Peggy Ehrhart's Blog

I’ve always been skeptical of claims that if one focuses intensely enough on the thought of something, that something will manifest in real life. Yet here I was at a neighborhood garage sale staring at an example of the very something I had been focusing on non-stop for the past six months—and it was only happenstance that I was there. I wouldn’t have bothered with the sale except that the bright fall day was perfect for a walk and the sale was just a few blocks from my house.

I’d very recently finished the manuscript for book number one in my new mystery series. Like my Knit & Nibble series, the mysteries in the new series will be craft cozies featuring a female amateur sleuth. But whereas the craft in the Knit & Nibble series was—duh!—knitting, the craft in the new series is quilting. My sleuth, Caroline Platte, is a curator at a crafts museum. Her special interest is quilts, and she herself is a quilter who makes custom quilts on commission.

As I was developing the series, I immersed myself in the world of quilts, reading books and studying catalogues from museum exhibits, poring over photographs of quilts old and new and absorbing their deep roots in American history.

The sale featured the usual neighborhood garage-sale offerings: castoff clothes not old enough to be vintage, and kitchen ware, and children’s toys, as well as lots of Halloween costumes and party decorations, which would have been great finds for someone (not me). And then, on a table of folded sweaters and sweatshirts, I saw a flash of patchwork. Thinking it was perhaps a blouse or jacket sewn from fabric printed to look like patchwork, I picked it up.

It was larger than I expected, much larger, folded into a compact rectangle, and it was a genuine piece of genuine patchwork. The pattern was based on blocks about two inches square. Some were solid color, a pale yellow. Alternating with them were blocks composed of eight triangles pieced together to form four one-inch squares. The triangles had been cut from patterned fabrics of all sorts, completely random, tiny stripes, plaids, checks, old-fashioned prints in every color imaginable. As I discovered when I looked on the reverse, all the stitching had been done by hand. And it was huge—large enough to fit a double bed, as I discovered when I got it home.

Someone had been very busy! But not the woman who was selling it at her garage sale. She said she had bought it at a craft-society rummage sale, and I knew exactly what she meant. My mother was a quilter and belonged to a quilt society. Once a year her group would host a sale to which members could donate quilt-related items: maybe lengths of fabric left over from a project, maybe half-finished projects that didn’t hold the quilter’s interest anymore, and maybe even half-finished projects inherited from someone who died mid-project.

Quilts particularly lend themselves to the unfinished-project phenomenon. A full-size quilt takes a very long time to make, starting with the separate blocks that will be joined together to form the top. Once the top is complete, backing and batting have to be added, and then the top has to be fastened to the backing by means of quilting, either hand or machine. (An alternate way to anchor the top to the backing is to use yarn ties at intervals, in which case the finished product is often called a comforter rather than a quilt.)

This process can stall at any point. In the case of my garage-sale find, the creator had finished her entire top but had gotten no farther. Had she died? There’s no way of knowing. But the fact that all the work of piecing the blocks and joining them together was done by hand—as well as the old-fashioned patterns of the fabrics used for the triangles—suggests that the work was done a very long time ago.

Then at some point someone had contributed the quilt top to the rummage sale at which my neighbor found it. She told me that she had intended to finish it but had never carried through on that plan. One never expects to pay much for anything at a garage sale, and sure enough, this treasure was mine for $20.

I own a wonderful book documenting a quilt exhibit at the Oakland Art Museum. The exhibit featured quilts made by African-American quilters whose roots were in the South but who ended up in California because in the 1940s good jobs were available in the defense industry. The quilts themselves are magnificent and the stories attached to them are fascinating. Some are composed of mismatched quilt blocks that seem juxtaposed by accident—but somehow the effect is more appealing than a too-careful symmetry.

The quilt’s story might reveal that a beloved grandmother died and left behind a handful of complete quilt blocks that a granddaughter then supplemented with her own creations. Or a whole quilt top was completed by the original creator, but decades passed before a subsequent generation turned it into a quilt.

That is going to be the case with what I now think of as my rescue quilt. The hardest part has been done, and the original creator is surely long gone, but her creation deserves to live on as a finished quilt. My quilt-mystery protagonist has devoted her life to rescuing, preserving, and interpreting antique and vintage quilts, and it seems I am going to have a chance to do my part as a result of a garage find that fate seems to have destined.

