The Day after the Election

The day after the election, I was on an early morning flight to Washington DC. I hadn’t flown in a while, and I was trying to get settled in my seat, balancing my book, the yogurt and bottle of water and 1-ounce-sized bag of nuts for six dollars I’d just bought. It was a small plane, and I was cramped between two men. Where was I supposed to put my elbows, my legs, the yogurt? Could I eat the yogurt without disturbing the men? 

The man on my right was watching a sitcom on his phone. The one on the left was scrolling the news. The news! I had woken up that morning, cautiously optimistic. The Democrats had swept the House and probably the Senate. The cruel, arrogant Billionaire from Ohio lost and it wasn’t even close. My seatmate glanced at me. I wanted to tell him, Don’t worry, I’m not reading over your shoulder. I misplaced my reading glasses. Oh, wait, they’re on my head.  

Instead, I said, Do you know what’s going on in Mississippi? He straightened up. He said, It’s still undecided, but all the betting markets say the guy’s going to win. He was smiling. I was smiling. You know, he said, This would be the first time a Black person won a Senate seat since Reconstruction. I took my chance and ate my yogurt. When we landed in DC, the weather was warm and bright and beautiful. 

The night before I was at an election night dinner. The event has been held at the Grange, our area’s arts and cultural center, every election night since 1916. When I got the invite, immediately, I said, Nope. I was imagining big TV screens blaring the election results as they trickled in. I’ve been to things like this in the past. They make me sick to my stomach. 

No, my son said. It’s not like that at all. It’s just a nice dinner with people from town. Your neighbors. No matter what happens in the election, we’ll all still go on being neighbors. 

This is true. 

I went. The Town Manager Ken, who’d just been reelected as Town Manager, was serving the food. It was your choice of chicken pot pie or a veggie version. I took the chicken. My husband and I hugged our son who was sitting with his friends, and then we went to sit with some of our new friends. There were no TVs. No one was talking about the election. 

Instead, we talked about the weather (how unseasonably warm it is in the Adirondacks), ticks (how I keep finding them hopping around on me!) the potpie (freaking delicious!) the lake (how someone swore she spied Champy the Sea Monster cresting above the surface. 

He’s like the Loch Ness Monster, someone else said.) I was nodding along, smiling. I was thinking, What do I really know about anything? 

DC was the same as when I left it last summer. My daughter and son-in-law’s lovely condo in a leafy neighborhood, far far away from whatever is going on with the reflecting pool. I am here to watch the dog, while they head out of town for the weekend with friends (their usual dog-sitters). It’s weird being in a place that’s not mine and being here alone. 

I’m a guest, but a guest who is walking the dog and poking around in the cabinets. I had images of a mini-vacation, glutting myself on city amenities. I could walk ten steps out the door and buy anything I want, treat myself to any food, uber off to the ridiculous reflecting pool. 

But day one, I stubbed my toe so hard I saw stars. So now I’m hunkered down on the couch. I read my book. I snuggle with the dog. I peek at the news and get teary-eyed at the pictures of people in Minneapolis sticking their I-voted stickers on the spot where ICE murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good. 

Back home in the Adirondacks, the leaves have turned brown and mostly fallen, but here, in DC, it’s still full-blown fall, all of the trees fluttering red and yellow. I limp around the block with the dog. I can’t get over it. How beautiful this place is. It hits me that the past ten years I have forgotten how to pray and what would I say anyway, if I remembered? 

But that’s not true. I know what I would say. 

Thank you. 

For safe flights and kind neighbors. For cuddly dogs and sunny weather. For whatever this feeling is, as I shuffle, as I plunk, as I hope. 

Crazy World

The summer people are gone and the Fall people are on their way out, flying off to their first homes in warmer places. Every day it’s a little quieter here. In the mornings, I wake up early and watch the sun rise up blazing over the lake. In the afternoons, I do yardwork and take long walks through the woods. I tell myself, DON'T read the news. 

I read the news. 

Do you remember ten years ago, how the world went crazier and crazier, and you were thinking, This has GOT to be It. There’s no way it can get any crazier. The election will be over and everything will slow down and go back to normal. (Normal, meaning, you can just live your life and not have to worry about the world falling apart every second of every day.) 

Ha ha. You were such a silly little doofball back then, because things just got crazier, and now, here we are, the crazy world whirling on. 

