The People Who Take Me In.

The last Sunday Room from Frisco, and the first one spent entirely on Avery's side of the family.

When his aunt Pam made pancakes, he sat on the counter, right next to the stove. Pam turned seventy this week; the book he wrote about making room for people is out in the world. So this Sunday goes back to where the idea came from: the two elevations a boy learns a family from, up on the counter with Pam and down on the shag carpet at Christmas on Maley Road, where his great grandfather kept everyone company from his side of the room. His grandmothers, who take him in, in the present tense. A hard year with people he loved at work, told in the same voice as everything else, with the sentence he wishes he had had then. The Thursday a woman named Ms. Betty put a card in his hand across a bar in Yellowstone, and the whole second life that came out of calling the number. An old friend's face after nine and a half years. And a cobbler that is his own: stewed apples, a brown butter oat top, a corner piece served first to Pam.

The Sunday question: somebody made room for you once. Tell one small story about that person this week to someone who will never get to meet them. If they are still around, tell them what it was like on your side of the door. Write to [e-mail] and say how you would like it held. Nothing becomes part of Galena House without permission.

From the kitchen: the corner of the cobbler. Stewed apples on low with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, a pinch of salt, lemon peel and a splash of cider, twenty minutes covered, five uncovered, finished with butter and vanilla. The top: three quarters of a cup of rolled oats, half a cup each of flour and brown sugar, half a teaspoon of cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon of salt, six tablespoons of browned butter. Clumped over the fruit, baked at 375 for twenty five to thirty five minutes, until it bubbles at the edges. Sit down for your share.

Come In. It's Already Warm., the keeper's book, is out on Thanksgiving. Signed copies from the house's own door, and the Kindle edition now: averylanemaxwell.com/come-in

This episode is also a film. Watch it at averylanemaxwell.com/podcast

Keep the lamp on: the house is kept by the people who listen to it. The Patron Circle is at averylanemaxwell.com

Every episode, and the films: averylanemaxwell.com/podcast · the letters: averylanemaxwell.com/letters · the kitchen: averylanemaxwell.com/kitchen

A note from the house: this is a personal podcast. Avery tells these stories as he remembers and understands them, from his own life and perspective. When other people wander into them, he protects what belongs to them.

What is Come In. Stories from a Keeper, Told by Avery Lane Maxwell?

Essays written and read aloud by Avery Lane Maxwell, author of Still, by Design. and Come In. It's Already Warm.

A keeper is anyone who makes a place ready for someone else: the one who sets the table, leaves the porch light on, and remembers how you take your coffee. These are stories from that side of the door, about hospitality and belonging, rest and starting over, and the small kindnesses that hold a life together. Each one is scored and filmed, and told to one listener at a time.

Every episode, with the essay inside it: https://averylanemaxwell.com/podcast/

♫ The Galena House playlist: the episodes, among the songs they sit with: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/55wkYr82P02Tsr4zgKZubw

A note from the house: Galena House Audio is the independent creative work of Avery Lane Maxwell. Stories and reflections are presented from the host’s personal perspective and recollection. References to real places, workplaces, or events do not represent statements on behalf of those organizations or their owners, employees, or guests. Certain identifying details may be changed or omitted to protect privacy. Nothing shared on the podcast should be understood as professional, medical, legal, or recovery advice.

The People Who Take Me In.

The Sunday Room, 8 November 2026. The last Sunday Room from Frisco. Written and read by Avery Lane Maxwell.

When my aunt Pam made pancakes, I sat on the counter. Right next to the stove.

Yes. I know.

She made me the fluffiest pancakes in the world. She would still make me those pancakes. And if I wanted to sit on the counter, I would probably still fit.

Pam turned seventy a few days ago. I have a book out. A book I wrote about making room for people. And here I am on a Sunday morning, thinking about the square footage of my aunt's kitchen counter.

I suppose that is my first author interview question answered. Where did you get the idea for the book, Avery? Well. How far back do you want to go?

