Reminder

The pre-school kids on their class visit to the library are cute. They file down the stairs with their fingers against their lips. Shh shh, they say loudly to each other. When they troop past me, they tap their heads and make wide motions with their arms. You’re a library person, one of the little girls tells me, doing the wide arm motion thing again. This means, Library Person. 

Okay, I say. They dance around me as I help them pick out books. The easy ones. Dinosaurs. Princesses. Puppies. Dragons. The more difficult to find. A book about Aurora. A book in the Pig the Pug series. No, not that one. No, not that one either. The one with the orange cover? Yes! The girl who wants an Aurora book is still waiting. (Who is Aurora? I have to google it. Ah. It’s Sleeping Beauty. But we’re out of Sleeping Beauty books.) How about Cinderella? 

No.

Belle? 

No.

Elsa?

No.

One of my co-workers digs around in the back room and comes out with a Little Mermaid book and saves the day. Sorry she was being so picky, one of the teachers tells me, but I wave it off. She knows what she wants. 

Home in the afternoon, and I sit down at my desk to work on the book I’ve been trying to write, but nothing comes. The main character doesn’t know what she wants. This is a problem in a story because wanting is the whole shebang. It goes like this: 

What does the hero want? What is standing in her way? Which leads to conflict. Which keeps the reader turning pages. Think: Dorothy wanting to make it home to Kansas. Or Chief Brody wanting to catch the shark so it will stop eating people over Fourth of July weekend. 

Meanwhile, my character is schlumping around wanting nothing. The world she’s in won’t stop morphing and changing. The world I’m in won’t stop either. I used to be able to do this better. Fit my noise-cancelling headphones over my ears and muffle out the distractions. What if I have lost my writer self? 

Here is something I want. A library person to greet me at the door, welcome me in. Find the missing writerly pieces on the shelves and give them back. 

The pre-school kids finish their visit. They skip past me holding their books. One of them makes the wide armed sign again, and I laugh as I remember. It's me. I am the library person. 

 

Lucky Charm

My daughter is visiting for the weekend, and we browse the shops in my neighborhood. The place where she likes to get custard. The thrift store with the colorful glassware. The feminist gift shop that sells build-your-own charm necklaces. 

Let’s make a necklace, my daughter says.  

No, I think. It’s a reflex from an old self. The one who worries about money, the one who pooh-poohs silly trinkets. All week I’ve been on edge, crossing my fingers for friends in North Carolina who are cleaning up after a hurricane. Another hurricane that just barreled past an aunt who lives in Florida. And how did I end up so lucky, a beautiful fall day in Ohio, a daughter who wants to pal around with me and make a silly necklace?  

Yes, I say, and we spend a ridiculous amount of time pawing through the various charms. Mostly this is me. I forgot to bring my reading glasses, and I can’t see what I’m pawing through. A dog’s face or is that a mouse? Some kind of plant? A feather? 

My daughter laughs. It’s weed, Mom.  

Oh. Ha. Okay. When it’s time to pay, the clerk says I’ve won a chance to roll the dice to win up to fifty percent off my purchase. She hands me a beachball-sized die. I roll it on the floor and it lands on a picture of a cat. The clerk cheers. A cat is the fifty percent off symbol. I am over-the-top excited about my win, posing for pictures, holding the dice, grinning next to my daughter, the two of us festooned in our matching half-price necklaces.

Later, we gorge ourselves on custard and binge-watch a trainwreck of a reality TV show. The stars on the show keep talking about how they feel, but for some reason they pronounce it “fill.” The word echoes in my head, the heartbreak of it, the absurdity. How they fill. How I do. 

Why is it one person's turn for tragedy, another's turn for joy? And what a thin line separates the two. A senseless shift in the weather. A roll of a die. 

Transplanted

I have one goal today. Move the peony plant that’s slowly being strangled by the raspberry bush in the corner of the backyard. Peonies, if you don't know them, are big, brightly-colored flowers that bloom in spring. This one needs more room, more light. I’d meant to move it last fall and never got around to it, and here we are again. But this time I'm making the effort. 

The shovel is out, the new sunny spot scoped out, but I keep getting distracted. Weeds that need to be pulled. A mass of prickly raspberry branches to pick through. I’m listening to a podcast called Family Secrets. Each week the interviewer introduces the program by saying it's about "the lies we tell each other; the lies we tell ourselves." And then she asks, "Do you have a family secret you'd like to share?" 

I laugh as I lope around with my shovel. Oh lady, you wouldn’t believe how many I'd like to share. Here is half of one. I am 12 years old, 13, 14, and I am practically living at my best friend's house. The word practically might be the wrong word. But what is the word for spend every weekend with her family. Follow them along to church. Go on vacation with them. Have a place in their bathroom to put my toothbrush. 

After school I take the bus home with my friend and spend the afternoons with her, praying praying praying as dinnertime looms closer that her mom will invite me to eat with them, a cruel voice in my head whispering, They don’t really want you here. You’re overstaying your welcome. But each night here comes the lovely mother, poking her head into my friend's bedroom, saying, Should I set a place for you tonight, Jody? 

And no hint at all that I am a burden. In my memory she is always wearing an apron. When she hugs me, I can almost pretend that I am one of her daughters. Do the people who save our lives know that they have saved us? 

I wish I had told this person. I meant to but never got around to it and now here we are, too late. But not too late to move this damn peony. My gardening book warns me not to bury it too deep, be careful with the roots. 

I don't. I do. 

A Toast to an Apocalyptic World

There was a story in the newspaper this morning that made me cry. A group of friends in the 1970’s gathering together to eat a fancy breakfast in front of the reflecting pool in Washington DC to bring some joy to a friend who’d just been diagnosed with cancer. A photographer snapped a picture and it appeared in the newspaper, but no one ever knew the story behind it. The photographer’s daughter found the picture after he died, tracked the original friends down, and they recreated the photo, but now, all of them older and with missing people, empty chairs. 

I don’t know why the story made me cry. The beauty in the original photo, the young people dressed up and clinking glasses across the table. The waiters with their serving trays. The pool shimmering in the background. All of the lovely ways people come through for each other. 

Sometimes we forget this. I forget this. 

The news is terrible and it’s always terrible. I’m driving home from work under a gray, menacing sky, the hurricane that touched down nearly one thousand miles away tearing the branches off the trees in my neighborhood. While I sleep, people I know have been flooded out of their homes. Another storm is gathering strength and heading our way. 

But just this week a neighbor dropped off a bag of freshly picked pears. Another neighbor gave us a jar of honey. The woman we always buy homemade rosemary bread from at the farmers market threw in a couple of bonus rolls, “just because.” Two friends invited me out for dinner. Another friend who visited us recently sent us a gift card for the gourmet ice cream shop up the street, and honestly, it’s like she sent us a million dollars. This ice cream! I could eat a scoop every day for the rest of my life. 