Still, somehow, you keep living your life and living your life and living your life. The sun, the lake, the walks in the woods. What a strange, fascinating place we've found ourselves in. I write notes so I will remember.

How the tree up on the hill has a plaque that says this tree was planted in the 16th century. And how the library in a nearby town needs an assistant (I am going to apply for this job. Please cross your fingers for me!) and one of the job duties is you have to tend the fire in the fireplace. And how everyone around here seems to own a vest. What’s up with the vests? Do I need to buy a vest? 

Someone swears he saw a mountain lion? A cheetah? A leopard? I forget which variety of big cat. This was said at The Grange, the town’s community arts and culture center, where they show movies and have art exhibits and live music and lectures. 

The lecture I went to was packed, everyone clamoring to hear more about how we should reclaim the area and return more of it to wild animals. Wouldn’t it be great if we had more foxes? the lecturer said, And wolves and moose and big cats?

All of the vest-wearing people in the room nodded excitedly, but I was not nodding excitedly. I was fidgeting anxiously. I was imagining myself out with the dog after dark, and a wolf or a moose or a mountain lion or whatever creeping out of the woods. 

And then, I was imagining living through it. I was imagining telling you the story.  

That night driving home the car crested over the hill, and there was the lake ahead, the moonlight on the water so white it was blinding. 

The world has never been crazier. The world has never been more beautiful.

Story Time

Every month there’s a fun group that meets up at a local bookstore, and anyone who wants to can share a personal, true story. The group has very few rules. It has to be a story (not a poem or a song). You have seven minutes to tell it. You can read it or just talk off the top of your head. 

Our son invited my husband and me to the event. He’s one of the group's moderators. He said, Are you going to share a story, Mom? I said, no. But then, I don’t know what came over me. When the sign-up sheet came around, I wrote my name down and almost immediately regretted it. What story would I tell? 

It had been a long crappy day. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this—if you’re a person who does not live in Ohio or know about Ohio politics—but there’s a campaign ad that was recently put out by the Republican candidate running for governor. The ad features the mother of his opponent. In the ad the mother says, basically, Don’t vote for my daughter. She’s a liar. 

What the ad doesn’t say is that the mother hasn’t been in contact with the daughter for forty-eight years. When the daughter was twelve years old, she and her brother were taken away from the mother because the mother’s husband raped the daughter. The daughter testified in court and the mother ran off with the rapist, and the daughter never saw the mother again. 

That this would be an ad that a whole campaign of people would think was a good idea to make and air, that some people, (for example, the vice president and the president) would defend as just perfectly fine and dandy is something that I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around. I floundered around in the house for most of the morning. I was feeling the disgust of any decent human. But it was going beyond disgust. I was triggered. 

That’s a cliché kind of word these days, triggered, but I don’t know what else to call it. Triggered, for me, is one moment I am a happy, relatively content adult woman, and the next, it’s fifty years ago and I am eight years old, telling people, Listen, someone is doing something bad to me, and the people I am telling are saying, Shut up. 

You’re a liar. 

I surprised myself by bursting into tears. Surprised, because I thought I was past all of that, but apparently, this is how triggers work. On the plus side, I was able to pull myself together. I went on a two-hour walk with a friend. We walked through the woods and around the lake. The water was blindingly bright and blue. There was a nice cold breeze and I stopped thinking about shitty people and the shitty past. 

At the story time group, when it is your turn to tell a story, you stand up, and the people in the audience do a slow, building clap as you make your way to the stage. When you tell your story, they nod along enthusiastically. When you finish, they give you a loud applause. The story I told was not the story I told you today. It was a funny story about the time I got a tattoo. 

After my seven minutes were up, I settled back into my seat and nodded enthusiastically as other people told their stories. The woman who went on a bike ride with her father from Albany to Boston. The man who got bitten by a rabid fox. The guy who married his wife on a dock and after they said, I do, they held hands and jumped into a lake. 

The story time was over and the moderators thanked the audience for coming. We couldn’t have done this without you, they said. Otherwise, we’d be telling our stories to no one and it would just be weird. 

Everyone laughed. The room was pleasantly warm, and I was in one of my favorite places. A place filled with books and surrounded by family and new friends.

Thank you for listening to my story. 

