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.

What Is Real

On Sundays we volunteer at a local farm where everything that is grown there or raised there is given away for free. How it works is every Sunday, anyone who shows up is given a task to do. Pick vegetables or weed or gather herbs or bake cornbread. After a few hours everyone stops and cleans up and eats a meal together. Sometimes more people drop by at dinner time and they are fed too. 

Last week I was put in charge of making the salad. The farmer who runs the place gave me ideas, things I never would’ve thought to throw into a salad. Cooked beets, for example, and steamed purple beans and a massive amount of herbs. I spent three hours steaming and chopping. I was talking to a woman who showed up randomly from Canada. Every week there are a handful of newcomers. How did you hear about this place? I always ask them, and usually, they answer, The documentary. 

Until recently, I had no idea what they were talking about. I’d heard about the place from my son and daughter-in-law, who’d heard about it from a friend. The woman from Canada was a high school English teacher. She volunteered to help me chop vegetables. While we chopped, we talked about teaching and books. All week I was reading a book called The Things We Never Say. 

The book is about all of the painful thoughts going on in people’s heads, all of the stuff we struggle with alone. The main character goes to a party with his wife and he’s bothered by the fact that no one talks about anything important. It’s all on the surface. Why aren’t we talking about things that are real? the guy says. 

His wife laughs. Oh my God, she says. We can’t talk about things like that at a party! 

The woman from Canada was telling me how challenging it is to teach these days. The kids use AI chatbots and think they’re pulling one over on her, but she can always tell. Once she had her students draw character maps about a story they read in class. The chatbots spewed out nonsense, making up characters and quoting lines that weren't in the story. In the end the students were forced to create the maps themselves. They admitted they had fun with it, she said. 

Because they had a chance to do their own thinking, I told her. I was cutting herbs. I was thinking, who puts so many herbs in a salad? And what’s with all the beets? I don’t even like beets. 

But I had been imagining canned beets and not these fresh, just-pulled-out-of-the-dirt kind. When I tossed everything together, the salad looked like a work of art. I wish you could've tasted it. There are so many things I want to say, but I keep getting muddled up. How uncomfortable I feel going to the farm each week and why do I feel so much better by the time we sit down to eat?

I want to tell the farmer, Okay, this is a nice idea, but there’s no way it can work on a larger scale. What are we even doing here? I finished reading that book I was reading and I loved it. I started to write about it and couldn't remember the title. When I googled it, the first thing that came up was the forced-on-me AI summary telling me the book does not exist. 

The farm is such a small farm. Every week I wonder if we will have enough food to feed each other, and somehow, always, we do. Before we eat, someone says a blessing. We hold hands. 

We sing.

 

Strange Days

This place is strange. The sailing, the tennis, the nearly nightly meet-ups for barbecues and cocktails. Everyone is retired. Are you retired? they ask me. No, I say. But then I have to add, But I’m not working. I left my job at the library, and I’m not sure the libraries up here will have a place for me except as a volunteer.

The little library downtown has a staff of two, both only part-time. At my first volunteer shift the director shows me the checkout procedure. The checkout procedure is: scan the book and then handstamp the due date on the back. I am flabbergasted. When was the last time I saw someone use a handstamp at a library? 1989? 

I head home, still trying to puzzle it out. Walk the dog, and a wild animal streaks past. A fox? Is that a fox? It’s adorable, and also, scary, and neither the dog or I have time to react before it’s on the other side of the road, disappearing into the woods. Through the trees the lake is moving, the waves pushing to the south. 

It’s a north wind, a local tells me. That means the water will be warmer. Why? He goes into a long explanation. Is there an App for that? I ask him, and he squints at me like I have two heads. 

App? Just go out and look at the lake.

The lady next door asks me if I play Mahjong. 

No.   

Do you want to learn?

Not particularly. But I show up to play, which turns out to mean, not playing, but watching other people play. What I learn is that Mahjong is a very complicated game. After two hours of watching, I am no closer to playing. I don’t even know if I can explain what I am watching. Something about building a wall of tiles and matching the tiles to one of the many patterns on a card. The card looks like ancient hieroglyphics. Bam! one of the ladies will say as she throws down a tile. Or, Crack! 