A yard shaded by trees has lots of advantages. Until recently, and the advent of hotter and hotter summers, we survived without air conditioning thanks to the huge trees on all sides. A disadvantage, though, is that no spot in our yard is sunny for enough hours of the day to make a kitchen garden possible. I’ve been able to satisfy some of my urge to grow my own food, however, by raising herbs.

We have a wooden deck at the back of our house, in a spot that actually does get sun, furnished with several large and heavy terra cotta planters. I grow herbs in some of them, and in our New Jersey winters, which are getting milder all the time, many herbs will winter over. I had a sage plant that started out in a plastic pot from the garden center and lasted for about thirty years. I looked forward to my late-November ritual of harvesting sage leaves to add to the stuffing for our Thanksgiving turkey.

The sage plant outgrew several pots and then I moved it to a large wooden barrel. After a decade or so, the wood in the barrel rotted away and the barrel collapsed. I tracked down another barrel, filled it with good soil, and transplanted the sage plant. It continued to do well for many more years, even spawning a baby sage plant that I gave away. Eventually, though, it didn’t survive through a winter and that was the end of it.

My first attempt at replacing it with a new, small, plant from the garden center didn’t make it through the first winter. I now have a sturdy replacement that’s been with me for a few years and is getting bigger and bigger.

Some herbs that winter over are woody shrubs, like sage and rosemary. Others are perennials that form an underground root system, like oregano, thyme, and mint. They need to each have their own container because nothing sharing a container with them can survive their territory grab.

They disappear completely in the winter, but new shoots come up when the earth warms again. In fact, more and more new shoots come up every year. It’s fun to go out onto the deck in March to clean the dead leaves out of my herb pots and inspect for signs of new growth.

Basil dies as the days become shorter, and it has to be replanted every year. A spring ritual is going to the garden center when the herbs are in stock and coming home with basil, tarragon, parsley, and whatever else catches my fancy. This year I bought some woodruff just because I liked the foliage. It’s light green, almost chartreuse, and the leaves are long and thin, arranged around the stems like a stack of flower petals.

I like to keep a tarragon plant because tarragon is so good with dishes involving crab. And last year I had a very vigorous curly parsley plant that was always willing to surrender a few sprigs when a recipe called for parsley.

One spring, just for fun, I planted catnip even though we didn’t have a cat. Late that fall, when not much was left of the catnip plant but a few stems and withered leaves, I looked out the back window to see a neighborhood cat in the catnip planter. The cat was rolling about in ecstasy, clearly getting even more enjoyment from my herb garden than I could ever imagine.

Nothing is forever, and it’s with mixed feelings that I’m wrapping up the Knit & Nibble series. Kensington, my publisher, has invited me to launch a new project. Like Knit & Nibble, it’s a craft cozy series, but the craft this time is quilting. Thus my amateur sleuth, Caroline Platte, is a quilter. She’s also a curator of decorative arts (including quilts) at a folk art museum in the charming, invented, town of Banburyport, Massachusetts.

I think of her as a quilt whisperer because her job involves teasing out the secrets in antique quilts as she studies their history and determines their authenticity. Naturally her observational skills and puzzle-solving abilities come in handy when murders shake the normally serene Banburyport community. Sometimes the clues to the killer’s identity can actually be found in quilt patterns!

The first book in the quilt-whisperer series is to be released in the fall of 2026. I’ve written about 100 pages of it so far, aiming for a deadline of October 1. It doesn’t have a title yet, but I’ll be updating my website with more information soon.

LAST WOOL AND TESTAMENT, which came out in April, was the final full-length book in the Knit & Nibble series. One more Knit & Nibble project is yet to be published, the novella AN EGGY WAY TO DIE. It will appear in March 2026 as part of EASTER EGG MURDER. All together there will have been twelve full-length Knit & Nibbles and five Knit & Nibble novellas.

Readers who have worked their way through the Knit & Nibble series know that a romantic subplot has been percolating ever since Pamela Paterson’s attractive new neighbor, Richard Larkin, introduced himself in MURDER, SHE KNIT. Will Pamela, widowed long before the series began, finally allow herself to love again?

Throughout the life of the series, I’ve tried to make the novellas independent of the full-length books, in the sense of not including major subplot developments that would confuse people who hadn’t read the full-length books. In this case, though, I’ve had to make an exception. Because AN EGGY WAY TO DIE will be the very last appearance of Pamela, Richard, and all the other Knit & Nibblers, I added an epilogue that ties up things that needed to be tied up.