Last Sunday I wrote about the unrelenting heat, the drought, a dead deer rotting on the sidewalk. Today, I sit at my desk looking out at the rain, a squirrel hopping across the backyard, the fall flowers along the fence coming into bloom. I don’t know what I am trying to say. 

I want to set a fancy table and gather all of my loved ones close. I want to freeze the moment as we clink our glasses, cherish the world we are given.  

Neighborhood Drama

It’s fall, but the summer keeps going. 

Ninety-five-degree day after 95-degree day, the garden barely holding on, browning, burning. I’m worried about the toad in the crunchy oregano patch, the birds listlessly flitting around the powerlines. Does everyone have enough water? Last week something died in our neighbors’ backyard. The smell was so bad it was hard to be outside without pulling your shirt up over your nose. 

Later in the week, there was a deer carcass rotting on the side of the road. I think it was the mother of fawn triplets. We’d often see the family roaming around the neighborhood, munching on what’s left of everyone’s hostas. Now I can add Orphaned Fawn Triplets to my list of things to feel vaguely uneasy about. 

On the neighborhood social media page everyone takes a side. What to do about the deer, the plants, the weather, the city, the country, the world. Meanwhile, there’s a mystery unfolding outside the apartment complex up the street. (This is me, spinning out stories on my walks with the dog, but hear me out.)   

Scene: A suburban lawn. A strip of sunflowers eight or nine feet high overlooking the sidewalk. A metal bowl filled with water, set out for dogs. 

A middle-aged woman saunters by with a dog and thinks, How nice.  

Next day: The water bowl's missing. In its place is a sign in angry marker: “F OFF TO WHOEVER STOLE THE WATER BOWL”

Well, that escalated quickly, thinks the middle-aged woman. She ponders buying a new bowl, leaving it in front of the sign, a reminder that not everyone’s a thief and our dogs appreciate the gift of water on another sweltering day. But she forgets about it. There’s dead deer and orphaned fawn triplets to worry about. 

Flash forward several days. Now there’s a large cement block with a water bowl screwed into it. A new sign: GOOD LUCK STEALING THIS, ASSHOLE!

The End.

But I have so many questions. Who lives in the apartment building? Who planted the sunflowers? Who stole the water bowl? DID someone steal the water bowl? Is the person who planted the sunflowers the same person who has such strong feelings about missing water bowls? 

The dog drinks the water, and we continue around the block. The deer carcass is gone, finally picked up by the city. And in our front yard, the fawn triplets. They munch my dying plants, seemingly unfazed, silent witnesses to our strange burning world.  

 

So Many Stars

Every morning my job is to make the coffee. Here’s how to make the coffee: push the ON button. The trick is it takes an hour for the water to heat up and the coffee to brew. (This is an enormous coffeemaker. It makes 60 cups of coffee. So I have to get down there early.) 

Down there is the dining hall. Where I am is a kids’ camp somewhere in Maine. My son and daughter-in-law are hosting a big party over Labor Day weekend. They’ve invited all of their family and friends and organized what basically amounts to a Camp for Adults. We’re assigned cabins and bunks. There’s a daily schedule with activities. Hikes. Swimming. Meals in the dining hall. A sign up sheet for volunteer help. 

My big contribution: Push the coffee button. I’m supposed to do it by 5:30 am. Day one, I’m forty-five minutes late. A miscommunication with alarms. When I realize it, I’m tearing out of my sleeping bag and half running down the dirt road toward the dining hall. No big deal, Mom, my son tells me later. Turns out my son-in-law had beat me to it on the button-pushing, and anyway, the rest of the cabins didn’t wake up and get moving until after seven. Whew. 

Day two, I’m a pro. A quick walk under the trees in the growing light, past the lake, the docks jutting out onto the water for the kids. I am having flashbacks to Girl Scout summer camp. I only went twice. One week when I was eleven, a week when I was twelve. But the two weeks take up an outsized space in my memory. For example, I still remember the lyrics to the songs we sang around the campfire. The names of the girls in my cabin and the camp counselors. The recipe for a dessert we were taught to make called Peach Yum Yums. 

The funny thing is I hated camping. An accumulation of crappy and occasionally traumatic experiences on so many ill-fated family camping trips. But Girl Scout camp, I loved. It suddenly occurs to me that it wasn’t camping that bothered me. Night at the Adult Camp, we have a bonfire and toast marshmallows for s’mores. The sun has just gone down and it’s hard to believe how many stars there really are in the sky. All this time and every night. Family and friends around me, I have never felt so comfortable in my life. 

Last morning off to push the coffee button, I walk slowly down the road, past the lake. I am not afraid of the dark anymore, and I am making progress on my fear of the woods. If everyone wasn’t still sleeping, I would belt out the happy song that is playing in my head. 

 

Trail Thoughts

Hiking, and I can’t take my eyes off the ground. This is supposed to be a birding walk, but I am having a hard time listening for birds. I am watching my feet. 

The tree roots, the loose stones, a mucky area on the path. The other day I was on a different hike and the trail turned straight up. You had to climb over rocks, crawling in places, to reach the top. My husband and I were laughing. This was listed in the guidebook as "moderate" in its degree of difficulty. What’s the hard trail? we wondered.

Listen, the birder guide says. Do you hear the loon? She describes it as a scream. You might think you’re caught in a slasher movie, but no, it’s a loon. Someone in our group points out a bird, far away across the lake. I can’t see it. What I see is on the ground, mushrooms. Perfectly mushroom-shaped and bright orange. Now that I’ve found one, I'm finding them all over the place. The entire woods is suddenly filled with orange mushrooms.

The other trail, the one that went straight up, reached a peak. When we finally made it to the top, the view was mountains, lakes, trees. Someone had erected a cross on the ledge. A stone marker said that in 1864 a twelve-year-old girl fell to her death when the wind blew her hat off and she leapt to snatch it back. I was sad thinking about this girl. A hat. Who cares? But I have done dumber things in my life and I have definitely taken stupider risks.  

Back on the birding trail, we are talking about the mushrooms, how most of their growth is underground. This is like my ferns. I tell the birding group the story about how I tried to move all of my ferns from an open area in my yard, where they were continually burning up under the sun, over to a shadier place. It was a lot of work and it ended up being for nothing because all of the ferns I moved died, and later, new ones sprouted in the original sunny patch and predictably got scorched.   

There is a lesson in this story. Dig deeper. 

In my old life I trampled the mushrooms. I wouldn’t even have seen them. In this one, I pause to take a picture. Beyond the trees someone screams. It’s the loon. But what I hear is a girl reaching for a wind tossed hat. This time she catches it. 

Gratitude

Up on the summit it was cool and breezy. From there you could see the little town where we were staying on this vacation, the harbor, the island that we walked out to during low tide. Now, the path was gone, underwater, and a sailboat glided by over the same place where we'd picked stones. I was looking for heart shaped stones and I found them everywhere. 

Who lives in the big houses overlooking the harbor? How do you get to be one of those people? This was the conversation we were having as we were looking for stones. We continued the conversation as we drove up to the summit. 