They explain things to me as they play, and I keep responding, Oh, or Okay, when really, I have no idea what is going on. 

East! one of the women shouts. Flower! 

Really. What the hell is going on? Meanwhile, back in Ohio, there’s a massive windstorm that blows through our old neighborhood, knocking down trees and leaving nearly everyone I know without power. A former neighbor sends me a video of our former yard, the flowers I planted flattened, water gushing down the street. Why am I here and not there? 

The dog wakes me up in the middle of the night. I half stumble with her out into the dark, kicking myself for not grabbing a flashlight. What if there’s a fox streaking across the yard. Or a fisher cat. Someone told us about those, adding that it’s not a cat and they don’t have anything to do with fish. So why is it called a fisher cat? One more thing I don't understand. 

While the dog does her urgent business in the yard, I look up at the night sky and gasp. I have literally never seen so many stars in my entire life. What is this place? 

And how have I found myself in it, the dark trees, the lake moving to the north or to the south, and no way of knowing until morning? 

The lake, mostly still

This book is due soon

Apparently, this is a fisher cat!

Go Jump in a Lake

I don’t know what took me so long. The lake is right there, shining between the trees. Outside, it’s sweltering hot. The new house doesn’t have air conditioning. Who needs air conditioning, I keep saying to my husband. We’re in the woods. We’re far up north. There’s a breeze. A fan. Five fans. 

Ten fans. I’m out doing yardwork like an idiot. My clothes are damp-drippy, and the sunscreen I’ve slathered on streaks down my legs and seems to be catching and smothering some kind of bug that I can’t see without my reading glasses. That’s it, I say. I’m jumping in the lake. 

The lake is a short walk down a hill and another thirty or so cement steps down to a dock. We’re still new to this place. We don’t know the rules. Can we sit in the Adirondack chairs? Can we use one of the pool noodles strewn around the rocky beach? 

Come in, says a woman, backstroking through the water. Closer, and I see that it’s one of the Marthas. (Every other woman here is named Martha.) The water is glorious, she says. Seventy-six degrees. 

Seventy-six degrees sounds good to me. But when I dip my foot in, I wince. 

Just jump in, Martha says. It’s the only way to do it. 

I take one step down the ladder, gasping, stopping at me knees. I’m one of these people, Martha, who needs to ease into it. She shrugs and whirls off toward the large wooden raft that’s anchored fifteen feet away. I step down another rung, thigh deep now. I’m having a flashback to Girl Scout camp 1978 when we had to take a swimming test. 

The swimming test was Jump Off the Dock into the Lake and Swim to the Wooden Raft, then Swim Back and Tread Water for Two Minutes. I knew how to swim. I knew how to dive and do forward front flips and somersaults. I had been practicing for weeks in my best friend’s pool. But for whatever reason that day at Girl Scout camp, I panicked. 

The water was ice cold, and unlike my best friend’s pool, you couldn’t see the bottom. Who knew what was churning around under the surface.  

I dove in and froze. My arms didn’t seem to work anymore and my head wouldn’t stay above water. One of the counselors had to scoop me out. Swimming test failed, I was sent to the Tadpole group where I had to wear a red bathing cap and stand near the shore with the girls who were afraid to get their faces wet. 

Next step down the ladder, and the water’s chest level. Maybe this is far enough, deep enough. Martha floats by again. The thing is I hated those girls in the red caps. What fraidy cats they were, what babies. But there I was, one of them. The Tadpole counselor threw pennies in the water and challenged us to find them. 

I was the only one who took her up on it, sucking in a breath and dunking down, opening my eyes and blinking in the murk. The pennies weren’t hard to see at all. 

One more ladder rung and what am I waiting for?  

In the Weeds

Because of our half-cross-country move, I don’t have a garden this year. It’s making my hands itch, that urge to plant something. Or kill something. By kill something, I mean weeds. But also, possibly, the mortgage lending industry. For a few days in June, I stayed at a friend’s house and yanked weeds out of her flowerbeds. 