My mother is one of eleven children. Eleven, altogether, including my mother. Pam is her sister. Out of that much family, I can take you straight to one woman at one stove. I can take you to my grandmothers, who take me in. I can take you to a Christmas on Maley Road, and show you my great grandfather from what was apparently my preferred vantage point at family gatherings. Flat on the shag carpet. Waiting for presents.

You will understand a good deal about me from those two elevations. Up on the counter with Pam. Down on the carpet with him.

I'm Avery Lane Maxwell. Good morning. Come in.

This is the last Sunday Room I will make from Frisco. Next Sunday I will be somewhere else, and I will tell you about it when I am there, with the kettle on. Today I wanted to take you home first.

If you have only ever heard me as the fellow who gets the coffee on, I would like you to spend this Sunday on my side of the family. You can hear what my voice does when I say Pam. When we get to Maley Road, let me show you the people first.

I have had a hard year with people I loved at work. I want to be able to tell you about it in the same voice I use for everything else. I have given a good deal of thought to how to do that. Starting here, with people who know me, seems like a good idea.

The book is on the desk beside me. The real one. I have had it as a file on a screen for a year, and now it has corners. It has a weight my hands did not know to expect. The cover is navy, with the lines of the country drawn across it in gold. And when I set it down, it makes a small sound on the wood, the way a book is supposed to.

The first person I want to show it to is Pam. Not the cover. The dedication page. I want to watch her read it.

If you are walking, I will walk with you from this end. If you are still in bed, stay there on my behalf. I am going to tell you a story in which I spend a fair amount of time learning how to sit down, when somebody who loves me offers me a seat.

Let me tell you who offered first.

My grandmothers take me in. I like it in the present tense. It is one of the things I know about my life in the same plain way I know I am from North Georgia.

I have spent years working on the welcome end of a counter. You pay attention to a person coming through a door. Do they want your whole face looking up at them? Do they want five minutes and a cup in their hand before they tell you how the trip was? People have called that a professional skill of mine, and I will take the compliment. But a welcome feels different when I am the one showing up with my things. I would like to tell you about it from that end.

Mema first. Mema cooked. Not in the modern sense, where somebody owns beautiful pans and calls it a hobby. She cooked the way a house breathes. Food was how the place functioned. You fed people. You noticed what they liked. You remembered it. You made it again. Nobody announced it. Nobody said, I made this for you. It was simply there, on a plate, by the time you had your coat off.

That is what taking somebody in looked like in her house. You arrived. Something was already warm. You were handed a job small enough to do with your coat still half on, and by the time you had finished it, you lived there.

One of the luxuries of belonging somewhere is that you can ask where something is from another room. You holler. Somebody sends half a sentence back, because they know you know the rest. Imagine it in a brochure. A distinguished establishment where guests may holler from the other room. Actually, I might stay there.

My grandmothers are different women. I want you to be able to tell whose house you are in with your eyes closed.

Her house had a different sound. Where Mema's welcome came out of the kitchen, hers came to the door. You were expected, and you could hear it before you knocked. And she had a whole life that had nothing to do with looking after me, which is the thing I understand about her now that I did not understand at nine.

If you knew either one of those women, and then watched me receive a guest, I wonder what you would recognize. It tickles me that a stranger could walk into a place where I work, have a perfectly ordinary morning, and go home with a little of my family in them. They would have no idea how far their welcome had traveled.

You might have somebody like that in your hands, too. Someone once showed you where to put things when another person is coming. Somebody taught you by the way they made a place for you on a day you had very little to offer. If a face just came to mind, bring them along for the rest of this. We are going to need a little more room.

Pam. Now you get your birthday.

It is a funny business, having an aunt. I get up and put on my grown man voice and speak to people who know me as an author. It goes reasonably well. Then I get to say my aunt Pam, and I am somebody's nephew. I feel an enormous affection for that particular job. I am qualified by birth. It would take considerable paperwork to get rid of me.