The point you kept coming back to was why can’t WE be one of those people? Lucky, you meant. On the summit we walked along the ledge. A stranger offered to take our picture. The light is so nice behind you both, he said. I looked at the picture on my phone later. He was right.  

The next day we rode e-bikes along trails through the woods. We coasted past a pond splotched with lily pads. Around a bend, an old stone bridge. More ponds. More stone bridges. Had we ever visited a place so quiet, so still? We ate lunch in a picnic area and watched the other tourists coming in. The young families. The older couples like us. And some much older. See, that can be us, you said. And I could picture it, the two of us roaming around in our retirement through National Parks.  

Biking back, we got lost, looping around the wrong way and having to loop back. The road signs made no sense. And then your tire went flat. We had to abandon the bikes and take a bus back to the visitor center, but we felt lucky. There was a bus. There was a visitor center. 

This is another conversation we had: how can we be grateful for what we have? Well, we’re on vacation, was number one on the list. We were walking along a shoreline and watching our shadows flicker in the water. I used to feel unlucky. And then I grew up and felt like the luckiest person in the world, but there would be a kernel of fear lurking, a What if it all went away and I was back where I started. Wait, you said, look. 

We stopped by the water’s edge and took a picture.  

 

Vacation Mode

This beach is like every beach and I immediately love it. The expanse of ocean. The sand. What’s different are the perfectly smooth black stones. They’re everywhere. I want to take all of them, but I limit myself to two. It’s only the first day of vacation. I should pace myself. 

It’s the same at dinner. The restaurant is known for its blueberry pie, but I pass on it. I can’t eat a piece of blueberry pie! I just ate a lobster roll! My husband is flipping through the guidebook, and we’re both overwhelmed by all the things to see and do. We’re still in travel mode, the packing and cleaning, the last-minute odds and ends you have to take care of before you go out of town, such as water the houseplants and buy dogfood, and speaking of the dog, will she be okay with the dog sitter?  

Also, I’m still stuck at the airport where the woman in front of us in the security line got flagged because she didn’t have an ID with her. She seemed genuinely confused that she needed one. Do you have anything with your name on it, the security guard asked. A credit card? A medication bottle? No, the woman said. See, her traveling companion pointed out to her. I told you! 

I was half laughing as my husband and I were waved past them. Feeling smug, I took off my shoes and belt like a pro, expertly set up my basket with my carry-on bag and laptop. Two minutes later, I was flagged by security for walking through the scanner with my cell phone in my back pocket. Someone had to pat me down. She was really nice about it.

I promise I will never judge anyone ever again. 

Back on the beach with the smooth black stones, it is warm and you can smell the ocean. My husband and I walk along the shore for a few minutes. We have a whole plan in our heads of how this week will go, the hotels picked out, the little towns we’ll stop in along the way. But I already know we’ll veer off the plan. A few days in and fully in vacation mode, we’ll take a third stone. I’ll eat the blueberry pie. 

To Do

My husband is out of town for the week, and I make a list of things to do. I want to be productive while he’s gone. Grow something, is one of the things on the list. Cook something. Throw something out. I check the items off dutifully. Pick the tomatoes that are finally ripening in the garden and turn them into a spaghetti sauce. Pull out the spent cucumber vine. (That counts as throwing out, I decide.) 

I add more things to do. Paint the kitchen trim and finish reading the book I’m reading for my book club. Write every day for at least one hour. Clean the house. I am a Crossing-Items-Off-My-List machine, powering through the week like an Olympian sprinting across the finish line, arms raised and barely out of breath. 

What else can I grow, clean, cook, paint, read, write? Wait, am I running from something? The quiet house, my strange, random thoughts in the middle of the night, the dog draped over my feet. One night the power flickers. The fan clicks on, the doorbell rings (this is a thing with our doorbell, the ding-dong after a power outage. It’s funny during the day, but a little scary at three o’clock in the morning.) 

The dog sleeps through it, but I stay up for a while, wide awake and squinting at the ceiling, relieved that I am no longer afraid of the dark. The old me would’ve tripped down the stairs to check the front door, done a frantic whirl around the house to test all of the locks. It is a gift to lie in bed alone and know that you are safe. 

End of the week and there are more things to do. (There are always more things to do.) Instead, I spend hours writing this post. Mostly, I am staring out the window at the squirrels running across the powerlines, how the sky darkens, and one white moth flutters over the yellow flowers along the fence. 

The other day when I was out there pulling weeds, I lifted a stone and found a dead toad, its body shriveled up and stiff, but before I dropped the stone back over it, a fluid-like substance squirted out of its rear end, and as I watched, the body inflated and the toad came back to life. I am not lying. It blinked at me and hopped away. 

I immediately looked this up online and learned that some toads go into a kind of hibernation during droughts to conserve energy. Cool. But now, I'm worried that I’ve interrupted this process and must add another item to my list: Leave water for the freshly rehydrated toad. 

This morning, I set a dish out. A gift for the toad, a gift for me. We have done enough for today. 

Quiet Walk

I used to listen to music or audiobooks or a podcast (interviews with authors and artists on NPR or Pod Save America or Behind the Bastards, which alternately make me laugh and get my blood boiling. SO many bastards you wouldn't believe it), but lately I’ve been walking alone with my thoughts, 

letting the dog do her sniffs while my mind wanders, trying to think of the next line in the book I’ve been trying to write for two years or the topic for today's blog post 

Five Good Books I read in the past few weeks (Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Consent, Grief Is for People, Between Two Kingdoms, and Idaho.) 

Or 

Things I Love about Working at the Library (Over 2000 people participated in the summer reading program at our small branch, and we're giving away free school supplies, and every Friday Ted brings donuts.)

Or

Notes from the Garden, and how the cucumbers are finally petering out, but now we’re overrun with tomatoes, and look, there’s a random moonflower popping up in the corner, which always makes me think of my father-in-law (he gave me the seeds and I scattered them around without knowing what I was scattering. He told me they were pretty, "purty" was how he pronounced it, and he was right, and every year when they come up, I am surprised and grateful

and 

Speaking of Grateful

the unexpectedly pleasant weather, the sun warming my face, okay, I am getting old and sometimes I am sad or cynical or stressed out or pissed off, but all of this leaks away in the silence that isn't really silence with my sneakers slapping the ground, the cicadas rattling, the kids whooping it up as they ride past on their bikes, the dog prancing along beside me. Listen

remember how I told you she lost her hearing and how sad I was about it--no more coming when I call her to come or wagging her tail when I gush at her what a good girl she is, no more playing with the squeaker toy because she can't hear it anymore so why bother--well, 

I taught her two hand signals! (Come, with my hand curled, and Sit, with my palm faced down.) It only took two days of gesturing and effusive petting and treats, and now she is a pro, an old dog learning new tricks, 

like me. 