It was a hot day and the sun was pounding my neck. My phone had been pinging me for hours. It was the mortgage lender telling me (the first of what would be many times, but I didn’t know that yet) that our house closing had to be pushed back. I was on my knees in my friend’s dirt, slamming my shovel into the ground, at first, pleading with the woman, and then, giving up and letting go. What was another week between houses. I slaughtered more weeds. 

A few days later I was down in my daughter’s community garden plot, tackling the weeds that were growing there. It was the 4th of July in Washington DC and every twenty minutes fighter planes would streak overhead. I felt like I was trapped in a dystopian novel. I walked over to the neighborhood Starbucks and tried the Tropical Butterfly Rainbow Refresher.

The drink comes with an overlarge straw so you can suck up the tiny mango-pineapple boba-tea-like pearls. I sucked the drink down carefully, mindful not to accidentally swallow down the wrong pipe. This is not an unfounded worry. I read an article about how people who drink a lot of boba tea run the risk of inhaling tapioca pearls into their lungs. 

Another streak of a fighter jet over the Starbucks, and I thought, Who the hell cares. And then it was back to weeding someone else’s garden. 

The new house has no garden, and the nearest Starbucks is forty-five minutes away. I had a moment of panic upon learning this. (Which is funny because back in Columbus we had a Starbucks on our street, and I can count the times on one hand that I walked the three-minute walk down to purchase a drink.) Shh, don’t tell anyone, but I went back to Columbus last week for a long-scheduled doctor’s appointment. 

I drove to our old neighborhood and parked in front of our old house, fighting the urge to tear across the lawn and pull weeds. Once, a million years ago when we first moved into that house, I’d crawled through the overgrown lawn, the bamboo thicket, a patch of out-of-control ornamental grass. 

A flash, and there was something hurtling toward me. An old woman on her hands and knees. Wild hair. A fierce expression on her face as she moved in a frenzy through the weeds. Oh my God, I thought, until I realized it was me. 

The previous owner, for some bizarre reason, had planted a mirror in the garden. I sat in the car in front of the house for a long time, thinking about taking advantage of the Starbucks while I had the chance, but in the end, decided not to. 

What I wanted was to go home. 

The new yard is a blank slate surrounded by trees. No weeds as far as I can see, but then a helpful neighbor points out something called Buckthorn, a non-native plant that’s wreaking havoc in this part of the world. Now that she’s shown me, I find the weed popping up all over the place. 

I grab a shovel and get to work. 

Nice View

The lake is glittering somewhere behind the trees. We can see glimpses of it from our porch and it’s lovely, but could we make a better view? Cut a few branches off the trees lining the yard? Maybe ask the people across the street if we can trim some of their branches?

The couple next door invites us over for drinks and dessert. We sit on their porch and marvel at their view, which is expansive and amazing and totally different from the water-fluttering-between-leaves thing we’ve got going on. I paid a lot for that, the husband says. 

I want to say, How much? Instead, we have the usual get-to-know-you conversation we’ve been having over and over again since we’ve moved here, which honestly, feels more like an interview. Where are you from and How did you find out about this place and what made you decide to move here? The intake of breath when we say we’ll be living here year-round. 

Every time someone does this, and it happens every time, I’ve been assuming they mean the weather. The majority of people living here are summer people. Most head home after Labor Day. They shudder at the cold, the snow. I make a joke about snow not bothering me. I grew up in New England, I say, brightly. 

When the truth is I haven’t been back to New England in winter for decades. I spent all of my adult life in the South or Midwest. A few years ago, when my husband and I visited our son and daughter-in-law up here in November, we were marveling at the cold. Our daughter-in-law works on a farm and our son took us on a tour. We tromped around a frigid field and I was laughing at how &$^%# cold it was. Aren’t you cold? I asked my son. 

No, he said. I’m wearing long johns. 

(Rule number one for surviving the winter: Dress for the weather.)

The couple with the awesome lake view clues us in on all the social things going on around here. The weekly potlucks and gatherings, the cookouts and concerts and theater performances. The tennis (Do you play tennis? No) the sailing (Do you sail? No) Hiking? What do you like to do? 

The wife asks me this, and for a minute, my mind literally goes blank. 

My husband looks over at me. She likes hiking, he says. Also, she likes to garden. 