I’ll miss the Knit & Nibble characters, who I’ve come to think of as my imaginary friends—though they are in some ways more real than the flesh-and-blood people around me. As I work on the first quilt whisperer book, I’m getting to know a new cast of characters and I hope they will turn into people that my readers enjoy knowing as well.

This time of year in New Jersey everything wants to grow. The April rains are soaking the ground, and the longer days are coaxing dormant plants to life. Some plants don’t even need that encouragement, however. We’ve all had onions sprout in our vegetable bins and noticed the eyes of stored potatoes beginning to bud. On a visit to my mother some years ago, I opened a cupboard to find three sweet potatoes that had sprouted leaves.

My parents lived in southern California, so the planting season could be a year-round affair as far as my mom’s collection of patio plants was concerned. I took the sweet potatoes outside and tucked them just as they were into random pots.

I had been back home in New Jersey for a few weeks when I got an email from my sister. She included a photo that showed the pots where I had tucked the sweet potatoes now wreathed in cascades of potato vines, and she kept me updated on their progress. Eventually the new plants got so big she divided them and took some clumps back to her yard in LA. A subsequent photo showed a good-sized patch of garden covered with sprawling sweet-potato vines. The vines eventually created more sweet potatoes, and she reported that she and her husband ate many meals featuring baked sweet potatoes from the patch.

At last they decided they had eaten enough sweet potatoes and the garden plot could be used for something else, so they dug up the remaining sweet potatoes to let the soil rest for a bit. But it didn’t rest! Somehow enough sweet-potato bits remained underground that new plants formed and vines re-emerged and she had a sweet-potato patch once again.

I was so inspired by this tale of vegetal resilience that I decided sweet potatoes were an easy and inexpensive cure for the bare spots in my yard. I bought a few sweet potatoes at the grocery store, cut them into quarters, and planted them in likely, sunny spots.

A few weeks later sprouts began to appear, and then little leaves. The foliage is quite pretty and in fact ornamental plants from the same species, batatas, can be purchased at the garden center purely for their decorative properties.

Eagerly anticipating both the landscaping possibilities of my sweet potatoes and the eventual day when I could harvest dinner from my front yard, I checked on my crop every morning—until one day the leaves and most of the vines were gone! They had been nibbled away, leaving only nubbins.

I knew that look, because I had sadly inspected the remains of lilies, hosta, poppies, pansies, and any number of other plants that had fallen prey to the neighborhood deer. (My sister’s neighborhood doesn’t have deer—though raccoons have been known to raid people’s koi ponds.) So it appears that my experiment growing sweet potatoes in New Jersey proved only that I had added yet another plant to the all-you-can-eat deer buffet that is the suburban New Jersey yard.

An estate sale can give one an intimate glimpse into the life of a complete stranger, to the point that the stranger becomes a stranger no more. I wrote about that phenomenon in my last Goodreads post and I’m revisiting it here. People collect things. A person who has inhabited the same house for decades has had ample time to indulge the collecting urge, and the best estate sales take place in houses that have been inhabited for decades.

My mom collected objects having to do with chickens. Over the years, gift-giving occasions brought chicken figurines of all shapes and sizes, and ornamental plates decorated with images of chickens, until it seemed that every surface in the kitchen and dining room had some poultry-related object on it. She is gone now, and since she lived on the opposite coast from me, I wasn’t the main person to deal with the objects she left behind. But somewhere other chicken collectors are enjoying the additions to their collections that they found among my mother’s things.

There’s a certain danger, however, in letting friends and family know what one collects. Let’s say you’re into butterflies, or maybe you’re not even all that into butterflies, but mention in an unguarded moment that you like butterflies. The damage is done. Every gift you receive henceforth will involve butterflies: pajamas with butterflies printed on them, dishes decorated with butterflies, butterfly wind chimes, butterflies on stakes to position around your garden, real butterflies pinned to backing and framed . . .

A few years ago, I went to an estate sale in a beautiful rambling old house. In place of a traditional lawn, the landscaping featured a large meadow of native plants favored by butterflies. And inside the house the items for sale included, among many butterfly-related items, coffee-table books about butterflies, framed prints of butterflies, butterfly note cards, and butterfly wrapping paper.

