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)