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. 

Teapot Trail

The day was off to a bad start. I made coffee, and immediately spilled the full cup, drenching the couch, a throw pillow, books and loose papers. I read too much news and felt sick. Collapsing glaciers and heat domes and rising measles cases. A kid in Ohio who died by suicide. He was an honor student. Haitian, and recently told to self-deport or wear an ankle monitor. Someone commented online, Good. Now we don’t have to pay for his flight back to where he came from. 

I shut down the news and forced myself out the door. 

Someone had invited me on a group hike. The trail wound through woods and past overgrown meadows. Our guide was clipping branches hanging overhead before they could whack us all in the face. Every few minutes she’d point out something of interest. 

An old rock wall lined with barbed wire. (This used to be a place where someone kept cows. But if there’s only a rock wall and no barbed wire, they kept sheep.) An outcropping of rusty appliances. (People used to dump trash here.) A giant clump of poop. (Possibly, black bear.) 

What. 

Everyone in the group stopped. Someone took a picture with their phone and confirmed it. Yes. Definitely black bear. I pretended to be blasé about it. So, if you see a black bear, what do you do? Run? 

The guide raised her eyebrows. Don’t run. Never run. 

What you’re supposed to do, apparently, is make noise. Make yourself look bigger. I mulled this over for the rest of the hike. How do you make yourself look bigger? In the morning I was still thinking about it. The night before I had bad dreams. I was alone and lost in the woods and along came a bear. 

This actually happened to me once in real life. I was eleven years old and it was a man not a bear and no place to run. What I did that time was make myself smaller, and in that way, I saved myself. But what about the boy from Ohio? What could he have done to save himself? 

There’s a teapot, the guide told us. Somewhere along the trail. 

She didn’t know where it came from. Who set it down or why. And now she couldn’t remember where it was. Help me find it, she said. I kept my eyes along the trail’s edges and found more bear poop. 

A few other dumped appliances. Some tossed beer cans. The guide clipped a pricker branch. We weren’t always good stewards of this place, she said. But we’re getting better. 

Are we though? I wanted to say. But I liked following this guide, how confidently she marched forward, how thoughtfully she wielded her clippers. I found more beer cans. But also, flowers. Absurdly colorful mushrooms. Stone walls where I could imagine cows grazing, or sheep. 

And then at a bend in the path, the teapot, looking like somebody had thrown it away, or planted it. 

Six Things I Learned in Six Weeks

How dark it gets in the woods at night, and conversely, the brightness of the moon. The varying greens of the Green Mountains, sometimes gray, sometimes bright blue. The lake surface, smooth as glass, or choppy, the waves pushing toward shore, the white frothy lines that locals whisper might be a sea monster, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t capture any of this in a photo. 

The smallness of the town and all of the history, everyone seeming to know each other going back generations. The names and faces I keep mixing up. Which Sara sat with me on the dock and who was the Martha who offered me plants and which of the Lucys is the artist? Who started coming here in 1959 and who climbed all 46 of the 46 High Peaks and who has a dog named Brooke with a darling tag on the collar that says Help! Please Feed Me! 

They like to do potlucks here, and for weeks, I can’t crack the potluck code, the dishes I bring, barely touched. I dig out my old cookbooks and flip through ancient recipe cards, the appetizers and desserts that I remember being hits, for whatever reason, fall flat around here. Am I going too fancy? Or not fancy enough? And then I remember a former co-worker’s amazing carrot cake. I follow her recipe to the letter even as I doubt the measurements. TWO CUPS of sugar?! A cup of canned pineapple, plus the juice?! But it’s delicious, and everyone raves about it. (THANK YOU, Rebecca!) 

I won two games of Mah Jong! Okay, one of my new friends totally helped me every step of the way, but the second game I was on my own. Probably beginner’s luck, but I’ll take it. 

How to find new doctors and register to vote and apply for drivers’ licenses and pick up your prescriptions and get rid of your trash and recycles and compost and yard waste and where is the nearest airport and gas station and ice cream and coffee. 

Also, the place with the best deli sandwiches and the hill where you can see the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain, all at once. The beach with the smooth black stones, each with one white line drawn across the center. The theater downtown where they had a story-telling night and one of the story-tellers was my son and I couldn’t get over him up there, holding the mike, how he made the audience laugh, and I was thinking, 

Look at us! 

how far away from everyone we know, but close too, to the people we love, and all of these strangers who aren’t strangers anymore.