I know of a frog collector. I’ve never met her but I was once shopping with a friend in quest of a birthday gift for the frog-collecting woman. The object chosen was a large frog sculpture made of metal wire bent, twisted, and soldered to form a frog that could perch on the edge of a shelf. I found myself wondering how it would be received, and whether the recipient was really an enthusiastic collector or had merely mentioned once that frogs were cute—thereby solving the “What shall I buy her for her birthday?” quandary in perpetuity for my friend.

I also know of a pig collector, my sister-in-law, and I’ve been guilty of contributing to that collection. In the animal realm, however, I’m sure the most commonly collected creature is the cat. It’s easy to understand how people’s affection for cats can create a desire to be surrounded, if not by them, then by images of them, at all times. (I myself have a cat weathervane.)

I’ve been to many many estate sales where it was clear that the house had been inhabited by a cat-lover: Cat figurines, of course. Large stone cats intended as door stops. Paintings and prints of cats. Stuffed animal cats. Cat note cards. Decorative plates with cats on them. A teapot with cats on it. A teapot shaped like a cat. Coffee mugs with cats on them. Coffee mugs shaped like cats.

I have collections. That goes without saying, given my devotion to estate sales. Browsing among vintage items, cast-offs, or a lifetime’s accumulation in a house that needs to be emptied for sale is much more fun—like a treasure hunt, in fact—if one is looking to add to a collection.

I bought my first matryoshka on a trip to Russia, new, in a souvenir shop. I had always loved the idea of the nesting dolls, one inside the other till the smallest, innermost, one is the size of a bean. My souvenir matryoshka quickly acquired companions, because once I was home and back in my routine of going to estate sales, I noticed that they were everywhere—souvenirs, probably, of other people’s trips to Russia.

I bought one every time I saw one, usually for five or ten dollars, or even less, and now I have over thirty, lined up on a shelf in my kitchen. My most recent one was something of a splurge at twenty dollars, but she is huge, with at least ten more dolls, smaller and smaller, inside her. She is also very old. The colors used on classic matryoshkas tend to be red, yellow, and black, and usually the figures are wearing some generalized version of Russian peasant garb, with colorful aprons, babushkas tied over their heads, and rosy cheeks. The outfits often feature a stylized rose, so large as to be out of scale with the little figure, but red, in keeping with the color scheme. The colors on my giant matryoshka are so pale that the details of her outfit are hard to make out, but the many additional dolls she contains are brightly colored, suggesting that they were kept safe inside her, shielded from the sun while she, over the years, faded.

For a while it seemed that I found a matryoshka at nearly every sale I went to. Then a few years ago, I stopped seeing them. Are the sale-organizers reluctant to put them out now that Russia is at war with Ukraine? Or given that estate sales usually take place after the homeowners die, is everyone in the generation of people who brought back matryoshkas from Russia now dead (except me, of course) and their estates dispersed?

I hope not, though that shelf in my kitchen has gotten awfully crowded.

If an estate sale is truly an ESTATE sale, the entire contents of a deceased person’s house are on offer. Shopping at such a sale is not unlike the experience of browsing in a department store (back before online shopping made department stores nearly obsolete). Everything one might need is available: furniture, pots, pans, china, bed linens, towels, ladies’ fashions (on the second floor, usually), menswear, books, records . . . and holiday decorations.

Who’s in the mood for Christmas in July? Hardly anybody—but this time of year, it’s fun to come across Christmas things. I am at this moment kicking myself for passing up the chance yesterday to buy, very cheaply, enough twinkly white lights to festoon a whole forest of Christmas trees. The owners of this particular house appeared to have stockpiled spares of anything and everything. In the basement, I found boxes and boxes of the lights, unopened.

I passed them up because I’ve actually been trying to give away my surplus Christmas tree ornaments, lest when I’m gone I leave behind a house so full of things that people shake their heads and murmur, “The poor thing never threw anything away.” We have twinkly lights, enough strings to make our tree very twinkly, but they are multicolored lights.

I always liked the twinkly white ones better, but our son loved the colored ones and Christmas is for children, so that’s what we had. He’s grown up and living in Brooklyn now, though, so we could have twinkly white lights if we wanted.

The collections of Christmas-themed items vary from house to house. I’ve browsed drawers full of festive tablecloths and napkins, dish towels and oven mitts featuring Santa, holly, Christmas trees, gingerbread men . . . Sometimes there are whole sets of china whose designs make it clear they are season-specific. I’ve come across boxes and boxes of ornaments, sometimes painstakingly handmade—styrofoam balls embellished with sequins, or tiny crocheted wreaths and Santas. Elaborate Christmas stockings are another frequent find, knit or crocheted or needlepoint or sewn from felt, sometimes large enough for a dandyish giant to wear.

