A small note before we begin. This is a personal podcast. I'm telling these stories as I remember and understand them, from my own life and perspective. When other people wander into them, I'll protect what belongs to them. Some identifying details may be changed or omitted for privacy. And while some of this happens inside a real inn, these are my words — not the official voice of the property, its owners, or anyone else who works here. And, today, a recipe that belonged to somebody before it belonged to me.
All right. Come in. It's already warm.
So. Last week I told you this house didn't save me. And then I told you the whole enlightenment was noticing, and pots. I stand by the pots.
A few things from the house first, because it's been a week. The aspens have started. Not the whole hillside. Just a few trees deciding early — the way a few always do. There's always one. Give it two weeks. Then the whole valley goes the color of the thread, and everybody in town walks around pretending they're not looking up.
And one more. This one's better.
This morning a guest came down to breakfast and had a blueberry scone. Then another. Which — fine, that's what they're for. And then he asked if he could take some with him. He was climbing Mount Royal. That's the mountain right out the window, the one this whole street sits under. So we wrapped up five in foil. He put them in his pack. Off he went.
I heard the rest this afternoon. Aperitivo hour. He came in with — I don't know how else to say it — magic in his eyes. I'm telling you this from memory, the way he told it to me.
Somewhere up on the trail he came across a woman and a little girl. And they looked very tired. The kind of tired you can see from a distance. And he told them, in the kindest possible way, that they probably needed sugar. He was thrilled there had been five. Like — that was the detail he kept coming back to. Five. Enough. He gave them scones out of the foil. Two strangers on a mountain. And then he had his at the summit.
He took photographs. I'm going to keep him anonymous unless he ever tells me otherwise. That's his story. He handed it to me the way you'd hand somebody a scone.
But I want you to hold that. Just — carry it with you for the next half hour. Five scones. A stranger. Two more strangers. The top of a mountain.
Because I've been thinking about water. Which is not where I thought this episode was going. I want to be honest about that. I sat down this week to tell you about my grandmother. Mema. And scones. Which, admittedly, is a very Avery Lane Maxwell sentence. Grandmother, scones, microphone. I hear it.
But I started looking back through things I'd written. Old things. New things. Things I'd forgotten I'd written, which — if you write before dawn for long enough, that's a whole drawer. And every time I tried to get to her, I kept finding water. Montana. Colorado. Georgia. And somehow, eventually, a kitchen.
So I think we have to start where the water starts. Or at least where I first remember noticing it.
Okay. So. A few days before I came to Colorado the first time, I was working at a hot springs resort in Montana. And this is where stories become inconvenient. Because it was also the place where I had first gotten sober. Detox and all.
There is something uniquely humbling about shaking through withdrawal while wealthy tourists walk past you in linen robes talking about healing. I can laugh about that now. Sort of. Sort of.
But there was something almost offensive about how beautiful it was. That's the word I keep landing on. Offensive. The water came out of the earth hot. Not warmed by a machine. Not piped in from somewhere pretending to be natural. It had been underground, and then — there it was. Steam lifting off it. Mountains around it. People lowering themselves into it and closing their eyes like they'd discovered something ancient. And maybe they had. I'm not being sarcastic. Maybe they had.
Everybody there had come on purpose. They'd booked rooms. Packed bathing suits. Paid money. Driven into Montana. All because they wanted the water to do something to them. Relax them. Restore them. Heal them.
And I was there trying to survive myself. There's a difference.
And look — I think I believed in the water too. Not literally. I didn't think there was some mineral combination that was going to rearrange my life. But I believed in the place. I believed in places a lot back then. We talked about that last week — the emotional geography. The right town. The right room. The right job. The right mountain. And then suddenly, somehow, the right Avery.
Montana was one of those. And for a little while, it worked. Or it appeared to. And appearances can carry you surprisingly far. Until they can't.
I got sober there. I stayed sober there for a while.
And then I didn't. That's the simplest way to tell it, and I'm going to leave it simple, and I want to tell you why.
I could give you the chronology. Every decision. Every conversation. Every explanation I had ready for myself at the time — and I had a lot of them, I was very well-stocked. But I don't think that's the interesting part anymore.