The pancakes were always Pam's thing. I was the child beside the stove, close enough to watch. It makes a fine picture of our respective contributions to breakfast. She knew how to make pancakes. I knew how to get on the counter.

You know what I am curious about, Pam? What pleased you about that? I can tell a listener precisely what was in it for me. Best seat. Best pancakes. My aunt to myself for however long breakfast took. The older I get, the more curious I am about your half of the memory. Did I talk the entire time? I feel the evidence from my subsequent career may be admissible here.

I can tell you where I was looking. At the batter. At the first bubbles coming up through it, which I believed, at that age, that I had something to do with. And then at her hands. I could not have told you then that I was learning anything. I was waiting for pancakes. But I have watched a lot of people cook since, and I still look at their hands first.

There are eleven children in my mother's family, and I am up here announcing who makes the fluffiest pancakes in the world. I stand by it. Anybody who wishes to contest the matter can make me breakfast.

What I said a while ago, that she would still make them for me, is the part I keep coming back to. I have been a lot of people since I sat there. I make things for other people now. I can set breakfast out and go through a whole morning with guests who would have difficulty imagining me as a child at all, much less up on a kitchen counter. Pam could make me breakfast tomorrow, and I would know exactly where I wanted to be.

Pam. For your seventies, I wish you a kitchen that stays full of exactly the people you want in it. And I would like to offer to wash up. You can decide for yourself whether my kitchen qualifications have improved. I will say they have. I will also say I understand if you want to supervise.

Pam, happy birthday. I love you. One of these days I would like to make the coffee while you make the pancakes. The seating arrangements can be settled when I get there.

Listen to the sound of your own voice sometime when you say the name of somebody you are glad is alive. I heard it in mine just then. I would like to keep that part in.

I have another name to say now. Let me have a second to get from here to Maley Road.

At Christmas, at my great grandparents' house on Maley Road, there were warm hugs, and food, and presents coming, and shag carpet. You see my difficulty. I was going to stay awake for those presents. The next clear fact I can give you is that I had a nap.

My great grandfather was always quiet. Silent, really. He watched. Anybody who has ever been a child in a room full of grown people knows there are several sorts of being watched. The way he looked at us felt easy. Amused, maybe. I want to leave the maybe in. He had his own thoughts. My impression was that he was enjoying himself. Watching, and listening, to people he loved.

I still know how it felt to be in a room with that man. I was interested in the presents. He seemed interested in us.

From the carpet, a Christmas is mostly legs and voices. You hear the kitchen before you see it. You hear your name said by three people at once, and you know which one of them wants you to come eat. And somewhere above all of that, in a chair that was his, a man who did not need to say anything to be the warmest thing in the room.

My great grandfather died. I wanted you to have those few minutes with him before I said that.

I could have told you we had a death in the family and gone straight on to what loss has taught me. But then you would not have met him. You would not know that one of the people I come from had this way of listening that a boy could pick up all the way down on the floor. I think that is quite a thing to remember about a man. He could keep you company from his side of a room.

I wonder how much of my own pleasure in listening started there. I have spent years looking up when people come through a door, watching the way somebody gets ready to tell a story. I enjoy that little second when you can see the laugh coming and the person has not made a sound yet. My great grandfather might have understood the appeal. I would like to ask him.

If I had a little of that party back, I would not ask him anything at first. I would go and sit by his chair, at the height I was then, and let him watch the room for a while with me in it. And then I would show him the book. I think he would turn it over in his hands and not say a word, and I think I would know exactly what he meant.

My book is out. My great grandfather died. My aunt had a birthday. You can have all three things in you when somebody asks how your week is going. I do. If you have two or three different things going on in you while you listen, you can keep me company exactly as you are.

I have been in rooms since then where the sense of being watched made me go over every word before I spoke. And I think of that little boy at Christmas on Maley Road. There were eyes on him, and he felt easy enough to fall asleep. I understand the value of that now in a way I did not when I was waiting for presents.