Thirty-Four Things about Us

Two kids

Five houses (plus, 

Two apartment rentals, the first with the mattress on cinderblocks, the hand-me-down furniture, the green shag carpet, a scraggly plant) (the house we live in now with the real beds and the furniture you made, the hardwood floors and multiple gardens overtaking the yard)

Two dogs

Two cats

Three fish (two orange, one blue) 

Eleven vehicles (one stolen, but that was before we were married) (three of the cars, generous gifts from loved ones) (I am not counting the kids’ cars.)

Speaking of the kids. They are not kids anymore, but sometimes, when they tilt their heads a certain way, you can see the baby in them, the fat red cheeks, the chattery toddler, the school aged body weighted down by a backpack, the slouch of a teenager, the swing of long hair, the wave goodbye at the airport, the graduation caps, the weddings, the gathering into our family

a second daughter, a second son 

add another dog

Have you been counting? We are up to 30. Okay, I’ll wait while you check the math (Two dogs?—you’re forgetting Handy the greyhound. Three fish?—remember our son had the two orange ones, Goldie and Fishie. Our daughter had the blue.) For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, and we haven’t even gotten to the sickness and health part yet, 

the Three scary hospital stays, the divvying out of pills, the chicken soup, the cups of tea; the bad times (we lived through a global pandemic! and mourned lost family members and put beloved pets to sleep and fought over money, screaming at each other and stalking off to sulk, how stubborn we were and how silly), the good times 

because aren't there so many more that are good? Not only the vacations and celebrations, the school concerts (why do we still own three violas?) the hikes through the woods and walks along beaches, the fancy dinners, 

but also, the everyday meals, hundreds of them, thousands? (the chocolate chip pancakes and the spaghetti sauce, the lunches packed, the hotdogs on the grill), the walks around the block, the long car trips, the nights curled up in front of the TV. 

Thirty-four years ago, could we ever have imagined now? Could we have known how lucky we were at age twenty-two and twenty-three, when we promised to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, 

when we said, I do.

The Other Side

When I take the dog for a walk, she stops to sniff at everything, sometimes yanking me backwards to follow a scent we’ve already passed. Leave it, I say. She can’t hear me anymore so I am basically talking to myself. Today I give up and let her smell to her heart’s content. While she’s smelling, I’m thinking about the book I just read, Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley. It’s a memoir about loss and how to get past it. 

It comes to the conclusion that you can’t get past it. 

But eventually, you learn to live with it. In the book the author’s good friend commits suicide. A few weeks before her apartment had been broken into. The two things have nothing to do with each other, but in her grieving state, they muddle up in her head. She becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of the burglary, and she’s torn up about her missing jewelry, gifts from her grandmother. She looks for a grief support group for victims of stolen jewelry, but there are no support groups for that. 

Grief isn’t for things, she writes. Grief is for people.

Of course, what she is really struggling with is why her friend killed himself. You are never going to know, I want to tell her. Fifty years ago, my father killed himself. Why? I don’t know. The dog is yanking my arm again, pulling me around a lamp post, halfway into someone’s front yard and back out again, rounding a corner toward the house with the backyard chickens. How extensive is this scent trail? 

Okay, he was suffering from depression. He had a drinking problem and a gambling addiction. He’d recently filed for bankruptcy. His marriage was falling apart. Are these valid reasons? If they are, factor in this: he was thirty-four years old. He was the father of three children under the age of seven. 

I was the seven-year-old. Don’t write about this, says a voice in my head. But I have stopped listening to the voices in my head. 

Here is how you live with it: You just do. 

And after a while you find yourself somewhere on the other side. I wish I could’ve said this to my father. That, and the other side isn’t perfect, but it has its good points. Flowers, for example, and a comical number of cucumbers in the garden. Good books and good friends. People who love you despite all of your weirdness. Dogs. You knew I was coming back to the dog. 

I love how she leads me along, doubles me back, finds an interesting trail for us to follow whenever I let her go.  

Small Talk

The lady in front of us in line at the grocery store is having a love fest with the cashier. While my husband unpacks our cart, I watch the two of them gushing on each other. I love you, the cashier says. I love YOU, the lady says. They hug each other over the grocery bags. You have a good day! YOU have a good day! When the transaction is complete, they’re still saying I love yous. 

I want in on some of this love, I say, and the cashier immediately lights up. You got it! I love you! She tells us it’s her and her husband’s 38th anniversary today. 

That’s great! I say. Happy anniversary! And then we start talking kids and grandkids as she weighs our grapes, wrangles our toilet paper. I can hear my husband chuckling behind me. We recently had a conversation about social interactions, and I know he’s studying this one. 

What happened is it has occurred to him that he's had very little live human contact with people outside our house (me), since March 2020, when he was sent home to work remotely, and now small interactions feel like big ones. So, for example, he will go to the gym, and a stranger will say, Are you using that machine? And my husband will say, No. 

And even that feels like it's a little too much. 

Meanwhile, I’m out every day at the library talking up a storm with pretty much everyone who walks in the door, and this includes six-month-olds. Okay, I have to tell you about this six-month-old. The mom has been coming in with the three-year-old big sister (Daisy) to story-time, first as pregnant person and then as a person hauling around a baby carrier, until it seemed like one second went by, and Boom! there was a baby in her arms while I chatted it up with Daisy, the usual small talk you have with a three-year-old.

Me: Ooh, I bet you’re a good big sister!

Daisy: Yes.

Me: What’s your little sister’s name?

Daisy: Evelyn.

Me: Hi Evelyn!

Evelyn: _____.

This went on for maybe three months, until one day last week Daisy came up to my desk to get her sticker, followed by Mom holding Evelyn, and I said Hi to Evelyn how I always do, but this time Evelyn said Hi back. I almost fell out of my chair. The mom said that Evelyn just learned how to say it, and now she’s practicing on everyone. And she was. The whole time the family was down in the Youth Department, I’d lock eyes with Evelyn wherever she was in the room, and she’d say, Hi and give me a wave. 

Each chirpy Hi was a little charge zinging directly into my heart muscle. A person. A small connection. And who knows, flash forward fifty years and Evelyn will be holding up the line in the grocery store. 

That was weird, don’t you think, my husband says, as we walk out the door, the cashier calling out, It was so nice to talk to you! and me, laughing, saying, It was so nice to talk to YOU!

Oh, yeah, it was most definitely weird. 

But it's the kind of weird that makes you laugh. The kind that reminds you it’s not too late to jump in and how nice it is that there are still so many reasons to love the crazy world. 

