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consider myself blessed to have found this profession when I did and to be able to know that what I do changes people’s lives for the better. It has been a long and rich career. When people ask where and when I started, I answer 1973, in the San Francisco Bay Area, but that’s only partly true. Really, it started at least two decades before and three thousand miles east of California.
    The city of Salem, Massachusetts, lies sixteen miles north of Boston on the coast. Salem Neck and Winter Island extend out from it like two fingers stretching into Salem Sound. By the time I was born in 1944, Salem had been cleaved into ethnic neighborhoods. The Polish, Italian, Irish, and French Canadian communities were largely composed of the descendants of immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century to work in the city’s textile mills.
    My family members on both sides made their way from France to Canada and then down to Massachusetts, bringing their French language and customs with them. Luckily, they also brought their recipes. My great-grandmother on my father’s side was a wonderful cook. When we went to her house, mouth-watering aromas of French food greeted us as soon as we crossed her door—including her specialties: cipate, a casserole layered with vegetables, meat, and pastry dough; creton, a pork pâté; and bouef bourguignon.
    Salem is a place with deep ties to and constant reminders of its past, especially the Salem Witch Trials. The Witch House, home of Judge Jonathan Corwin, one of the judges appointed to hear some of the first charges of witchcraft in the late seventeenth century, still looms eerily at the corner of North and Essex Streets. Gallows Hill, where around twenty innocent women were hanged after being caught in the crosshairs of hysteria and religious fundamentalism, isn’t far from my childhood home. These days the city capitalizes on its history for tourism dollars and witchcraft kitsch abounds, but when I was growing up witches were no Halloween marketing ploy. To my child mind, they were very real. They served as warnings to stay on the right side of God—or at least the Church.
    I was the first child born to Virginia and Robert Theriault. Almost two years later, my brother David came along; eight years after that my brother Peter arrived. With his job at the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, my father earned enough money for my mother to be a full-time homemaker. He started out as a salesman selling advertising for the yellow pages and later became a manger. Unlike most of his counterparts in management, my father didn’t have a college degree. He did, however, have a gift for art and for gab. Both of which helped him in his selling days. As he talked up particular ad opportunities for clients he would draw out what they would look like, bringing them to life on the sketch pad he took on all of his sales calls.
    For the most part, my family was made up of hardworking, decent people. Many of them were inclined toward generosity and, for the most part, they were a lively and fun bunch who delighted in big family dinners, music, dancing, storytelling, and laughter.
    Growing up, the person I was closest to was Nanna Fournier, my grandmother on my father’s side. She was funny, intelligent, and kind, and she was crazy about me. One of my earliest memories is bolting out of my stroller so I could run into her open arms. She also had a sharp fashion sense, and as I got older I was the only girl I knew whose grandmother gave reliable advice for looking hip.
    For all of their merits, my family members were also people of their times. They were steeped in a rigid Catholicism and a pre-women’s movement mentality about the proper role of women. A woman’s job was to look pretty, win a stalwart husband, and then be a doting wife and mother and make a comfortable home.
    My mother took this job seriously. Impeccably neat, slim, well-coiffed, and—frankly—obsessed with appearance, she never cut