A member of my family came to work alongside me. There was somebody I cared about. There was work I cared about. And I wanted the two to go well together. I can still understand that hope. If I saw somebody I loved getting a chance at something that mattered to me, I would want good things for us both.

What happened hurt me. From where I stood, it felt like somebody trying, in their own way, to undo everything I had been working to become. I mean everything quite personally. My word. The care I put into work that other people counted on. The person you are hearing now, who spent a long time finding a voice he could recognize as his own. It is a particular hurt to feel those things under threat, and look up, and see family.

I have spent hours of my life trying to figure out what went on in somebody else's head. This morning I can give you a much better account from where my own two feet were.

Here is where I went to put myself back together. I got on the bike. Most evenings, that autumn, at the hour the light goes gold, I rode the path along the water until my hands were cold, and I did not think about anybody's head but my own. And in the mornings I got up at five and baked. There is no argument you can have with a tray of scones. They need what they need. You give it to them. They come out. For a while that was the only part of my day with a clear beginning, a clear middle, and a result I could put on a plate.

There is a part of me that wants to go back and give the Avery who hoped it would go well a very thorough talking to. And then I hear what I would be asking him to learn. Be suspicious of a person you love, in case one day you need to be able to say you saw it coming. That would make a considerable change in the man my family took in. I have had enough taken out of that man already.

I get a say in how close to me a person can work now. I get to take care of my work. I can love somebody and tell them, plainly, that what they are doing hurts me. Any one of those sentences would have saved me some time, if I had been able to get it out of my mouth earlier.

Here is the sentence I wish I had had then. I would say it quietly, across the counter, with the coffee on. I love you, and this is hurting me, and I need it to stop. Eleven words. It would have protected the work, because the work was never the problem. And it would have protected the part of me that keeps showing up glad to see people. Which is, as it turns out, the part I was most afraid of losing.

If you have loved the person who hurt you, it makes a very long morning of trying to sort everybody into good people and bad people. I would like to do something else with the rest of mine. I want to tell you about the love, too. That part cost me something to learn to say.

For over a year, I worked for somebody I loved. I want to get the tense right. I can tell you what it was like to work for that person. The love is harder to put a tidy ending on.

Narcissism is the word I have used for what I experienced in that relationship. I can tell you how it felt. I am sitting here trying to tell you what happened to me, and part of me is still wondering how the person I worked for would like me to tell it. Imagine how much of a working day a man can spend doing that calculation. Now imagine all the other people, and all the ordinary work, happening around him, waiting for him to come back into the room.

I watched things that mattered to me come apart. There is a temptation, when you have loved a place or a person, to talk only about how beautiful it was when it was beautiful. I remember what I loved doing. If somebody had walked in while I was at the counter doing a thing I was good at, they might have caught me on a genuinely happy morning. I can see the difficulty for that person, if they are listening to me now. Yes. You saw me happy. There were hours you did not see. I lived those, too.

I can give you the end of one of those days. The door of my own room closing behind me. The quiet landing. And then the strange, slow return of my own thoughts, like a radio coming back in after a tunnel. I would stand there a minute and let them arrive. And I would notice how long it had been since I had heard them, and that was the whole measure of the day. Not what had happened. How long it took to hear myself again.

The awkward truth about loyalty is that I enjoy it. I like being glad to see somebody. My face generally gets the news out well ahead of the rest of me. Give me a person I love walking through a door, and I have the composure of a golden retriever who has done an exceptionally poor job of keeping the couch warm by himself. I would miss being that glad. I would miss it terribly.

So what do I do with a loyalty that will quite cheerfully walk me back into a room where I have already been hurt? For a long while my answer was to keep going in and hope love would eventually be evident in the results. I can hear how tired I got saying we might yet get it right. We is a little word for one man to be carrying by himself.

