Rain needles the kitchen windows and makes the shells in the Sea Shell garden wink like sleepy lanterns. Susan preheats the oven to 500, slides the big iron skillet inside, and sets a timer for ten minutes so the heat soaks in evenly. The dough waits on the counter, puffed and proud beneath a tea towel, flour dusted like snow on a map. She and Wendy call themselves “the girls” in a wholly whimsical way, and today the girls are staying put.
Little Luke stands on a stool like a foreman, sorting what he’s gathered from the herb garden: garlic cloves bright as pearls, oregano and basil in tidy sprigs, small onions with their paper jackets, and a bowl of little plum tomatoes he has rinsed until they gleam. He taps each clove with a tiny trowel, satisfied with their readiness.
“Storm day is sauce day,” Susan says, stirring a pot already low and steady on the back burner. It has simmered into something rich and red, a whisper of oregano clinging to the steam.
Jessie, the rescue dog, parks herself by the cat door with one eye open, because vigilance is a lifestyle. Little Luke is the only one who actually uses that door, but Jessie keeps the watch anyway.
Wendy arrives with a gust of umbrella and laughter, blonde hair damp at the ends, cheeks bright from the dash up the walk. She is curvy, fair, and retired from guiding young souls through small storms of their own; now she parcels out her days to hobbies like beads from a jar. Today’s beads are pepperoni and cheese, lifted from Vincenzo’s Italian Deli on the way through Walpole, and the deli paper still smells faintly of fennel and brine.
“I brought the good mozzarella,” Wendy announces, setting down her parcel like treasure. She peels back the paper and grins. “And a little provolone, for depth.”
“Depth is my favorite pizza topping,” Susan says.
The timer chimes. Susan pulls the skillet out—shimmering, dangerous, perfect—and sets it on the stove. Luke flicks the light switch off and on, a ceremony; it pops back to bright, and everyone gets serious.
They stretch the dough in the air, passing it between hands, fingers outspread. It softens into a round that drapes just so, and when they lay it into the skillet it sighs and settles like a quilt. Sauce goes on in spirals. Luke flicks basil leaves with the importance of a town crier: “Hear ye, hear ye,” he murmurs as each one lands. Wendy lays the cheese in a tidy patchwork and rains pepperoni across the top.
“Who needs a pizza stone?” Wendy says, admiring their work. “We’ve got cast iron and stubbornness.”
“Stubbornness is crispy,” Susan replies, and slides the skillet back into the oven.
They lean on the counter and listen to the storm. The rain grows from needles to strings to a full curtain. In the oven, the pizza shelters and becomes itself—edges blistering, cheese burbling in small luminescent ponds. Jessie relocates to the table, tucks her paws neatly, and pretends not to be tracking the smell with every cell in her body.
“So,” Wendy says, pouring seltzer and tilting her head toward the windows, “we’re not geocaching today.”
“Not unless someone hides a cache under the couch,” Susan says.
“I could,” Luke offers. “But the hint would be unfair: ‘Seek the place the dog pretends is not her kingdom.’”
They laugh, and the kitchen feels like a fort.
When the pizza comes out, it’s a round sun in a cast-iron night. They let it rest three minutes that feel like three years. Wendy cuts, Susan plates, Luke sprinkles a last ribbon of basil. The first bite is a chorus: tang of tomato, basil’s bright breath, the polite salt of cheese, the pepperoni crisped at the lacy edges. The crust snaps, then gives; steam escapes like a secret.
They eat with the rain for accompaniment, and because it is stormy and human and amphibian nature, they start remembering. Not the triumphant finds or the clever puzzles that ended with dry socks and high fives. No—without even planning it, they bring up the one day they decided to out-stubborn weather and the weather won.
