maple syrup in coffee: seriously, try it

The purpose of the trip was a combination family reunion and birthday party: my paternal grandmother turned 90 this past weekend, and she’s a native Vermonter. In fact, my aunt and uncle’s house, where I stayed, has been in the family for generations: it’s the old Cobb family farmhouse. I’m told it’s the oldest house in Westford, and while I’m not sure if that’s true, it’s certainly pretty ancient. The beams running across the living room ceiling are lumpy and uneven, with crescent shapes running along their length from where axe-strikes originally hewed them. Those beams are old and bowed enough that there’s a second set running perpendicularly underneath them, keeping the house from collapsing completely. My dad tells me that he remembers being forbidden as a child to walk on certain “soft” parts of the second story, lest he fall though. It’s old.

Or at least part of it is. The house has been massively expanded to include a modern industrial food operation. This is my aunt & uncle’s business: Cobb’s Corner. They make vegetarian burritos, quesadillas, and a bunch of Middle Eastern goo in tubs: hummus, baba ghanoush, tabouleh, muhamarrah, tsadziki and the like. There are benefits to this beyond being surrounded by delicious snacks: having a commercial kitchen at your disposal is pretty cool, as I learned when I gave my cousin Emily a hand preparing food for the party. Need to make lasagna for 50 people? Just grab a few gallons of tomato sauce from the walk-in cooler, pull out a dozen baking pans and fire up one of the pizza ovens. It’s easy!

The other attractions are the Vermont Lees themselves. My cousins consist of scarily-proficient snowboarder Noah, inevitable-future-mayor-of-Burlington Emily, and entrepreneur and occasional lesbian Rachel. They’re all very nice and surprisingly normal. It’s the parents who’re nuts. Rebecca spent a lot of her younger years in Goa, India, where she had my cousins by a French drug smuggler (a relationship that, surprisingly, ended badly). I’m pretty sure at one point in her life she did enough acid that her toenail clippings still count as Schedule I controlled substances. Now her outlook is a mix of New England toughness and Eastern philosophy, which works out to her being nice to family members and mean to everyone else.

It was in Goa that she met Yavuz, my uncle. He’s a Turk, and responsible for most of the recipes that Cobb’s Corner makes. The man is unstoppable. Most of his time is spent traveling around the Northeast in a diesel truck, delivering Cobb’s Corner products and living in the cab. When he gets home he always has some prize that he has bought or traded for on his trip – sometimes it’s baklava, sometimes it's a block of cheese, but most recently it was a 200lb slab of granite that he’d taken a shine to, and which he proceeded to move around the house with the sort of reckless abandon that’s only possible when your English vocabulary doesn’t include the terms “hernia” or “structural collapse.”

Evenings are when Yavuz shines. Although he holds religion in complete contempt, he lives his life in a sort of permanent Ramadan, eating nothing during the day, then settling down to a gigantic meal once the day’s work is finished. While wolfing down two distinct dinners – chili and curry, say – he pours himself tall water glasses of Raki, a Turkish anise liquor that changes from clear to an unsettling milky white when the ice in it begins to melt. Then Yavuz holds court.

“Toe-me,” he says, in a confessional tone. “Listen, Toe-me. One time, I am driving…”

Yavuz has driven everywhere – North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Western Asia. His stories usually begin with him being held at gunpoint at an arbitrary roadblock in some backward Islamic hinterland. They almost always end with him being embraced as a brother by his captors, who then present him with figs and send him on his way with their blessing. In between these points he paints an extremely entertaining history of the Islamic world that I have been assured is almost completely inaccurate.

But that doesn’t matter. When you’ve seen as many strange things as he has, it’s probably not that unreasonable to conclude, for example, that nobody can actually understand the Arabic of the Quran anymore so the imams make it up as the go along. Just don’t worry about it. All you have to do is say “mm” occasionally, do your best to avoid the proffered Raki, enjoy the story and hope the house doesn’t choose that moment to collapse.