There is a line I gave a character in one of my essays. Elias thanks Alyssa for reading my face and leaving it where it was. I spent more than a year arranging my face for work. It takes a remarkable degree of love to look at somebody you know, see that he has had a hell of a day, and let him wear the face he came in with. I know women who have made room for me like that. I want that sort of company in whatever room I make next.

Here is one thing I do differently now. Before I say yes to anything with my whole heart in it, I say it out loud to one person who loves me and has nothing to gain. And I listen to how it sounds in the room. It is a small thing. It works. The part of myself I was afraid the year would take was the gladness. The face that gets the news out early. And the smallest recent proof that it is still here: a friend called this week, and I heard my own voice go up before I had decided anything about it.

I told you my light got dim. It did. I am quite sure there were days the people who love me could see it better from where they stood. It did not leave, though.

I can think of a Thursday that might help explain the sort of light I mean.

On my twenty second birthday, I got on a Yellowstone bus outside a Walmart in Bozeman, Montana. There you have an opening shot. Any filmmaker who pictured a lone figure riding west on horseback is going to have to make their peace with the Walmart.

The bus took me to Gardiner for human resources. I went on to Mammoth, to Juniper Dorm, and a job bartending in the lounge at the Mammoth Dining Room. A family used to come in almost every Thursday for my martinis and appetizers from the kitchen. I would be working. They would be having their evening. In my head, that was pretty well the arrangement.

One evening after the dinner rush, Ms. Betty asked what my plans were when the park season ended. Her family had a little motel in Gardiner, right on the river. She handed me her business card and offered me a place to stay for a short while, if I wanted to look for other work. I thanked her sincerely. My plans, which were in excellent shape for plans I had just made at twenty two, involved going straight back to Georgia.

I called Ms. Betty.

That story still does something to me. I was looking after a table. Somebody at the table was looking out for me. All those Thursdays, I thought I knew which direction the care was going. She had enough information to put a card in my hand just when I might need it. She also let me go on standing there, being a young man with absolutely excellent plans.

I remember the bar as a place where I knew things. I knew that family's Thursday order before they sat down. I knew the light on the rim of the glasses on the breakfast tables in the morning, before the room filled. There is a particular pleasure in being the one who knows a room, when you are twenty two and have known very few rooms. When the season ended I stayed five nights at that little motel on the Yellowstone. Five. And within the week I had a job at a front desk up the road, with a room that came with it. Gardiner became my second home in the West. I have a word for what that town did with me. It folded me in.

I lived, at one point, above a bar, with a casino wheel spinning right under my living room floor. I can still hear it. I lived in a hundred year old log cabin insulated with bison fur, and woke up in it to my first snow. I was young, and I was pleased with my life, and I was right to be.

I am giving Ms. Betty a place at this Sunday table because she did something I knew how to recognize. My grandmothers had taught me how it felt to be taken in. I could follow that feeling a long way from Georgia.

And then this week, a friend from my Yellowstone days called me. Nine and a half years, and there was her face. Any doubts about the continuing presence of the retriever were quickly put to rest. The part I would like to keep from that call is how it felt to be recognized by somebody who had never required me to be especially useful that day. She wanted to see me. Imagine.

What she could still see, I think, was the fellow behind that bar who liked people. Who liked knowing their order. Who had excellent plans and did not mind being talked out of them by the right person. I enjoy him. I would hire him again. And something I am looking forward to this week: I get to put this book in a few more hands. Actual hands. I have been handing it to people for a year as a thing I was making. This week it is a thing I made.

There is so much good coming into my life at once. I want to get to have it. I want the people who knew me before this year to hear what I sound like when I am happy. And more than that, I want the people who have come to know me through the work to get to hear it, too.

Which brings us to a perfectly respectable source of happiness. Would anybody like a corner piece?

When I have spent an hour telling you about the people I come from, I am liable to start sounding as if this next recipe came down a mountain on a handwritten card. This one is mine. I had stewed apples. I thought about a pie. Then I wanted a cobbler. Then there was the important question of oats. This is how some traditions get started. A man changes his mind about pastry.