When I Was Eight

I made up worlds 

because the one I was living in was intolerable, scary, crazy. You could only take so much of it before you’d go crazy yourself. For example, something really bad would happen, and you’d say, Hey, this bad thing happened, and the ones you told would say, No, this did not happen, 

or, 

Okay, it happened, but it wasn’t really that bad Why do you always have to make such a big deal out of things just shut up about it. When I was eight

I would not shut up about it. But then, after a while, I would let it go and mostly shut up about it. When I was eight 

I wrote stories about little girls who were broken, run over by cars or dying of exotic diseases and one was even mauled by a bear, but all of the little girls ultimately triumphed by healing. When I was eight 

I escaped into books. The books were all fantasies. Time travel and amazing other worlds and kids solving mysteries and what it’s like to live in a happy family. When I was eight

I played outside, swinging on swings and riding my bike and climbing the crabapple tree in the backyard before it was chopped down. Last night 

I woke up in the darkness, panicking. I was eight again and the world had gone crazy, the people in charge didn't know what they were doing and there was nothing I could do about it. In the morning

I played in the vegetable garden and read some of the book I’m reading, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. Like all good books that seek to reflect our world, it’s about darkness and it's about love. I took a long, meandering walk with the dog, and we played together in the flower garden. 

And then I wrote some words, the truth, even though it is scary. And strangely, I felt better. Or maybe not so strangely, because ever since I was eight

the world was what it was, is what it is, and I have learned how to live in it. 

When I was eight

Today 

Notes from an Alternate Reality

First, I need to just get this out of the way: I don’t like the version of reality we all seemed to be trapped in, the one where the world is boiling over and the supreme court is off the rails and the presidential race is let’s just say it, cuckoo nuts. I don’t want to write about this. I don’t want to think about this. I suspect you don't want to read about this, at least not from me, so here we both are. 

A much more pleasant reality is the mini vacation I'm on with my husband in Washington DC where our daughter and son-in-law live. So far we have eaten many gourmet meals courtesy of our son-in-law, who is a chef, (a special shout out to his turkey burgers—so good!), taken early morning walks through their neighborhood’s impressive community garden, and played indoor mini golf. (I won! Okay, I tied for first place with my son-in-law. My strategy was "what the heck, just hit the ball and don't worry about it," and that seemed to work for me.)

We also went to a Washington Nationals baseball game. During the three innings we were there (it was 97 degrees with a heat index of 105 and we're lucky we lasted that long) we got to see two homeruns, snarfed down Dippin Dot ice cream before it melted, drank multiple bottles of water, and took many sweaty, red-faced pictures of ourselves. It was fun! 

And then we headed back to the apartment to do what we all really wanted to do, which is watch the Tour de France. I had never watched the Tour de France, and up to this point, knew nothing about it. I still don't really know that much about it, but the gist is every year teams of bikers bike around France for three weeks. Our son-in-law grew up in Paris and is a huge fan and was a big help explaining the finer points.

Like, why there are some bikers wearing different colored shirts. The yellow, for example, is worn by the fastest rider, but that can change throughout the race depending on your time. And white is worn by the best performing younger biker. And then there's a multi-colored polka-dotted shirt for the best sprinter? or is it the best climber? Never mind all that. 

What I like about the race is how mesmerizing it is to watch the group of bikers moving together as one. They look like a flock of birds, diving and soaring, as they swerve around sharp turns through quaint-looking French villages and climb up into the Alps and then it's back into the villages with the teeth-jarring cobblestone streets. 

While we were watching, we got to hear the dubbed backstories, the previous years' harrowing moments when bikers banged into each other or someone's bike broke and they skidded out and caused a pile-up and the time a biker had to have his face rebuilt. It's brutal when it isn't so beautiful.

Which is a good tagline for life these days, don't you think? with the extreme weather and the dismantling of human rights and so much depending on a contest between a bumbling elderly gentleman and a carnival barking wannabe dictator, and meanwhile, over here you have someone carefully tending their cucumber vines in the community garden and perfectly seasoning a gourmet turkey burger.

I know no one asked me, but I want to live in the place with the cucumbers and the burgers, the homeruns and the frothy minigolf waterfalls, the world where everyone I love piles on one enormous couch together and cheers as the bikers roll by.  

Surprised by Vegetables

I forgot what I planted in the vegetable garden. I mean, I have a vague idea but not the particulars. Usually, I keep a little booklet, detailed grids of all of the flower beds and garden plots in my yard. I used to go all in with it, drawing out pictures and coloring everything in. Now, it's just a scribble. Notes for next year. What worked and what didn't.

For example: Don't plant this doofy variety of tomatoes again because they vine all over the place and hardly produce anything worthwhile. Or, this kale is great, but give it more space. Or, move the peonies before they get overtaken by the raspberry bush.  

Anyway, this year, I never mapped out the vegetables. What happened was it was going to rain, and I was trying to get all the seedlings into the ground before it started. I did get everything done, but ran out of time for my note-taking. I'll remember! I'll write it down later! But then a rabbit ate half of the plants (which plants? the cucumbers? the peppers?)

So, I planted other plants in those spaces (intending to write that down soon, but first, I had to put the fence up to keep out the rabbit). And later, interestingly enough, some of the rabbit-chewed plants came back to life (the beans? a pepper, but what kind of pepper?)

Totally unrelated, I've hit upon a new way (for me) to write a book. For the record, other ways that I've written a book: 

1. Write a big messy draft with no plan at all and rewrite the whole thing multiple times. 

2. Write a detailed synopsis and veer away from it spectacularly.

3. Write a draft in a 30-day rush and spend three years reworking it.

4. Handwrite like a madwoman in a notebook and transcribe on my laptop. 

5. Dictate, via the voice feature on my phone, and email myself the blathery output to revise.

This "new" way is a combo of some of the others, but with a twist. The original plan was to dictate the next scene while I walked the dog each morning and fine tune it in the afternoons. Instead, what I found was that I got further ahead in the whooshing out of dictation and further behind in the fine-tuning, so now I'm a mix of treading water and swimming forward through uncharted waters, both so far ahead and so far behind, and somehow straddling the present and the past at the same time. 

It's a maddening mess. But it's fun! 

Meanwhile, outside in the garden, every day it's a new surprise, the mystery plants spilling over the fence and twining around each other. A cucumber plant that might be a melon? Not a pepper plant but a tomatillo plant? I stake and untwine the best I can, vow to write it all down as soon as I figure out what I've grown. 

Or not. 

Keeping Busy on the Longest Day of the Year

I wanted to light the cherries on fire, but it turns out I'd bought the wrong kind of accelerant. The recipe called for cherry brandy, but I'd substituted cherry whiskey, and apparently cherry whiskey does not ignite. So, that was a big bummer. The dessert (cherry cheesecake bars) still ended up being delicious. Also, the lemon cookies. 

I am not what anyone would call a baker. Somehow, despite my best efforts, I always make a mess. Flour on the floor, dribbled egg on the counter, batter spatter on the walls. And everything seems to take ten times longer than I plan. Pitting cherries, for example. Ridiculous. Even with a cherry pitter. 

Still, I pitted my way through. The prep work for a celebration takes time. I wanted to take time. This is a new practice for me. Living in the present moment, rather than ruminating over the past or worrying about the future. In the present it was the Summer Solstice, and my husband and I had invited several friends over to mark the day. It's a thing I've wanted to do for as long as I can remember, but then inevitably, I forget. 

