When the pandemic pointed out that my flagship restaurant, Chef & the Farmer, in small-town Kinston, North Carolina, was only viable if people traveled, I imagined a life running a feed and seed store focusing on houseplants instead. When a member of my biological family exposed my work family to COVID-19 days before Christmas, I conjured all my favorite memories of Christmases past and projected them right there onto the present. And when the walls of our collective confinement nagged like a mosquito at my ear, I walked the well-worn mental path to my perfect day at the beach. Daydreaming has long been my particular brand of coping and hoping. So in the long, low moments of the pandemic, when I just knew I’d never travel again; when I virtually slapped myself for not trying more versions of the pink flash-fried shrimp that time in Nerano,