My stewed apples go on low with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, a pinch of salt, a little lemon peel and a splash of cider. Use firm apples. I leave them covered about twenty minutes without stirring, then give them another five with the lid off. If yours have taken their time getting tender, you are in very good company. I finish them with a little more butter and a little vanilla.

For the topping. Three quarters of a cup of rolled oats. Half a cup each of flour and brown sugar. Half a teaspoon of cinnamon. A quarter teaspoon of salt. Brown six tablespoons of butter and stir it in. Put the stewed apples in a baking dish. Gather some of the topping into clumps with your fingers and scatter it over the fruit. Bake at three hundred and seventy five degrees for twenty five to thirty five minutes. You are waiting for bubbling at the edges, and a top you would be tempted to pick a piece off of. That last bit of professional quality control is between you and your oven.

I am giving the first corner to Pam. Pam, you get the chair by the window, and you do not get up. I will bring it to you. This is a reversal of our historical arrangement and I am aware of that. And I think we would not talk about the book at all. I think we would talk about who in the family has done what lately, and I would get all of it slightly wrong, and she would correct me, and it would take the whole piece of cobbler and most of a second cup.

Somewhere along the way, I learned it is all right for a person to come in hungry. It has taken me considerably longer to include my own person in that arrangement. When I make this again, I would like to have a piece while it is still warm enough to eat just the way I like it. And I would like some company.

If you make it, sit down for your share. Even if you are the only one home. You are enough people to get a dish dirty for.

Come In. It's Already Warm. It is out in the world now. I get to say that. I made a book.

I am proud of the fellow who got up and did the writing. I am his harshest critic on several points of grammar, and today I am proud of him. He spent some of those same months trying to work out how to keep loving people while his world at work was coming apart. He found things on an ordinary morning that he wanted to set down and keep for you. He put the good cups out for two traveling keepers. He let one cook put an orange into another cook's recipe. He gave a man somewhere to sit when he came in the door. My name is Avery. The man in those pages is Elias. The women who took me in would know a few of his ways.

There is a reason I wanted to tell the family stories on the morning I told you about the year at work. If that year were all you knew, you would know quite a bit about who hurt me. I would like you to know who I love. I would like my grandmothers to get some credit for any good I do with an open door. I would like somebody who spent twelve minutes of their Sunday getting their washing out to hear the words Maley Road and remember that a man had a great grandson who loved him. I would like my aunt to be able to come back and hear her nephew wish her a happy birthday in his own voice, for as many birthdays as she pleases.

Pam. If you take one sentence from this hour, take this one. I was the luckiest child in Georgia, and I knew it from the counter.

Now. You. Somebody made room for you once. Maybe it was a kitchen. Maybe it was a card across a bar. Think of them for a second. And this week, tell one small story about that person to somebody who will never get to meet them. It does not have to be a good story. Mine is a child on a counter waiting for pancakes. That is the whole story. It has carried me twenty five years.

Maybe the person who opened a door for you is still around to hear about it. You could tell them what it was like on your side of the door. I would love to know what Ms. Betty saw when she looked across that bar at me. What my grandmothers saw when they looked up and there I was again. What Pam sees now, when she looks at the author photograph and recognizes her nephew. I get to ask her that. I think I will.

One more thing about this room. It is at nine thousand feet, and it has a lamp, and a window with the mountain in it, and it has been good to me. I am taking the lamp. The rest of it comes along the way the people in this hour came along: in the voice. Wherever I set the cup down next Sunday, that is where the room is.

I am glad you came walking with me. You know a few more of my people now. If you come upon one of them someday and they say, Oh Lord, what did he tell you, you can tell them I talked for an hour and barely got started.

To my grandmothers. I love you. I am glad I got to be the boy down on the carpet on Maley Road. And Pam. Happy birthday. Next time we get to make pancakes, if you see me pulling up a chair, give it a minute before you assume I am planning to sit on the chair.

I'm Avery Lane Maxwell. There will always be a second cup.