The objects seem inert, even forlorn—often relegated to misshapen cardboard boxes in a dusty basement, layered in among unrelated items like old T-shirts, sneakers, sad dolls. But they meant something to somebody once. Somebody stood in a shop and stared at an assortment of boxed ornaments, trying to picture the effect of red or gold or silver against the boughs of a live tree. Those stockings dangled from a mantel every year. The linen tablecloth with the meticulously embroidered evergreen wreath border was spread on the dining room table, with extra leaves added to accommodate a crowd. The Christmas tree in the center of that huge oval platter was hidden by a turkey.

I’ve even bought Christmas cards, sensing a kindred spirit in the homeowner seduced by an appealing design into buying yet another box of cards. Partial boxes accumulate and the supply is never exhausted, but now those partial boxes are part of my accumulation. And lest, with such an assortment to choose from, I send the same card to the same person, I keep a list of who got which card when. Meticulous as that seems (who would actually notice or care if they got the same card from the same person two years in a row?) I’m not the only person to do this. I’ve come across such lists among the boxes of cards left behind by the departed whose estates I’ve browsed.

Truly, they and I were sisters under the skin and I hope they had many merry Christmases.

Happy holidays to all!

During a particularly hot stretch of weather this past summer, an animal lover who posts on my town’s listserv recommended that people keep bowls of fresh water available in their yards for the local wildlife. I thought that sounded like a good idea because my husband and I are well acquainted with our resident squirrels, raccoons, skunks, possums, and deer, not to mention a stray cat that’s a very frequent visitor. I filled small round pan with water and set it out in the backyard at the edge of the driveway.

Thirsty animals in search of a drink may have visited during the night, but the most active use of the water bowl turned out to be as a birdbath. A bird—usually one of our very numerous doves—would hop in and thrash about, flapping its wings vigorously and splashing water onto the driveway until the pan was nearly empty. I would refill it, another bird would visit, and the process would be repeated.

One day I noticed two birds trying to squeeze in at once and it occurred to me that group baths would be fun. I got out the large rectangular roasting pan I use once a year for our Thanksgiving turkey, set it on the driveway in place of the small round pan, and filled it with water. The result was highly entertaining. The pan would remain unvisited for long stretches of time, but then a bird would perch on the edge, contemplate the water for a bit, and hop in.

All at once, seemingly impelled by fear of missing out—it appears birds are susceptible to FOMO—other birds would converge. If one bird was having fun splashing about, all the others in the vicinity seemed to decide they needed a bath too. One day I counted six birds all splashing about at once in the roasting pan.

The squirrels showed an interest in the birdbath too—not to bathe but to take the occasional sip of water. Evidently birds, even ones as large as doves, are afraid of squirrels, though it’s hard to imagine what a squirrel might do to a bird. If a squirrel came around while they were bathing, however, all the birds would scatter, and the squirrels didn’t seem to mind drinking bath water. Birds sometimes drank too, perching on the edge, dipping their beaks in, and tipping their heads back to swallow.

Now that it’s October and the weather is becoming definitely autumnal, the bath season appears to be over. Birds are, after all, warm-blooded creatures, and I guess the prospect of being wet on a windy and overcast day doesn’t appeal—any more than a dip in a pool would appeal to a human. The roasting pan is still in place at the edge of the driveway, but the only visitors these days come in search of the occasional drink of water.

I hadn’t thought too far ahead when I decided to offer my turkey-roasting pan to the birds, but it began to occur to me that, even if I scoured it thoroughly, the idea of cooking in a pan that birds had been bathing in was rather unsavory. Then, as luck would have it, I was browsing at an estate sale a few weeks ago when I came upon a roasting pan much sturdier and nicer than my old one and just the right size to accommodate a turkey. Unlike the old one, it even has convenient handles.

I’ll leave the old pan outside, filled with water, until the weather turns icy. Then I’ll store it in the garage until the time comes next summer to open the pool for another season of bathing.

Humans are territorial, we know. What causes most wars but a society’s desire to enlarge its real estate holdings? Somehow we feel we must occupy more and ever more land in order to expand our population and increase our power—even though it seems to me that the world has enough space and enough resources for everyone to share if people were sensible.

