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July | 2026 Today's newsletter has nothing to do with restaurants or hospitality per se.
It's simply a story I felt compelled to write. I hope it finds you where you are. I drive the narrow, winding roads of Westchester County. The lushness of the Hudson Valley is intoxicating. I fall quickly into the pace of New Yorkers. My minimal interactions at the airport and rental car counter remind me that my level of friendliness is unexpected. It’s met with faces wavering somewhere between quizzical and annoyed. It’s a look I’m familiar with from my dear husband, who has long been mystified by my need to connect with each person, even if it’s at the international customs counter or a toll booth. I feel it like a challenge to see if I can invite someone to smile through the mundanity of life. My overconfident attempt to find my way to the Hudson Valley, where Mike’s grandma lives, without navigation is fueled by anticipation and interrupted by a handful of U-turns down narrow country lanes I'd mistaken for my road. When I finally catch sight of the river, I feel a sense of ease take over. I’m steady in my route now, and the excitement of seeing Grandma hums quietly inside me. Both of my grandparents lived two states away, which meant my childhood was shaped by long, immersive visits, full of the humid summers South Dakota promises and weeks of visitors at our house in Great Falls when they made their annual trips west. Unfortunately, three of my grandparents were gone before I hit my twenties. There is an odd feeling of stolen time that I still grapple with, knowing how few opportunities I had to know them as an adult, to hear their stories, and to learn from their hard-earned wisdom. I used to spend hours on the phone with my Grandma Quinn before she found her way to memory care in my mid-thirties, but I never knew the experience of having grandparents woven into the routine of everyday life the way Mike did. If I’m honest, it’s always made me green with envy. Grandma Porco has been like a second chance since my first trip to New York in December of 2011. At the time, I had only one grandparent left—someone I loved deeply but who no longer remembered me—and I found myself drawn to her immediately. What has unfolded over the last fifteen years has been unequivocally one of the most surprising and fulfilling gifts of my adult life. “Grandma” and I talk weekly. She has become my pen pal, and she rights my course whenever I feel flustered by our rapidly spinning world. Our friendship has invited me to slow down, to send letters instead of texts, and to remember that through all these long days Magpie has cultivated, the years are short. Soon the landscape of them will shift again and again. Some changes will be welcome. Some will break our hearts. But they will come. As I curl up in the wicker chair on her front porch, with fog settled into the valley and the humidity already palpable, I realize that in my normal life I would already be busy by this time of day. My list would be bulleted on a piece of paper, and I’d be convicted again by the falsehood that productivity equals success. Instead, today will be slow. I’ll ask about stories from her childhood, her memories of the war, and what it was like being a child of immigrants. I’ll listen closely, repeating things in my mind after the words fall silent, because these stories are the framework of her. We’ll read in the sunshine and then talk some more. We’ll sit quietly for a while longer, and without saying much, she’ll remind me that not everything uncertain needs to be fixed today. Then we’ll eat an early supper and make our way up the carpeted stairs to our spots on the loveseat recliner at an hour so early it almost feels blasphemous, yet somehow so nourishing. She’ll power on the TV, and the Hallmark symbol will mark the beginning of the end of our day. My hand wrapped in hers, nowhere else feels important. I hear her breathing settle after the climb up the stairs. I look over at her and smile. There is a warmth in her eyes that overwhelms me with gratitude for these days together. She has let me be a grandchild again. xo,
Kat
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