The only preparations I made were getting ice, batteries, and canned foods. I also place my lawn furniture inside so that the wind will not blow it away.

She pulls from a shelf certain rare spices and sugars that her successor is unlikely to use. Insulating the jars with softbound books and sheafs of cooking notes, she packs them in a carton that came to this kitchen holding boxes of Italian pasta. She examines the fanciful designs on a container of sugar imported from Turkey, a favorite finish for the surface of cookies: bearclaws, butter wafers. The large, faceted granules glitter like bluish rhinestones; children always choose those cookies first. She wonders if she will be able to get this sugar anymore, if borders will tighten so austerely that she will lose some of her most precious, treasured ingredients: the best dried lavender and mascarpone, pomegranate molasses. But in the scheme of things, does it matter?
She comes upon her collection of vinegars, which she uses to brighten the character of certain cakes, to hold the line between sweet and cloying. She takes down a spicy vinegar she bought at a nearby farm; inside the bottle, purple peppers, like sleeping bats, hang from the surface of the liquid. Greenie used it in a dark chocolate ice cream and molasses pie.

It's also very chic to put outdoor furniture inside.

Roomservice, Roomservice, don't send up any more ice.

Over the years I've done everything from small organization units in condo closets with sliding doors, to one massive one-thousand-square-foot duplex closet for a pamper socialite that included a wall of climate-controlled storage for her substantial fur collection, and no lie, a CIA-level fingerprint lock on the door. The only thing that was ever more fun was doing a panic room for a paranoid woman who had recently lost her husband. She wanted to be sure that if someone broke into her Gold Coast brownstone she could survive in comfort for at least a week. We referred to her as the Preppy Prepper, giving her a large panic room with en suite bathroom, which included a mini kitchen stocked with canned caviar and smoked oysters and splits of vintage champagne, completely upholstered in a huge-scale blowsy floral chintz.

A good wife is one who can mow the lawn in the summer and put up the storm windows in the winter.