The game of football, in which each team strives to lay claim to the entire field, reflects this expansionist impulse. Chess does too, as well as almost any other game one can think of.

Animals also lay claim to territory and strive to defend it. My husband and I have adopted a stray cat which refuses to be cuddled or even come indoors, but for the past year it has been showing up on our back porch morning and evening to accept a meal. For a while, we noticed another cat lurking around too, and one night we heard a fierce feline battle characterized by shrill howls and screeches outside a window in our living room.

The next morning “our” cat showed up for breakfast with a clump of fur missing on the side of its neck and a fearsome wound visible. The wound healed and the fur grew back, but the interloping cat never returned.

Lately a less fearsome interloper has appeared. A possum sometimes comes up on the porch to drink out of our cat’s water bowl, and once it stayed around to groom itself in a very cat-like manner. The last few mornings when I’ve looked out on the porch first thing I’ve discovered the water bowl empty but surrounded by a giant puddle—as if the bowl was the object of some violent struggle during the night. Has our cat been defending its territory and its water bowl from this interloping possum?

Plants, too, are territorial. Bamboo is notorious. People plant it because it’s attractive and it grows fast—but once planted it almost never goes away. Bamboo patches expand outward, forming networks of roots that then thrust up new shoots. When I was a child in Southern California , we had a bamboo patch at the edge of our yard that my mother hated. She would periodically do battle with it, hacking away and gathering great piles of its stalks to dispose of, but it remained, getting larger and larger.

Even in the gentle world of herbs, certain plants are determined to claim more than their share of turf. When I first began cultivating herbs in pots and planters on the deck behind my house, I was very inexperienced and was taken unaware. I planted an oregano plant, a rosemary plant, a parsley plant, and a basil plant all in a row in a long planter and soon discovered that oregano spreads . . . and spreads . . and spreads, eventually squeezing out anything that it shares a container with.

Thyme spreads too, and my original small thyme plant has now taken over most of a rectangular planter that’s about two feet long. The particular variety of it that I brought home from the garden center a few years ago also turned out to be extremely resilient, surviving all through a New Jersey winter not just as roots lying dormant underground, but as leafy sprigs still able to add their flavor to recipes.

My most remarkable herb-invasion story concerns mint. Several years ago I planted mint in a planter at the edge of the deck. It soon filled the entire planter, and as summer progressed it produced little white flowers. With the first frost in the fall, it died back and through the winter nothing was visible but a few dead stems.

Once spring came, new shoots appeared and soon the planter was again crowded with leafy sprigs. Leafy sprigs also appeared in the patch of soil next to that end of the deck, and I soon realized that they were mint too. The little white flowers had produced seeds and the seeds had blown or dropped onto the soil below.

That mint spread and spread and spread, having formed an underground root system from which new shoots come up even at rather far distances from the original patch. The volunteer mint now occupies an area about five feet square and it is completely ineradicable. Landscapers have volunteered to get rid of it, but their efforts only stimulate it to spread farther.

As a side note, I sometimes notice that sections of it have been pressed flat, as if some large and heavy animal has found a comfortable out-of-the-way place to bed down. I suspect this is a sign that the mint patch has been visited by our local deer, which are themselves a story involving territory. Only in the past few years have they been venturing into our suburban neighborhood, and that’s because the county claimed the stand of woods the deer used to call home and turned it into a park for humans.

I wrote about the deer in an earlier Goodreads blog: "Coexistence."

I enjoy speaking about cozy mysteries at libraries and other venues. Lately I’ve been giving a talk I call “Crafts, Cooking, and Cats: The Contemporary Cozy Mystery,” and when I first devised it, I prepared a one-paragraph description for groups to use in promoting the event. I ended the description with the line, “And cozy mysteries almost always include cats . . . just because.”

The books in my Knit & Nibble series certainly do, and cats feature prominently on my covers, as they do on the covers of so many other cozy mysteries. I’ve given the talk at several local libraries, as well as presenting it to seniors’ groups and women’s clubs, and fortunately no one has ever asked me why cozy mysteries almost always include cats. If they had, I wouldn’t until recently have had an answer any better than “just because.”

But then I started thinking about the relationship between cats and cozies, actively pondering why the pairing seems so natural. Certainly cats are associated with cozy interiors, and most cozies unfold against a backdrop of cozy interiors. I even think of my Knit & Nibble books as Martha Stewart with murders.

