Sweet evening

Today was B’s one week birthday—and also her first real outing. We put that good bottle of Champagne on ice, tucked it and the diaper bag in the back of the car, buckled the baby in, and headed east, across the Mississippi to Wisconsin. There, on Thursdays only, this farm offers pizzas made entirely from ingredients produced on the property and baked in a wood-fired brick oven. (This seems to be a happening thing in the cheese state—other farms there are offering their own riffs on the same concept.)

We got there to find what looked much more like a lawn party or a holiday picnic than anything remotely like a restaurant, with adults in lawn chairs chatting and drinking beers or sodas, and what seemed like dozens of fair-haired children running cheerfully around.


We placed our order, and the lady asked us where we were sitting. Well, over there by the little tree. She wrote that down on the ticket: “By the little tree.” And when it was ready, she brought the pie over to us.

Before the pizza came, H and A posed with B, the bottle (an attempt at providing a scale for B’s size), and a card from a friend.


The pizza itself was very good. People in Brooklyn are always going on about how they have the best pizza anywhere. They’re wrong. The best pizza anywhere is in New Haven, Connecticut. This Wisconsin farm pizza wasn’t quite that good, but is isn’t absurd to mention it in the same breath, either.

We offered a toast to a dozy B, singing “Happy Birthday” and tapping her very gently on her sweet little head with our glasses, and another to H, who had just gotten notification that she passed Step II of the national medical boards.

We had a lovely, easy-going meal, watching the goats nibbling in the next field. As dusk came down, the pizza boxes were put to good use starting a campfire that people were beginning to settle their chairs around.


We left just before dark, sending a slightly fussy B back to sleep with the motion of the car. A sweet, sweet evening.