This goes back to my English teacher days, reading The Great Gatsby so many times I can practically recite it, random lines jumping out at me and sticking in my head, like this one, said by the bored, breathy Daisy Buchanan: 

"Do you always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."  

Anyway, this year I decided once and for all that I would not miss it. In addition to the lemon cookies and non-flammable cherry cheesecake bars, I whipped up a batch of fruity drinks. Everyone brought some variation of a fruity dessert, and we all sat outside on the patio. This week we were having a Heat Dome and the temperature was 95 degrees, but whatever. We pitted through it. I had read somewhere that a good conversation starter is to ask people what's keeping them busy lately. 

The question had all of us talking well after the sun set about volunteer projects and books and gardening and kitchen renovations and getting-a-kid-off-to-college, while also managing to pull in stories about a trip to Prague, a whale breaching off the coast of New Jersey, a theory about why women have big hips, and how lawns are dumb and why not just turn the whole thing into a perennial garden. 

Before we knew it, the longest day of the year celebration was over and we were divvying up the leftover fruity desserts and saying our goodbyes. Only a few days later, and I am already wanting to jump ahead to next year’s Summer Solstice. I know I know I need to live in the now, but forgive me if I make one small note: 

Next time go all in with the brandy and set the cherries on fire. 

(cherries, not igniting) 

Celebration, after the sunset

Brunch

On the patio watering flowers, I saw a bird, and we both stopped and looked at each other. The bird was bright yellow, and it was funny how he cocked his head and stared at me. I don't know how else to explain it except to say that it felt like he wanted to tell me something. He didn't. Instead, I took his picture, and he flew up into a tree. 

But the whole thing was unsettling. How bright yellow the bird was and the cartoon-like expression on his face. I sent the picture to my friend Natalie, who is an avid bird watcher, and said, What is this? 

She wrote right back: It's a canary. Probably someone's pet who escaped. It might need help. 

Oh my God, I said. Because it all made sense then. Poor bird. He WAS trying to tell me something. Also, I felt like a ding dong. I know what canaries look like! I just never expected to see one hopping around outside on my patio. Anyway, it was too late. The bird had flown off, hopefully, to find help from someone else. 

Stop beating yourself up about it, Natalie told me. It was a few days later, and we were having brunch, and I was still ruminating over the bird. And then I was ruminating over some news I'd read about how there's a bill going through the Ohio Statehouse that would force public libraries to keep objectionable books away from patrons under the age of 18. It's not clear exactly what "objectionable" is, but anyone can file a complaint about any book. 

If they did, you'd have to keep those books hidden behind a desk or wrapped up in paper, and parents would have to give permission for their kid to check a book out. Oh, and if a library worker broke that rule, the state could charge them with a crime and defund the library system. 

What is this? I said to Natalie, because in addition to being an avid bird watcher, she works in government, and therefore, she is my go-to person for what's happening politically in the area. 

Don't worry about it, she said.  

But I was still worried about it. I was thinking about the book I read recently about the collapse of society and how one of the characters said to another one of the characters: "History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave." 

While I was thinking about this, I was eating French toast with whipped cream and syrup. I rarely eat this kind of food anymore, and my head felt like it was detaching from my neck and floating away. It didn't help that I'd drunk multiple cups of coffee. Every time the waitress came by our table, she'd top off my cup. 

Natalie explained how the legislative process works in Ohio, and I ate two sausages to balance out the sugar rush, and then I drank a glass of water to dilute the caffeine. It's slow! she said. This particular anti-library bill is only sponsored by one guy and no one else has even signed off on it! 

Yet, I said. But I had to admit I felt a million times better. 

We quit discussing the yellow bird and crazy potential laws in the state of Ohio, and talked about our latest writing projects. Did I mention that Natalie is a New York Times Best Selling author? Anyway, she is. And as you can imagine, she was helpful on this subject too. 

After brunch, I checked my neighborhood's social media page where I’d posted about the yellow bird. I was hoping that whoever had lost the bird would chime in. Instead, there were comments about various sightings. People who had seen him in their feeders and playing in their bird baths. It wasn’t the news I was hoping for. 

I am not a person who is good with uncertainty. Will the yellow bird find his way home? Will the crazy book banning bill become a law? Who knows. If I ever run into the bird again, maybe I will ask him. 

Yellow Bird

 

French Toast 

Natalie's new book. Potentially banned? 

Help Is on the Way

At the grocery self-checkout, my husband and I are pros. We have a system. I scan. He packs the bags. But we are at a new grocery store (for us) and the system is not working. When I scan and he packs, the machine freezes and the light blinks on: HELP IS ON THE WAY. But we don’t need help, I say to the clerk who comes over to help us. We know how to do this.

I say it the second time the light comes on and the third. The problem is the machine, I tell the clerk. And the fourth time—the problem is the sensor thingy under the bags! It thinks we’re not placing the item in the bags because we’re using our own bags?! Or it doesn’t recognize a second person doing the bagging?! Maybe we are too fast for it! The fifth time, I am sweating.

Each time the clerk comes over, he replays the tape, I guess to prove that we’re scanning and packing properly? WE ARE! Okay, the sixth time the light comes on, I admit it. It’s all on me. In my flustered sweaty state, I forgot to weigh the grapes before my husband placed them ever so carefully into the bag. But the seventh time, I TOTALLY weighed the bananas, I promise!

The clerk rewinds the tape. His name is Daniel—I see from his nametag, which I finally read after interacting with him another dozen times—and he is giving us a master class in how to deescalate a crisis. As I am raising my voice and one second away from tossing my bananas and stomping out of the store, he’s there again, talking us through it, patiently rewinding the tape and resetting the machine, joking about how if it didn’t mess up, he would be out of a job.

You’re doing great, he says. Keep going.    

I am trying to channel this man later as I talk with a friend who is going through a crisis much more serious than an exasperating grocery store experience. It’s anxiety, and it zaps her when she least expects it, spiraling her out and shutting down her usually bubbly self. I love this person so much and I want to swoop in and fix things for her.

I can’t fix things for her.

This is where I could say something metaphorically clever about how having trouble with the self-checkout at the grocery store is like having a panic attack. But that would be stupid because it’s not the same thing at all. I have had panic attacks before and it felt like I was dying. In the throes of my anxiety, I couldn’t see the hands that were reaching out to help me. I didn’t believe the hands were there. That is the evil trick about anxiety. It leads you to think you are alone in your suffering.

My husband and I finally finished checking out at the grocery store. It only took a couple more assists from Daniel, right at the very end when I was trying to wrangle loose oranges and then when I was trying to pay by credit card, swipe or tap, and oh my God, Daniel, just DO IT FOR ME. He didn’t, but he was immediately standing beside me with his same patient smile, saying, Look at you, you’re getting the hang of it now.

Ha ha Daniel, we both know that you are kidding. But weirdly, it helped.

The thing about stupid metaphors is sometimes they work. When my friend calls later, I tell her I am here for her and she will get through this. A friend said this to me once. 

Come to think of it, SHE’S the friend who said it to me, so we both know that it is true.