Ticked

I found a tick on my neck. I was washing my face and saw a tiny dark dangly thing at my throat. What is that, I said to my husband. He squinted at me. I think it’s a cut, he said. A scab? 

He looked again. No. It’s a tick. 

He went into action mode. Tweezers. A flashlight. He was googling what to do on his phone. Somewhere in all the hubbub he dropped his phone in the toilet. I was laughing. I was freaking out. I was laughing again. He removed the tick and stuck it on a piece of tape, and we both looked at it with our reading glasses on. Yup, that sure was a tick. 

We did body-checks of each other with the reading glasses and the flashlight, and then we pronounced each other tick free. 

I went to bed. Or tried to. I turned my light back on and googled ticks. No big deal except you have to worry about Lyme disease. But Lyme disease only happens in like, 2 percent of cases. Or 4 percent. Or 50 percent. No, I read that wrong. 

Fifty percent of the ticks in our area might have the bacteria that causes Lyme. Still, you only have a 2 percent chance of getting the disease. Or 4. Or whatever. A tick has to be latched on for at least 36 hours for you to (possibly?) contract Lyme. 

Whew. My tick was barely on for an hour, two hours, five. I was scratching my entire body as I was reading this. My husband was in the other room nursing his phone back to life. 

I kept scratching myself. We had been working outside all day on the yard. The yard is Woods. Ticks are in the woods. Duh. But for some reason, I wasn’t really thinking about them. It was cold-ish outside, and I thought that ticks don’t come out in the cold. Well, we can put that dumb thought to rest. 

But it was such a nice day out there in the woods. I was listening to my audiobook about Russian stories and what they can teach writers about writing. Each story is an organized system, the author says, and this was all making great sense to me as I rummaged around in the underbrush and dragged out broken branches and tromped through thick, matted leaves. I can make a path, is what I was thinking. 

The deep voice on my audiobook was reading a story about a man swimming in a river. The swimmer was really enjoying himself. “By God!” He kept repeating delightedly, “by God!” I was right there with the guy. Not swimming in a river but whirling through the trees. I stayed out there all day.

Check behind your ears, said another article I was reading. Check your belly button. I checked my belly button and almost had a nervous breakdown. Another tick! 

I yelled for my husband and he ran back in with the tweezers and flashlight. After, I took the longest, hottest shower of all time. There was a teeny tiny hair part, leg part? mouth part? left under the skin of my belly button. I tried to dig it out but it wouldn’t budge.

Go to the doctor, said an article I was reading about tick bites and teeny tiny items left behind under the skin. Eh, don’t bother, said some guy on a Reddit thread, who had gotten bitten by tons of ticks and pronounced himself totally fine. I sent a message to my doctor. I fell asleep and only woke up a half a dozen times feeling for ticks. 

Morning, no ticks are crawling on me or latched on. It’s another beautiful day, and here is the story I am telling myself: 

Ready for tick-battle, I head out into the woods and make my path. 

In a New Place

People won't stop giving us food. Specifically, these are the Summer People in the area, on their way back to their normal lives elsewhere, but first, they have to empty out their refrigerators. Will you take our sour cream? they ask us. The partly used salad dressings, the sticks of butter, a bag of frozen strawberries? 

Sure! we tell them. How about the ice cream, the fancy crackers, the package of cheese cubes, the club soda and flavored seltzers? (The club sodas and flavored seltzers are big in this place. All of the potlucks and parties and cookouts. But now, the entire social scene is shutting down.) We say yes to everything. 

Also, we accept the flowers, the house plants and what’s left in the vegetable gardens. As we say goodbye, we have the usual conversation, the Summer People asking: Will you be okay up here this winter? The cold, the dark, the snow, the ice? The woods, the rattlesnakes, the bears. The ticks, the black flies, the mud, the murky gray, the isolation of a small village on a lake with a year-round population of 621. (Now, apparently, 623.) 

And with us answering, Sure! Because what else are we going to say? 

I go for a long walk along the lake. What nobody told me was how beautiful it is here in Fall. The blazing red and yellow leaves, the mountains pasted against the sky, the quiet. A patron at the library where I used to work sends me photos of her children, kids I had gotten to know over the years. The second youngest starting pre-school. The new baby. I feel a pang for my old life. 

The library volunteer job up here didn’t work out. I went in a few times and realized I was trying to recreate what I had—I was going to say at “home,” but this is home now, here—and there is no recreating what I had. This all sounds sadder than I mean for it to. Let me tell you a story. 