It was the rail-trail, back when the idea of rails-to-trails still felt like magic in their pockets. The map had promised an easy walk and a cache “just off the bed,” which turned out to mean off the trail and into a layered story the forest was already busy rewriting. They left the cinder path and found a ghost of a road and, soon enough, a bridge abutment stranded in trees. The road itself had been peeled away long ago; only the segment that had been the bridge remained, a slab of suspended time. A rusting guardrail clung to the edge like a memory. They checked the ends of the rail because that’s what guardrail caches love to be—clever, reachable, smug—but every end was only an end. The cache was missing. The rain, which had begun as a negotiation, turned into a statement. By the time they decided to turn back, the trail had blurred into one long reflective sentence. Water ran down their sleeves and laughed at their resolve. Occasionally one of them asked, “Are we having fun yet?” and the answer was always a wet, theatrical nod.
Back in the warm present, Wendy dabs her plate with a crust and smiles crookedly. “That day made this kind of day possible,” she says. “Staying in without guilt.”
“Agreed,” Susan says, reaching for another slice. “Besides, the cache is clearly hidden under this mozzarella.”
“The hint would say ‘Hot, round, and briefly missing,’” Luke adds, pushing a slice toward Jessie’s nose and then, saintlike, angling it back to his own plate. Jessie sighs nobly and settles for the glow of being part of it all.
The storm presses its ear to the roof. The garden keeps its counsel. The girls—and Luke, who is honorary girl by whim and decree—eat until the skillet shows its black smile. Afterwards they stack plates and rinse and leave the pans to air-dry like small boats after a voyage.
They don’t promise to stay in next time. They don’t promise to go out, either. They let the rain have today while the kitchen holds their talk and their laughter, and the memory of that failed expedition remains exactly where it belongs: behind them, firm as a lesson, soft as a story, useful as a joke the next time the sky tries to talk them into something. Jessie closes her one vigilant eye. Luke taps the counter twice, ceremonially. And Susan—who delights in both maps and recipes—writes one last line in her notebook:
If we can’t find the cache, we can still find the warmth.
ChatGpt Instructions:
Write a story in the present with only the failed trip in the rain in the past. Wendy is a friend of Susan’s and Little Luke’s and sometimes goes geocaching with them. Wendy is a blonde, curvy, fair complexioned woman and a retired guidance consular. She busies her retirement with numerous hobbies. Today it is raining so the two girls have decided to stay in and make pizzas. They consider themselves girls a whimsical way though. Today they are making pizza using Susan’s oven and her large iron skillet to bake the pizza in as she didn’t have a pizza stone. First she heated the skillet in the oven at 500 degrees for 10 minutes just get the temperature even. The dough had been mixed, kneaded and allowed to rise. Little Luke keeps the kitchen supplied with garlic cloves, fresh oregano, basil, onions and little plum tomatoes from the herb garden, so that Susan always had them on hand. The sauce had been stirred and was ready for Wendy to arrive with the pepperoni and cheese. Vincenzo’s Italian Deli was on the way and Wendy had made a brief stop in Walpole pick them up. The rainfall gradually increased so the would be geocachers decided to stay in and just eat Susan’s pizza. Jessie the rescue dog always keeps at least one eye on the cat door even though Little Luke is the only one that uses it. While they listened to the storm, they ate pizza, and remembered trips where they ignored the rain and went out anyway. As is human and amphibian nature, they remembered an awful trip that had gone horribly wrong. There was the geocache that was located just off a rail-trail bed that had been converted to a rail trail some 50 or 60 years after that portion of the railway had proven to be spectacularly unprofitable and abandoned. When the geocachers left the rail-trail they soon encountered a road with a bridge abutment just standing there in the forest. When the road was abandoned, the road had been removed and all that remained was that portion of the road that actually was on the bridge. All the rest of the road was missing and the forest had reclaimed everything. There was a rusting guardrail on the bridge. It is supposed the cache would be hidden in the end of the guardrail like many caches of that type. All the geocachers could remember was the cache was missing and they had to return to the rail trail in pouring rain. Occasionally,one would ask “Are we having fun yet?