The interesting part is that I was standing beside water people had traveled across the country to call healing — and I still had to leave.
The water didn't know what to do with me. Of course it didn't. It's water. I know that sounds obvious now. It was not obvious then. I promise you it was not obvious then.
And eventually Montana became another place behind me. Another room. Another address. Another landscape I could describe beautifully once I was no longer standing in it. I got very good at that. Maybe writers always are.
You leave something, and suddenly you can see it perfectly. While you're inside it, everything's too close. Then you put a few hundred miles between yourself and the thing — and there it is. A story.
Colorado had different water. Cold water. Fast water. Mountain water. The kind that moves through a town like the town was built around something much older than itself. Which, of course, it was.
There's a river here in Frisco. I've written about it before. There's a park beside it — Walter Byron Park. And there are memories there that I don't think belong in this episode. Maybe another one. Maybe never. And I'll say this once and then move on: I'm learning that being a writer doesn't mean everything has to become public. That is a fairly recent discovery for me. Embarrassingly recent.
But I remember the river. I remember standing near it during a stretch of my life when I desperately wanted time to stop. And the irritating thing about a river — the truly irritating thing — is that it refuses.
You can have the most important conversation of your life beside it. You can lose somebody beside it. You can say the thing you can never take back beside it. You can hear a sentence that divides your life into before and after.
And the water just — keeps going.
It doesn't swell for your climax. It doesn't stop for the scene. It does not care that you finally understand something. It passes you. Then another piece of water replaces it. Then another. Then another.
I used to think that was cruel. I don't anymore. There's mercy in a thing that keeps moving.
Because eventually — you do too.
— sorry. Stairs. Somebody's up early. Morning. Coffee's on the left.
The stairs in this building announce everybody. I've said that before. It's still true. There's no sneaking down to breakfast in this house, and honestly I think that's good for people.
Okay. Georgia. Georgia is where water gets less cinematic. At least in my memory. Montana had steam. Colorado had rivers and snow. Georgia had humidity. Georgia had heat. Georgia had air so thick sometimes that walking outside felt like stepping into somebody else's bathwater.
And when I went back — after Colorado, after all of it — Georgia felt flat. Physically flat. Emotionally flat. Spiritually flat. I'd gotten used to mountains. Cold mornings. Fireplaces. Jazz coming through lodge rooms. The strange clean feeling of altitude. And suddenly I was back among long roads and parking lots and heat. And familiarity.
Familiarity can be comforting. It can also be unbearable. Because nothing is impressed by your reinvention. Your hometown has seen your earlier work.
And there was my mother's kitchen table. I remember sitting there. I'd gotten a paycheck. There'd been a plane ticket. There'd been leaving. There'd been all the complicated arithmetic that happens when one chapter of your life closes and you're trying to work out what, exactly, you have left.
And eventually I opened my laptop. And I started typing. And that detail matters to me now. Not because I wrote something brilliant. I almost certainly didn't.
It matters because I sat down.
I didn't know what Galena House would become. I didn't know there'd be books. I didn't know I'd someday be sitting at nine thousand feet talking into a microphone about any of this. I didn't know there'd be a Still, by Design. I certainly didn't know there'd be a Good Little Innkeeper. I just knew what I've apparently always known how to do when I can't make sense of something.
I watched it. And then I wrote it down.
I come from a family of observers. That sentence came out of me this week, and the second I wrote it I knew it was true. A family of observers. Especially the women.
I remember my mother on the telephone with one of her sisters. For what seemed like hours. Hours. And they could roll back the tape of a family story with astonishing precision. Well, you know. Remember when — And then suddenly we were somewhere twenty years earlier.
Who was standing where. What somebody said. What somebody meant when they said it. What they were wearing. Who had already left. Who hadn't arrived yet. The version everybody was told. And the version everybody knew.
Nothing was ever just an event. It was material. It could be revisited. Examined. Turned slightly. Held up to another light.
I think I learned to narrate before I knew I was learning to narrate.
At Banks County High School, I could sit in a classroom and stare through the little glass window in the door. There was a fire exit out there. And I could disappear through it without moving. An entire lecture could happen around me, and I'd be somewhere else. Watching. Building. Replaying. Narrating.