The story is about the story we tell each other and ourselves.

Are we stumbling through dark, through cold, fearful of what may come our way? Rattlesnakes and bears? Did someone say rattlesnakes and bears? 

Or are we strolling along a well-marked path, the lake shimmery and bright ahead, the gift of new friendship, and more food and flowers than we ever expected waiting for us at home.

(Photo by Lucy L, my new, dear friend)

  

Mast Year

Acorns are falling on my head. I’m out walking the dog, and they plunk hard and bounce on the road, only narrowly missing us. Do we need to wear helmets, body armor? Later, I’m chatting with a neighbor, and my feet suddenly roll out from under me. Before I can register what’s happening, I’m on the ground. 

My husband rushes over. What happened, he says? Did you trip? 

I shake my head and stammer. I was just standing here. 

On a road covered with acorns. 

The neighbor looks embarrassed for me, and I make a joke about the trees attacking from above and below. It’s not really a joke. Some days everything feels precarious.

I drive an hour to a doctor’s appointment, trying to be mindful of other potential dangers. Deer darting across the street. Porcupines. This is a thing around here. I have seen their prickly bodies, stiff at the side of the road. I’m listening to an audiobook about how to write. The author is a teacher who uses Russian literature to show how stories can be put together. I love this book. 

Each chapter begins with a well-known actor reading a story by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy. The stories are like spells, and I am in the Russian countryside, jolting along in a horse driven cart or singing with the townsfolk in a rustic inn. I want to understand how these stories are put together, but I keep losing myself in the cart, in the singing. 

Forget plot. Forget characters, says the narrator of the audiobook. Focusing on these elements won’t help you write your story. So, what will? My mind drifts out of the Russian countryside and into the Adirondacks, the car, my own self. The mountains blaze up and all of the brightly colored trees. The road weaves around the lake. An acorn hits my car like a gunshot. 

Or maybe it actually is a gunshot. What do I really know about this place? 

This is a mast year, a friend says, when I tell her my funny story about slipping on acorns. Apparently, every few years there’s a bumper crop, too big for the animals to eat it all. In that way, the trees ensure their survival. But how do they communicate to each other? 

No one knows. 

Some magic switch turns on and the trees let loose. The Russian people sing and ride along with me as I drive the hour back home. When I walk the dog later, we pick our way around the acorns. There is no great secret to writing stories. 

All you need is one sentence. You set it down and write another. 

And another. 

Yard Work

It’s a beautiful fall day, and I am outside doing yard work. 

A row of cedar trees in front of our house needs pruning, the branches twisted and bunched up in a way that is quickly driving me crazy. It takes hours over several days to cut out all of the dead bits and pieces, and then I have to break it down further to cram it into our car and haul it away. 

Meanwhile, I am listening to an audiobook called The Wreck. The book is a memoir about a family secret that seems to permeate every aspect of the writer’s life. Before she was born, her father’s family—wife, mother, sister, brother-in-law and niece—died in a terrible car wreck. The author looks very much like her grandmother and aunt. So much so, that when older relatives see her, they gasp. But what really happened the day of the wreck? I can’t stop listening to this book. 

My arms are scratched up from twigs snapping. I turn my ankle over a knotted tree stump. I bonk my head on a branch. I discover half buried plastic planters and the remnants of an ancient-looking stone wall. I’m thinking about the book I’m listening to, and at the same time, I’m plotting out the book I am trying to write. 

What is it about family secrets? How can you grow up knowing something bad happened and still feel completely in the dark about it? 

Neighbors walk by and make comments about my project. The gist of the comments boils down to: 

Wow! This is a big project! 

And, 

Why are you doing it? 

What I want to say is: Why does anyone do anything? Instead, I tell them that I'm enjoying the lovely fall day and I like doing yard work.

They tell me stories about the old cabin that used to be here. It sat right where the ragged row of cedars is. Also, the stone wall isn’t ancient. It was put in place twenty-five years ago when the cabin was torn down and the new house—our house now—was built. That’s when they planted the cedars.

You’re doing a good job with those things, one of the neighbors says. Clear out the old stuff, get some new life around here.  

They saunter past, and I grab my clippers and head back under the tangled trees. 

(After)

(Before)