, I felt lost without the workaday structure, and Reichl’s book, which paired experiences with recipes, offered an unexpected roadmap for navigating my own changes, in my kitchen and beyond. It was a lifeline. 

In 2021, my husband and I bought a small lake house with a wide expanse of lakefront in Camdenton, Missouri. As a child, my family had a ranch in the Missouri Ozarks, and this house, although located two hours north, gently tugged at that memory. Each time we made the 11-plus-hour drive from the Colorado mountains to the lake, My Kitchen Year would make the trip too. Armed with seasonal produce and regular runs to the local butcher shop, I would cook recipe after recipe—picnic chicken, apricot pie, rhubarb sundaes, sour cherry crostada—from that well-loved book. 

Our little house, painted sky blue and set on a hill overlooking the lake, was a place my dad, who passed away very suddenly in 2018, would have adored. He would have felt a kinship with the humid air, the verdant quality of the tree canopy, the ever-present birdsong. I always felt his presence and, thus, loss keenly while there. One of his favorite birds was the great blue heron, a long-legged giant that stands four feet high but is deftly silent. The afternoon we closed on the house and received the keys, a heron was standing on the dock when we pulled into the driveway. It felt like a greeting, a father’s wink of approval, a welcome home.

We didn’t just travel to the lake in the summer months. Fall in the Ozarks is long, quiet, and glorious without the bustle of tourist season (the temperate weather is the locals’ best-kept secret). Our first year owning the house, we spent Thanksgiving at the lake. I envisioned hosting a magazine-worthy, long-tabled dinner on the dock with our family, including my sister and mom, both of whom had also road-tripped from their homes in Colorado. That Thursday, however, despite a brilliant sun and cobalt sky, the wind was strong and surprisingly biting.

We changed course and set about decorating the table inside. A festive table wasn’t just a flex, it was a tradition set in motion long ago. I grew up with a set table every day for breakfast and dinner. My mom always laid four placemats and napkins delineating our spots—mom, dad, my sister, me—and I’ve carried that simple, but easily discarded gesture, into our family rituals. (Even for breakfast when they’re running out the door, I set the girls’ places with placemats and cloth napkins.) And so, while the girls walked the yard gathering giant maple leaves for place settings, the rest of us checked off the to-do list, made a little shorter that year by purchasing an already smoked turkey from the butcher shop.

I always make three pies for Thanksgiving: sweet potato, pumpkin, and a fruit pie. This year, I was making the streusel-topped apricot pie from My Kitchen Year. While my mom worked on the crusts and my sister pulled out the frozen fruit, I thumbed the pages to find the recipe. I make that pie so regularly—usually with apricots but, honestly, it sings with just about any fruit—that I practically know it by heart. It was a reflex to look it up and as I did, a postcard fell from the pages and skittered across the kitchen floor.

Even before I picked it up, I knew it was from my dad. We all did; we could see his loopy handwriting and signature smiley face scrawled across the surface. It was a thank-you note he had penned and mailed to me in 2018 just a few days before his heart suddenly stopped. The photo on the back of the postcard: the Ozarks in full autumn bloom. He had chosen it, he wrote, because the rainbow of colors reminded him of the plaid shirt I had given him. We stared at it, at each other, tears rushing our eyes. This was more than a coincidence. In this special place that felt so profoundly of him, we received a divine hug and gesture, a true thanksgiving.

My sister suggested I frame the postcard and hang it at the lake. Instead, we left it propped up on the counter for the rest of the day—a reminder of who was missing and the family unit we once were. But the next day, I randomly tucked the memento back between the pages, knowing that someday I’d stumble upon it, and this new, beautiful memory, once again.