I've talked before about the watcher in me. That strange sense I've had most of my life that there's Avery — and then somebody just behind Avery, watching Avery happen. For a long time I thought that started much later. Maybe Montana. Maybe Colorado. Maybe recovery. Maybe writing.
It didn't.
I think the watcher was born in Georgia. In kitchens. In conversations. Listening to women say: Remember when.
And somewhere inside those memories is Mema. My grandmother cooked. And I don't mean that in the modern, romantic sense, where somebody owns beautiful copper pans and calls themselves a home cook. She cooked. It was simply part of the architecture of things.
Food was how a house functioned. You fed people. You noticed what they liked. You remembered. You made it again. There wasn't an announcement attached to it. Nobody said "I made this for you" — it was just there. Care rarely announced itself in that house. It appeared on a plate.
And one day, she had a scone. From a chain. And she did not like it. This is one of my favorite things about the entire origin story, and I need you to appreciate it with me. There was no pilgrimage to England. No ancient manuscript. No secret recipe handed down through fourteen generations of stern women in aprons. My grandmother ate a mediocre scone — and was annoyed.
That's it. That is the beginning of everything on this breakfast table. She essentially decided: I can do better than this. And then — she did.
And I love that. Because I recognize it. Painfully. I recognize looking at something and thinking: No. That's almost right. Move over. That instinct has built a publishing house, a reading app, and an almost concerning number of spreadsheets. It started with a scone.
She made her own. And then the recipe became part of the family.
And eventually — part of me.
I don't know whether she could have imagined where that recipe would go. I doubt she was standing in a Georgia kitchen thinking: one day my grandson will take this to a little inn at nine thousand feet in Colorado, alter it for altitude, bake it before breakfast, put it on the internet, write about it in books, and then discuss its narrative significance into a microphone. I hope not. That would have been a lot to put on a scone. But that's what happened. I carried it.
And I think that's the thing I didn't understand about leaving. Any of the times. You don't actually leave empty-handed. Even when you think you do. Even when you've packed the car badly in the cold and told everyone a version.
You take recipes. Phrases. Ways of folding towels. Ways of answering a phone. The sound your mother makes when she's about to tell you something she's already told you three times. The particular way somebody cuts butter into flour. The instinct to feed a person before you ask what happened. The habit of watching. The habit of remembering.
You carry all of it. Most of the time without realizing you packed it.
I moved all over this country looking for myself. And apparently I was hauling Georgia around the entire time. That makes me smile now. It didn't always.
Because I spent so much of my life believing identity was something waiting for me somewhere else. In the next town. Behind the next door. And all along, some of the most permanent pieces of me were incredibly ordinary. A kitchen table. Women talking on the phone. A grandmother irritated by a scone. A recipe.
And now I make them here. At altitude. Which changes things. Baking at nine thousand feet is annoying. I want that on the record. It is annoying. The air's thinner. Moisture behaves differently. Things rise differently. Recipes that work perfectly at sea level arrive in Colorado and suddenly develop opinions.
So you adjust. A little less of this. A little more of that. Watch the oven. Learn the room. Try again. And yes — this is perhaps the least subtle metaphor I have ever stumbled into. I see it. You see it. Let's just let it sit there.
The recipe survived. It just couldn't stay exactly the same. Maybe neither could I.
Mema's scone at sea level and my scone at nine thousand feet are not identical. They shouldn't be. The conditions changed. The recipe had to account for where it was now.
But if I make one tomorrow morning — and I will, there are people coming down — she is in it. Georgia is in it. That kitchen is in it. My mother and her sisters on the phone are somewhere in it. The boy staring through the classroom door is in it. Montana is somehow in it. Colorado is definitely in it. All those rooms I thought I'd left behind — apparently they came with me.
Maybe that's what inheritance actually is. Not preserving something so perfectly that it never changes. That's a museum. That's not a kitchen.
Maybe inheritance is knowing what part cannot be lost — and letting everything else adapt.
Which sounds a lot like writing. It sounds a lot like hospitality. It sounds a lot like recovery. It sounds, increasingly, like my life.