Right! I say, grinning like an idiot. I do like those things. 

But I have no time for them. Three weeks here and these people are serious about their social calendar. They invite us to a group What’s App channel so they can share all of the goings-on. We show up at their potlucks and cookouts and parties and concerts. We do more interview-conversations and respond to more gasps about our year-round plan, and suddenly, it hits me that this is not about the weather. Or maybe it’s not only about the weather. 

It’s about the summer ending and everyone leaving, and all of the tennis and sailing and social activities going away with them. Maybe they can't imagine what they would do if they stayed?

We go to a gathering at someone’s house on the lake. Where are you from? (Ohio) How did you find out about this place? (Our son and daughter-in-law live here) What made you decide to move here? (We’ve been visiting them for years and loved it more each time we came) So, you’ll be here year-round? (Yes) 

Gasp, but it’s a different kind of gasp. This person, it turns out, is a year-rounder herself. 

It's definitely quieter after the summer people leave, she tells me. But there's still stuff going on. Don't worry. What do you like to do? (Write, read books, putter around the library, hang out with family and friends) 

Then you'll be fine. 

Moving Day

The day the movers came the sky was orange haze. I didn’t know it was smoke. I’ve been off the news. I’m in a wildly different part of the country, by a lake, nestled in woods, between mountains. Maybe sometimes the sky is orange here? 

But no, it was smoke from the wildfires. The movers and I breathed it in all day while they hauled stuff off the truck, hefted it into the house. It was ninety degrees. I had what I thought was an organized system to help the guys out. Signs taped to the doors of the rooms so they’d know where to put what. That all fell apart the first hour. 

Where does this go, they’d say, tromping by with a table, a bookcase, a chair, a rolled-up carpet. I knew, but after a while, I didn’t know. But then, lately, there are so many things I don’t know. How do you clean iron stains off a toilet bowl, for example. How do you set up a mailbox? 

(I mean this, literally. The mailbox is lying on the ground. It is dirty inside and out and hosting a full-blown ecosystem of insects.) And why are so many of the boxes we packed leaking? Did I inadvertently pack a liquid? Did something drip on them in the storage warehouse?

This question has an almost immediate answer as I watch one of the heavily perspiring movers set a box down, the leak splotch on the box the same shape as the sweat splotch on his T-shirt. 

I have a moment of panic. The sweat. The heat. The orange haze that I now know is smoke drifting down from the wildfires in Canada. What if the fires don’t stop burning? How dangerous is it to breathe this stuff in? 

And what if we can’t get the iron and sulfur out of our well water? And what if the insects in the mailbox are poisonous? And what if we’re stranded up here with no way to receive mail forever and what have we done, uprooting our lives, quitting my job and saying goodbye to friends, flinging ourselves so far away? 

The movers leave and I am alone with the damp boxes and the furniture in all the wrong places, my husband still circling around with the anxious dog, the haze orangey but lightening a little, the breeze swirling off the lake, some bird I don’t know the name of tweeting at me. 

What kind of flower is that at the edge of the yard? 

What is the name of the mountain with the little hook at the top? 

And who are the new neighbors strolling by with their cute little dog? 

Hey, they call and wave. 

Are we free sometime this week, after we settle in? Because they’d love to have us over, introduce us to the little community here, answer any questions we might have. 

Camel's Hump, Green Mountains, Vermont

Smooth Oxeye

A New House

We moved into a new house. The house is 575 miles away from our old house. It is different in at least 575 ways. Instead of being in a city neighborhood--the Starbucks with the never-ending drive thru line, the Wendy’s and the firehouse, the shop where you can buy five-dollar-a-piece gourmet donuts, or walk a few stores down and learn how to pot a cactus or browse used books or eat a chicken tikka paratha roll--

this house is nestled in the woods, 400 steps down to a lake. The nearest Starbucks is 45 minutes away. I don’t know yet where the firehouse is. I think it’s all volunteer. We are here in this place because we wanted to live closer to our son and daughter-in-law, and it’s not all that much farther from where our daughter and son-in-law live in DC, and because we wanted to shake our lives up a little, 

and because I had a secret dream to live in a house by a lake. Secret, because I never thought this could be a reality. But here we are.

