I came to know Luisa Weiss as you may have, through her site, The Wednesday Chef.  I wish I could say what post was the first I devoured, or the recipe that was our introduction, but I can't. She's one of those people who seems as though they were always around. I do remember thinking her perspective was unique; born in Berlin to Italian and American parents, she was a woman who had studied in Europe and the United States, who loved food and now worked in cookbook publishing. She lived in New York. She seemed as sharp as she was kind, with a cracking streak of sarcasm and a real vulnerability. I thought her a little glamorous.

What sold me though was Luisa's impressive talent; she's got a knack for both words and recipes. She can line up a phrase in such a way that it comes across as both succinct and artful. She's a genius at sussing out good recipes, and specific and honest when it comes to analyzing the bad ones. 

As Luisa continued to write, her circumstances changed and her skill evolved; the recipes were the way she talked about everything else in her world. Her highs and lows were shared over baked beans and Greek salads and pommes de terre boulangère.

Now, she has a book that covers all that more. And it is a Los Angeles Times bestseller. 

When Sean and I packed up the boys for a late August jaunt to Montréal, Luisa's was the only book I tucked in my bag. It made for perfect travel reading, especially as we were going back to the city where I was born, and where Sean and I have spent so much time, starting from when we were dating. As Luisa recounted the journey she's had thus far, one divided into countries and continents, it made me consider my own.

I'll not spoil where her words leave off, but she sets us in an idyllic point of beginning and end. It is a moment filled with an appreciation for how we are in the constant collection of layers to our lives, how we are always building up these stories, memories, of people and places, adding and taking away from the patina of experience. She considers the complex, messy choices we make in the pursuit of growth and happiness, and shows a heartening faith in forward progress.

I thought a lot about my parents on that trip, how it was for them starting out as immigrants. I conjured younger versions of Mum and Dad in shops and restaurants, I tried to find places that felt familiar from my childhood, and I wanted to stand on the steps of the church where they married. I wondered what it must have been like to make the choices they did.

One evening after dinner, Sean and I walked with our sons through Parc La Fontaine. The light was gold and gleaming, and the shadows long on the grass. We ambled along the winding paths and listened to someone playing violin. I held Benjamin's hand, and Sean carried William on his shoulders until we reached Sherbrook street. At that point, facing south, you're at the edge of the plateau, with its width to your back and the mountain rising from there. The road falls away at your feet, rolling down towards the port and waters at the city's southern border. There was something in that moment that felt like potential. I imagined us living there. If I squinted hard enough, I thought I could see the boys running up the stairs of one of the skinny Victorian houses that line the park, I could hear the jingle of keys in my pocket, and I felt for a moment we could be home.

(Dear friends and family: we're not moving anytime soon.)