One night after rifling through my tilting mountain of bedside books and coming up short, I sifted through my husband’s stash. I pilfered The Ghosts of K2, the library book he’d been reading about the first decades of expeditions to climb the second highest mountain in the world. While I attempted K2, my husband moved…

November is always an interesting time for a family of vegetarians. While my three children have never lifted turkey to their lips, they’ve come home from school with a multitude of smiling birds cut out in the shapes of their hands, illustrated plates labeled peas, potatoes, and turkey, and all manner of pilgrims and Indians sitting before bulbous,…