When we visited the house a few months ago with our realtor, the second I walked in, I said, Oh, we can’t live here. This is a vacation house. If we lived here, it would be like we were on vacation every day. 

The realtor said, Is that a bad thing? 

Well. I mean, no? 

And then, before I could stop myself, I was doing it, picturing it. Living in an actual lake house. 

Cut to: here we are, second morning in the lake house. (The cut-to part was the six weeks part where we traveled around with our elderly anxious dog and lived out of our suitcases and glommed onto other people’s routines and traipsed around in a suburban neighborhood and a horsey farm in the Shenandoah Valley and the Cathedral Heights area of Washington DC.) 

I couldn’t sleep the first night in the house. The dark dark of the woods. The unfamiliar sounds. Is that a baby screaming? No, says my Merlin app. It’s a loon. A too hard mattress. (This house came with all of its furniture. Which is cool because our furniture won’t arrive for another week, but also, not cool, because what are we going to do with all of THIS furniture plus all of OUR furniture?) 

And the water is well water and it smells like sulfur. And the lower level has mice. And every time I open a drawer, I’m afraid of what I might find tucked away in inside. A bag of old pennies? Bath towels? Life jackets? Mice?! 

And we haven’t met many people around here yet, and I have that itchy feeling I had when I was eighteen and moving into my college dorm and everyone was unfamiliar and maybe they wouldn’t like me and how did I end up in this weird place miles from home? 

I stopped fighting being awake and got out of bed. My husband heard me from the couch in the living room (I know what you’re thinking: Why was he on the couch when you own ten beds? Why wasn’t he on the hard mattress with you? Long story short but the elderly dog won’t leave my side and double beds are too small for the three of us, and all of the beds are made up with mattress covers and sheets and blankets and comforters, 

as well as sprinkled with mouse dirt and bits of acorns and God knows what else, and we were too tired to wash everything and I ended up collapsing on the hard mattress and my husband ended up on the couch) But anyway,

he heard me get up, and we snuck out without waking the dog and walked the 400 steps down to the lake

and watched the sun come up. 

It was amazing. 

Morning

In the morning I tromp down to the community garden before the worst of the heat hits. Not even 8AM, and it’s already like an oven out here. How do people live in this kind of heat? Do you eventually get used to it? I work fast, weeding, watering, digging out what’s left of the lettuce. It’s still perky and green, but when I taste it, it’s bitter. Bolted from the heat. 

I am bolting in the heat, damp-haired and light-headed. Sweat dribbling down my face. My husband and I are in DC, longtime guests of our daughter and son-in-law, while the closing on our new house gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. But I am not complaining. We are with people we love and the people we love have a garden. 

Here is something fun about the garden: sunflowers, some so big that when you cut them and stick them into a jar, it all topples over. Also, bunnies. When I cart the dug-up lettuce over to the community compost bin, the bunnies are waiting for me. They don’t mind the bitter. The other day a friend died. 

The news came out of nowhere. Her daughter said she went to sleep and didn’t wake up and I can’t make sense of it. I mean, how do you make sense of it? 

Okay, I know it’s a thing that can happen. I just didn’t think it could happen to her, my friend. She was a fellow writer. Once, she finagled some kind of local TV show appearance for Ohio authors and I was one of the people she invited. I stood on the soundstage next to her holding my book and thought I might keel over from nervousness. But when I sneaked a peek at my friend, she was so cool, smiling like she was born to be on TV. 

Whenever she was in town, she stayed at my house. We'd walk the dog and talk about our kids, our writing, our gardens. The last time I saw her, a play she’d written was being performed downtown. It was about a woman our age who was empty nesting and worried about her elderly parents, so she and her husband decided to move in next door to them. 

The set was an elevator and the scenes changed to either be outside the elevator on the ground floor, the lobby, or upstairs where the penthouse apartments were. Or sometimes inside the elevator itself. The play was called Moving In, Moving Out, Moving On. At the end I was in tears.

Let me know when your next play is showing, I said. I’d love to come! But time went on and I never made it. In the garden I don’t know what to put in place of the lettuce. Sweet peppers? More flowers? The heat keeps rising. 