Cats are well-suited to domestic spaces. They are small, clean, and graceful. (They might knock knick-knacks off tables but they don’t knock over furniture.) They are even decorative—one might think of them as ambulatory throw pillows. And they are a warm presence to cuddle with on a chilly evening.

But there’s more. Cats are associated with that momentous development in human history when humans transitioned from living as hunter-gatherers to settling in permanent communities. As hunter-gatherers we domesticated dogs—or perhaps they domesticated themselves, following bands of roving humans and scavenging what remained after the humans had feasted on the game brought down in a successful hunt.

Then it occurred to these hunting-gathering humans that instead of moving around looking for food, they could arrange to have food, in a sense, come to them. By domesticating animals and sowing seeds for a predictable harvest, they were able to settle in one place and build permanent dwellings. And surplus food—grain, for example—could be stored to be eaten during seasons when fresh food could not be grown.

With the storage of food came a problem, however. Other creatures besides humans, namely rats and other rodents, realized that having a cache of stored food at hand made life a lot pleasanter than being constantly on the move in search of nourishment. The wild ancestors of our domestic cats, carnivores uninterested in grain but interested in rodents, also realized that having a predictable source of food at hand made their lives pleasanter. The rodents that congregated around stored food were as appreciated by the wild cats as the stored food was to the humans, and the cats were appreciated for the useful service they provided in keeping the rats at bay.

So cats also domesticated themselves, choosing to live among humans (but really attracted by the rodents) once humans stopped wandering and formed settled communities. Eventually cats were invited indoors, where they became useful mousers as well. But they also became furry fixtures in domestic spaces, decorative and entertaining, and indelibly associated with human domesticity and the pursuit of the cozy.

For a few evenings last week, our dinner salad included lettuce harvested from the spaces between the pavers that cover our driveway. It was volunteer lettuce, courtesy of our gardening neighbors to the east.

We live on a slight hill that slopes down from east to west, and each house on our street is on a lot somewhat lower than the one uphill of it, with a retaining wall marking the boundary. Our gardening neighbors have created several large raised beds on the strip of land that borders the top of the retaining wall. The raised beds, framed with planks of wood, perch as if on a three-foot-tall cliff overlooking our driveway.

They planted red leaf lettuce in one of the raised beds last spring, and they had a very nice crop of it. In the fall, what remained of the red leaf lettuce went to seed, and then with winter and freezing temperatures, the last remains of the lettuce disappeared. But the lettuce had obviously self-seeded.

Looking out a side window about a month ago, I noticed that a new crop of red leaf lettuce had begun to appear in the raised bed where last year’s lettuce had been—though I hadn’t yet seen any signs of gardening on the part of our neighbors.

Then a bit later I noticed little clusters of ruffly red leaves appearing on the edge of our driveway below the raised beds. Obviously some last fall’s seeds had drifted in our direction and sowed themselves between our pavers. I waited until the volunteer crop got larger and then harvested it.

Would that time travel was a reality! We could have had volunteer tomatoes with our volunteer lettuce.

A decade or more ago, at about this same time of year, an uninvited seedling appeared in a flower bed at the side of our house. I noticed that its leaves had a fuzzy texture and lacy edges, and as it developed, I recognized it as a tomato plant.

It grew and grew, and we realized the seed from which it sprouted had been delivered with a layer of compost my husband had transferred to the flower bed from our compost heap. Every scrap of fruit and vegetable waste goes to the compost heap, including uneaten bits of tomato.

Since the tomato plant had sneaked up on us unawares, I hadn’t made any provision to contain its ramblings with stakes or a tomato cage, and so as it got larger, shoots branched off from the main stem and sprawled here and there among the flowers. In recognition of this, we named it “The Creeper.”

In time tiny yellow tomato blossoms began to appear, and then tiny green tomatoes that swelled and swelled and turned red. The Creeper produced so many tomatoes so faithfully that for a few months that summer we harvested a tomato every day and I never had to put tomatoes on my grocery list.

I saved the seeds from one of these tomatoes and planted some of them the following spring, but in the meantime we had made some changes in our landscaping and the flower bed where the Creeper had flourished no longer existed.

In the absence of the particular combination of location and the one magical seed that had produced the Creeper, I was never able to coax the plants that sprouted from the saved seeds to even produce blossoms. In fact, my green thumb doesn’t extend much beyond pansies and herbs in pots, so I’m particularly delighted when nature volunteers to come to my rescue.