There's a line from Still, by Design. that I keep coming back to. You've heard me say it — I said it last week. "Healing isn't found in grand gestures, but in the stillness between them." I used to think the stillness was the destination. The place you get to. Now I wonder if it's just the place where you finally notice what you've been carrying.
Because when I stopped moving long enough — there was Georgia. There was Mema. There was the recipe. There was the watcher. There was the kitchen table. None of it had gone anywhere. I'd just been moving too fast to see it.
And maybe that's why I've been thinking about water. Water doesn't stay where it began. That's almost its whole personality. It moves. It becomes steam. Rain. Snow. A river. It disappears underground. It comes back up warm. It freezes on a mountain. It melts. It goes somewhere else.
And somehow — it's still water.
I think I spent a very long time afraid that changing meant losing myself. And then I spent another very long time trying to change enough to lose myself on purpose. Neither one worked. I'd like that noted.
The person who shook beside the hot water in Montana — me. The person beside the river in Colorado — me. The person at his mother's kitchen table in Georgia — me. The person making scones before breakfast at nine thousand feet — also me.
Different conditions. Same water.
And there's something enormously comforting about that now. I don't have to choose which Avery was the real one. I don't have to disown every version who didn't know what the next one would know. I don't have to make the difficult ones into villains or the successful ones into heroes.
They moved. That's all. They carried something forward.
Okay. This is the part of the show where I refuse to be profound for a few minutes. You know the drill by now. A podcast, like a breakfast, needs something on the plate that isn't feelings. And this week I'm not going to give you mine.
I have the recipe here. The original. Before altitude. Before Galena House. Before any of this. I've got it written out the way she'd have said it. Not the way I'd write it — the way she'd say it, standing in the kitchen, not looking at you, because she's looking at the bowl. And I think that's how I want to end today. Not with something I wrote. With something she made.
This is Mema's.
Mema had one of those orange scones from Starbucks and decided there wasn't any reason she couldn't make one herself. Hers were better.
Two cups flour. Half a cup sugar. Half a teaspoon baking powder. A little salt. One stick cold butter. Cream cheese, about four ounces. Zest of one orange. A good handful of dried cranberries, chopped up some. One egg. About half a cup heavy cream. A splash of vanilla. A little orange juice.
Put your flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Zest the orange right over the sugar and rub it around with your fingers a little. It ought to smell like orange before you do anything else. Cut in your cold butter. Add the cream cheese too. Don't fool with it too much. You want little pieces of both still in there. Throw in the cranberries.
Beat the egg with the cream, vanilla and a spoonful or so of orange juice. Pour it in a little at a time. You may not need every drop. Just get the dough to come together. If it gets sticky, you've gone too far, so put a little flour on your hands and leave it alone.
Turn it out on the counter and pat it into a round. Don't knead it like bread. Cut it into wedges. Brush the tops with a little cream and put some sugar over them. Bake at four hundred until they're good and golden around the edges, somewhere around fifteen to twenty minutes. Watch them. Your oven knows more about this than the clock does.
For the orange icing, just mix powdered sugar with enough fresh orange juice to make it run off the spoon. A little cream if you have it. Drizzle it over after the scones have cooled down some. That's about it.
Mema made these because she had the Starbucks one and figured she could make a better one at home. She could.
I add the cream cheese now. That part's mine.
And if you're up here with me, at altitude — you already know what the air does. Splash more cream. It's thirsty. Watch them like she said. Sea level? Make hers. Exactly hers. Live your life.
And that's it. That's the inheritance. Not a grand gesture. Flour. Butter. Cream. A kitchen. Someone deciding a thing could be made a little better. And then making it.
Which — go back to this morning for a second. The guy with the five scones. He didn't set out to do anything. He set out to climb a mountain. He just had more than he needed, and two people in front of him who needed some. That's the whole recipe, honestly. That's the one I'm still learning. Notice. Have extra. Hand it over.
I think I understand why I kept the recipe now. Water moves. Recipes travel. People leave. People come back.
And sometimes the thing you spend years trying to find — has been sitting at the kitchen table the whole time.
I'm Avery Lane Maxwell. This is Galena House Audio.
The scones will be warm. And there will always be a second cup waiting. I'll see you when the next one is ready.
Thanks for listening. This was made at Galena House, in Frisco, Colorado.