 

(Daniel is not shown in the picture but trust me, he's there)

 

 

Driving in the Fog at Night

The writer E.L. Doctorow once said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” 

I like that and try to hold onto it, especially lately, when writing has been all fog for me and the headlights are barely flickering. I have good excuses. My normal schedule is off. Trips out of town, and then, a guest staying in the house. I’m tired and random joints hurt. I think it’s the medication I’m taking. That, or I’m old. Also, there’s a rabbit in the garden who’s eating my plants. 

But the real problem is I’m at a place in my book where I’m at a crossroads. Something’s got to happen but I don’t know what. My main character has to make a decision, but for some reason, she’s spinning her wheels. Do this? or Do that? Or maybe do some other thing? Who knows. 

You should see this rabbit, how enormous he is, hopping across my yard after feasting on my garden, which he apparently sees as his personal salad bar. I spend several days with him in a battle of wits. I put fencing up, but the fencing is worthless. He can hop right over it. I try covering each seedling with its own little mesh cage, but he eats the tips off of everything, down to the mesh. 

Meanwhile, in my book I tread water in the same paragraph for days, moving sentences around like I’m the guy in The Plague by Camus. That guy kept rewriting the same sentence over and over again and reading it to his friends, who probably thought he was nuts. They were IN THE MIDDLE OF A PLAGUE. Why was he wasting his time writing a book? 

I head to the garden center and buy a bigger fence. It’s metal and comes in a roll. You have to unwind it and nail it to wooden stakes. It’s a big pain in the neck to set up, but when it’s done, it’s a fortress. I actually feel bad for the rabbit now, his usual food supply out of reach. I plant new plants to replace the ones bitten down to nothing. I leave one outside the perimeter of the fence because I want to be the type of person who can make peace with a rabbit.  

The character in my book is still frozen, teetering on the edge of something. I push her one way and it doesn’t work. I push her in the opposite direction and that doesn’t work either. I fix my broken headlights. I drive on through the fog. 

Confession: I love the guy in The Plague, how silly he is and how hopeful. Maybe he is never going to finish his book. Maybe he is going to catch the plague. If he doesn’t catch the plague, he is going to die eventually anyway. So what. I like how he keeps fiddling with his words. I like how he shares his story with his friends.

  

a peace offering

Go Deeper

Write about me, my daughter says, when I tell her I don’t know what to write about this week. She is visiting from DC for the long weekend, and we are lying on our backs in a hair salon having our hair shampooed. My hair stylist asks me if I want a hand and arm massage. I didn’t know this service came with a haircut. No thanks, I say. I’m good. 

Mom, my daughter says. Do it!

I do, and I am immediately happy. The warm lotion, the pulling and stretching of each finger, but also, the softly lit room, the scent of rosemary? the tinkly notes of spa music, my daughter only a lotion-y arm-length away. I never do stuff like this. 

Correction: I never do stuff like this unless she is here and prodding me along. It’s the same at the shops we browse in later, our new hairdos all fresh and spiffy. I just want to buy a couple of t-shirts, but she talks me into a trendy pair of jeans, a swingy-looking top. Think: fun, she says. 

And I do. It’s magic. No, my daughter says with a laugh, it’s retail therapy. We’re drinking frou frou coffee drinks on the front porch, and I’m pointing out the flowers I planted since the last time she visited, these purply globes called allium which make me think of Horton Hears a Who, how round and boing-y they are and who knows what kind of worlds they contain, what sweet voices are calling out from the hearts of them. 

There’s a clover patch my husband planted next to the boing-y flowers, and every time he looks, he finds a four-leaf clover. I’m not lying, I tell our daughter. See for yourself. We go back to our frou frou drinks and compare our horoscopes. A few weeks ago my son and daughter-in-law showed us a silly astrology app that’s so random and dumb that it's got to be AI-generated. You plug in your date and time and place of birth (yeah, I know, we’re giving away our private information to some company who will use it to try to sell us something later or steal our identities, but ah, well) and each day an absurd list of dos and don’ts spits out. 

For example, Today, mine is: 

Do—Morning rituals, Lists, Weird hat

Don’t—Leftovers, Restriction, Dirty Laundry

I am embarrassed to tell you how much time I spend pondering this. But I am a person who likes to find meaning in things. All of us are like this to one extent or another. Anyway, this is what the book I’m reading, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell, says. 

It’s human nature to try to make sense of the world, but what happens when there’s too much information bombarding us every second of the day? The answer, according to the author, is: Not good. It's how otherwise rational people fall for cults and conspiracy theories. 

Not me, though, I think, donning my weird hat and avoiding the laundry, swinging back and forth on the porch swing with my daughter, having fun.

Boing-y flowers

 

Look!

This book is good!! And also, it's disturbing!

I'm supposed to go deeper today,
but WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? 

Holes

Last week at this time I was digging a hole. It was three feet by three feet and maybe six or seven inches deep. It was hard work, and immediately my heart was pumping, and my hands around the shovel started to ache. I was standing in a very large field, and it was raining, and I knew that when I finished digging this particular hole, I was going to move onto another. 

How this came about was my husband and I were visiting our son and daughter-in-law and basically jumping into their lives for a few days, and this meant showing up at a farm to help one of their friends with whatever farm-related tasks needed to be done. What needed to be done was dig holes. 

I was working alongside my son, who was using a pitchfork to pull straw off the ground. The point of the holes, the straw, was to get the field ready for planting. Ooh! I said to the farmer when he explained. This is like the lasagna method!

*The lasagna method is an alternative to the more traditional "tilling" method. Instead of tearing up grass where you want to plant, you lay down cardboard or newspapers and make layers with grass clippings and leaves. You do this in the fall, and then later, in the spring, you've got some nice soil to work with. The farmer was using a thick layer of straw, which he'd covered with a tarp. Now, the tarp was removed and our job was: 

1. Fork off the straw.

2. Dig a hole.

3. Add compost from the giant compost pile at the edge of the field.

4. Repeat until the entire field was ready to be planted.

While my son was forking and I was digging, I was chatting with another volunteer, comparing notes about our gardens and what kind of compost we like to use. For example, she likes to use deer hides, animal blood, and dead fish. 

Oh, I said, I use eggshells and coffee grounds, but otherwise, samesies. 

It was mother's day and for various reasons, mother's day is a hard day for me. I was glad to be digging holes in a muddy field and hanging out with my husband and son and daughter-in-law and texting sporadically with my daughter and listening to my new gardening friend talk about how I shouldn't be scared of eating stinging nettles. 

*Stinging nettle is an herb that I have growing in my garden, but now I am afraid to harvest it because like it says in the name, it stings! So, I've been pretty much leaving it alone, but apparently, if you put it in hot water, it removes the stinging, and then you can eat it how you would spinach.  

The trick, my new gardening friend told me, is: Use gloves and tongs. She was pausing for a moment in her digging, and she bent down suddenly and picked up what looked like a rock, Look, it's a beaver skull, she said. 

