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) 

 

Raspberry Picking

Every day I go out into the field at a nearby farm to pick raspberries, and every day, there are more raspberries than I can pick. 

I walk between the rows, grabbing the ripest ones closest to me, eating one berry for every three or four that I toss into my basket. Bees buzz around my hands, but I’m not afraid of them. Should I be afraid of them? 

Are you allergic? A young friend asks me. She’s visiting this week, up in our neck of the woods for a string of college visits, and I’m along for the ride. This friend is a senior in high school and light years ahead of eighteen-year-old me in every way. 

No, I tell her.   

Then, you’re good.

She sets up the college tours online, signs herself up for the info sessions, comes downstairs in the morning dressed more fashionably and professionally than I have ever dressed in my life. Is there a gene for this? If so, I don’t have it. She takes my phone and finds the admissions office for the schools, taps in the locations, and hands the phone back to me. 

How long has it been since I’ve been on one of these tours? My own whirlwind visits a million years ago when I had no clue about college, only that I needed to go to one as far away from home as possible. The dozens of visits I took with my own kids, who were like my fun, smart, Gen Z (or whatever she is) visitor. Wise beyond their years, comfortable in their own skins, curious. 

I am curious too. What would it be like to go off to college now, to be starting out as a young person in this strange, crazy, dark world? How can a school help them navigate AI, climate change, fascism? (Of course, I don’t mention any of this to my young friend.) She loves the colleges we visit. I love them too! 

All of the possibilities. The classes to take. The clubs to join. The study abroad programs and internships. One school has its own ski mountain and you can take ski lessons for free. Another school has its own equestrian team. The campuses we tour are as different as can be, but also, somehow, exactly the same, the peppy tour guides walking backwards, spouting off stats about job opportunities and financial aid packages. 

We rehash the pros and cons of each school on the drive home, and then we head back to the farm and the raspberry field, where the raspberries are as abundant as ever. I have enough for today, but now I am picking for the future, freezing and storing for the winter that everyone up here keeps warning me about. 

I admit it. I'm afraid. The long dark days that are coming. The snow. The cold. But wouldn’t we be fools to let a day like this pass us by? 

The sun bright and warm on our faces. All of these bees buzzing. Our fingers stained with berry juices as we nudge aside the branches and reach for what we have been given. 

Still Life with Banana

All of the news this weekend is about AI accelerating and trying to kill humanity, but meanwhile, I am at a destination wedding in Maine where you can barely pick up a phone signal. 

The drive here was through a part of the country where I’d never been, on a ferry across Lake Champlain, and through the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We kept losing our GPS signal. Can they find us if we can’t find them? I bought a paper map at a gas station. 

I had it splayed out on my lap, and I kept running my finger over the road lines, trying to pin us down, but then I would look up and remember we are here in real life. The ferry cutting through choppy water, the mountains rising up. We were telling stories about ourselves, the friends we were going to see at the wedding, people we love. 

We went on a hike with them in the morning. The hike was called “moderate.” The trail wound past a beach and into the woods. It ended at an outcropping of boulders. 

But no, the trail continued, a splotch of blue paint at the top of the boulder pile indicating that was the way we should go. We all burst out laughing. We were supposed to climb that? And if this is a moderate hike, what is the strenuous version? 

We climbed the boulder pile. My friend had been eating a banana on the way, and now she was holding the banana peel, because this is a rule at the park, leave nothing behind. But the banana peel was making the climb more challenging, so we took turns carrying it. When it was my turn, I stopped on a ledge and held the peel up like it was a flag. 

The wind was blowing and you could smell the trees and the ocean. I took pictures and tried to send them to friends in other places, but my phone said No Signal. And where was the trail now? We found the blue paint mark far down below. I was marveling at these trail makers. Were they nuts or visionaries? And could we trust them? 

I let someone else take a turn with the banana peel. I was looking over at my friend. She’s the one getting married at this destination wedding, but for now, we were just two humans planning our descent down a mountain. 

We made it, with only a few stumbles.