appropriate page, and handed it to me. I looked at it, dumbfounded. It was my recipe.

Well, not exactly. She’d called them “Nuts and Bolts Cookies,” subtitled “Dentist’s Revenge,” a tribute to Peter, no doubt. But the recipe was close enough that it was clear that it was based on my recipe. I hadn’t given it to her, but I knew where she’d gotten the recipe: I’d given it to the NZ friends with whom we’d had dinner back in Springfield. The ingredients were expressed in grams, and as Ashley and I examined Seager’s adaptation, we discovered why the cookies were too greasy: Seagar had halved all the ingredients except the butter, so its proportion to the other ingredients was roughly twice that of my original recipe. I was more amused than offended. It was just so incredible to find my cookies – even slightly altered – waiting for me by my bed in a stranger’s home on the opposite side of the planet. But I wished she’d gotten the butter proportion right.

The next day we took the ferry across Cook Strait to the South Island, which, incredibly, was even more beautiful than the North Island, with its Southern Alps and fjords. We traveled the length of the island, then returned to Christchurch, site of Lincoln University, Ashley’s new school. Though it’s named for a British city rather than our Abe, one of the first things we saw on the campus was a large plaque about America’s 16th president. It even included information about Springfield – more evidence of our small world.

For the rest of my time there, we did everything I’d done with my two older children preparing for college: buying sheets and towels, books and supplies. As I rode up the elevator towards the gate for my flight back to Springfield, looking backwards for a last glimpse of Ashley, I couldn’t stifle my tears. Still, I’d discovered that even the other side of the world wasn’t that far, after all. And when I got home, I found that Seager had mailed me a copy of the cookbook.

Contact Julianne Glatz at [email protected].