Well, there's something you don't see every day, I said, and then I went back to digging my hole and marveling at my son who was pitchforking like a pro and stopping every now and then to text back and forth with my daughter. 

When we were all done working, we had a big feast in the farmer's barn. I felt like I had been through something but I didn't know exactly what. Work, rain, mud, and dead animal skulls. But also, a lovely meal with family and new friends. 

Before I left, I asked the farmer if I could have a few of his bean seeds. He jumped right up and returned with a handful. Isn't this what it's all about? he said. 

Yesterday, I dug holes in my own garden. It was sunny and hot and the holes were small and relatively easy to dig. I planted the seeds, and then I ate a big bowl of stinging nettles. Ha ha. I'm joking. I am not quite ready to do that yet, but when I do, you will be the first to know. 

holes

Some Questions I Have on My Vacation (in no particular order)

1. The town where my husband and I are staying operates on the honor system. We walk into the inn where we have a reservation, and before we say a word, the owner is shaking our hands and leading us to our room. How does she know who we are? 

2. It’s the same system at the little cafe across the street (the inn has a deal with them, that guests can pick up a free breakfast each day of their stay). Hi, we say, We’re staying at the inn. And the cafe owner is already handing us the menu. Don't they want an ID? A jangle of a room key? Nope. Just hello and here's your coffee. I love this town. 

3. They have llamas. The last time we were up this way (the far far far north country of New York to visit our son and daughter-in-law) we saw llamas in someone’s front yard, and one came right up to the fence with a look on his face like, Hey! And I was like, Hey! back. 

But later when I told my son we saw the llamas, he asked if we had fed them. Apparently, there’s a food bag near the fence and they were expecting that. And, he added. Those aren't llamas. They're alpacas. 

4. The farm where my daughter-in-law works has 200 newborn lambs. How do you know there are 200? I asked my son. Because the farmer counted them, he said. 

5. New York and Vermont used to be on two separate continents millions and millions of years ago. I learn this by reading a sign at the stone quarry up the street from the inn. Also, the lady in the cafe this morning said that last year someone set up a grand piano in the quarry and had a concert. Wow, I said. How did they get the piano up there? 

I don't know, the lady said. I was wondering that too. 

6. At the farm there’s a small pen of orphan lambs, and one immediately climbs on me and licks my leg and tries to eat my purse. Why are some of the lambs orphans? 

Because, the farmer says, for one reason or another their mothers rejected them or they're a triplet and their mothers can only handle one or two. But, she adds, at least they have each other. 

7. What is the the difference between a llama and an alpaca? 

8. I am still thinking about how I can walk into this inn and take a water from the fridge in the sitting room or make myself a cup of coffee and it’s no big deal.

9. Would you ever consider moving up here? our son asks us. We are sitting at a different cafe, a place where they serve you a bowl of ice cream with a drizzle of espresso on top, and I am immediately trying to figure out how to make this at home.

Through the window we can see the lake, and beyond that, the mountains of that long ago continent, Vermont. 

Answer: yes

orphaned lamb

a farm

seriously, how would you get a grand piano out here? 

not a llama

Stay, Bubby

There's a funny video going around online about how people's names for their pets change over the years. My dog is Zooey, but sometimes we call her Zo-Zo, or Zo-bee-doh. Which turned into Do-bee. Which somehow became Bubby. 

Zooey responded to all of these names. Just as she responded to Come, Sit, Stay-- a particularly tricky command, where my husband would place a treat on the floor right at her feet, and she would know not to eat it until he said, Release. 

She knows other words too, Walk, being the primary one. Because she would get so ridiculously excited when she heard the word, my husband and I would spell it when she might overhear, but then she learned W-A-L-K, so we would have to say, "We're going to take her for a You Know What," and she figured that one out too. 

I didn't realize how much I talked to Zooey, how much I expected her to hear me--telling her what a good dog she is on our You-know-whats, or giving her a heads up about a car trip, or picking her up from the vet and saying, Wanna go home? and making sure I grabbed the leash tight first before she pulled me off my feet in a mad scramble to get the hell out of that place-- 

until I realized she can't hear anymore. 

I don't know when this happened. It's possible it's been a while and I haven't noticed? I'd come home from work and she was still snoozing upstairs and startled when I walked into the room, but I had chalked that up to: she's older, she needs more rest, she knows I'm home and will come down shortly to greet me. But now I know that she just didn't hear me come in.

She can't hear the particular sound the mailman's truck makes when it rolls down the street, or the squeaky sound of her squeaky toys, or the doorbell ringing, or the opening of her dogfood can, or me, when I croon at her, Where's my Bubby? Where's my Zo-bee-doh? 

And it's changed our relationship in ways that I still don't quite understand. What is my relationship with my dog? What is her relationship to me? I read a book recently called The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. It was a disconcerting experience reading this book. First, I didn't know what it was about until I'd read a good fifteen, twenty pages into it. And then I was like, wait. What? 

(As a back story, I work at a library, and often see the same books come across my desk again and again. This particular book is a small book with a bright, colorful cover, the title and author in big font, and that's it. This is a trend in book cover design right now, particularly with literary fiction, which is nice, but it makes it difficult to know what the book is about. 

I don't know why I decided to check this book out except that it passed through my hands so many times that it finally made me curious. But then I brought it home and forgot about it for months. I would look at it and see the bright colors, the title, the author, and think... nothing.)

Anyway, I finally started reading the book and was immediately intrigued. It's about a woman who is a writer who has lost her very good friend who is also a writer. Ah, I was thinking. This is a book about friends, about death and grief, and possibly, about writing. But then I got to the part where the friend who died left the main character his dog.  

The woman does not like dogs and does not want this one. To further complicate matters the woman's apartment is small and does not allow pets of this size. (The dog is a Great Dane.) But she takes the dog in, despite all of this. 

Here is when it occurred to me that this book is not about the writer friend who died, it's about the dog--HE'S the friend!--and oh my GOD, please don't tell me this dog is going to die! The author, anticipating my fear, writes, Don't worry, reader, the dog is not going to die, and I breathed a sigh of relief, and kept reading.  

She was lying. But I don't hold it against her. The book was a good book and (spoiler) when the dog dies, he dies in the most beautiful way imaginable. I don't know how the author accomplishes this, but she does. And I don't know how she manages to take a fairly predictable story--a person who doesn't like dogs falls in love with one--and turns it into something complex and surprising. 

Once I was that person who didn't want a dog, who reluctantly took one in, and somewhere along the way, she became my friend. I don't talk to her as much anymore. It just seems silly if she can't hear me. Maybe it was always silly. But I have found other ways to communicate. Flicking a light on when I come into a room so as not to scare her. Showing her my sneakers when it's time to take a walk. I am working on how to convey the word, Stay. And in the future, Release.  

Something that truly shocked me about the book was that all of the many times I looked at the cover, I never really saw it. It wasn't only the title and the author. The dog, apparently, had been there all along.