Something else about my friend. When she came for a visit, she always brought homemade treats and wine. I would cut flowers and put them in a jar beside the guestroom bed. 

In the morning we would drink coffee together on the porch like we had all the time in the world. 

Saturday in Washington DC

Everything has a fence around it. The Reflecting Pool, the White House. We’re in DC and it’s a million degrees, but my husband and I want to go downtown and walk around and see things for ourselves. Is the pool really pond-scummed or is it “patriotic blue”? How are they coming along with the renovations of the half-torn down White House? The answer to both of these questions is: We don’t know. 

All we see is fence. 

Also, soldiers. They seem nice but not thrilled with the million-degree heat either. We walk along the Reflecting Pool fence and try to see the Reflecting Pool. We walk around the White House fence and try to see the White House. There’s a larger perimeter around the building every time we visit DC. More soldiers. More fence. The park in front is walled off too. Through the fence you can see the lovely trees and the empty park benches. 

I can’t stop thinking about the news I heard in the uber car on the drive downtown. How the Supreme Court just took away protection for the 300,000 Haitians who have been living here, legally, for many years. Someone from the administration said, The door to America is closed. Go home.   

We go to a Turkish café and order mango lattes. We walk past the Ford theater and it's closed. We head over to the Mall, the area where all of the Smithsonian museums are, but we can’t get through because it's fenced off. 

There’s some fair going on. I’m so out of the loop, I didn't know about this. What fair? The Great American State Fair, my husband says. For the 250th Anniversary. We shuffle through security easily. Not much of a crowd. The longest line is for the Ferris wheel. Or you can visit booths made out of cardboard. Every booth highlights a different state. 

We visit Tennessee where they have a video of Elvis and pictures of the Smoky Mountains and country music stars. We visit Connecticut and there's nothing. That booth is connected to Maine and there's nothing there either. Wait, my husband says. Do Connecticut and Maine border each other?   

No, I say. We drop into Ohio and someone hands us a sticker. Back outside the cardboard, and music blares over a loudspeaker. The Rolling Stones. Is this American music? No. I try not to stare at the other people wandering around. Foreign tourists or Americans wearing MAGA gear. Everyone looks sweaty and bored. 

I want to say to them, We’re not like this! We can do better than this! Instead, we escape into the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and learn about the treaties our government made and broke. Which is to say, all of them. A film is playing about one of the many forced removals of Native Americans, a story about a little girl carrying her baby brother, knowing that if she lets him go, the soldiers will kill him. 

Well, that’s depressing, someone says as they stride past. The museum is air conditioned, so we stay inside for a long time, and then it’s time to go home. Well, not home, because we don’t have one at the moment but who am I to complain. 

We leave the fenced-off part of DC and return to the part where people live and work and garden and shop and walk their dogs. I wish that they could see it, the foreign tourists, the MAGA people, this part of the city, the country, 

this place with no fence. 

Afternoon at the Movies

We went to the movies in the middle of the afternoon. We ate popcorn for lunch and peanut M&M’s. The movie was about aliens and how they’ve always been here and if only we knew, we’d all stop what we are doing and feel awe and wonder. I want to believe this but I don’t. 

Sitting in that movie theater was the longest I’ve sat still in I don’t know how long. When it was over, my whole body was stiff and sore. I felt like a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader during training camp. This is the show we’ve been binge-watching with our daughter this week. Law & Order is old news. Now it’s girls leaping up into the air to ACDC’s Thunderstruck song and landing in splits on the hard football field turf. Just watching them makes my spine hurt. 

After the movie we went crazy and ate ice cream for dinner. We browsed fancy shops and at my daughter’s urging, my husband bought a shirt that was not “him” and I bought pants that are not “me.” The pants are brightly colored pajama material and they pool up around my feet. The minute I put them on, I laughed. These are not me, I said. 

But everyone was saying why not? What is me, anyway? We’re whirling on to the next chapter of the rest of our lives. Why not occasionally eat popcorn for lunch and ice cream for dinner? Why not wear clothes you would never wear? Why not try a high leg kick and land in a split?

Oh my God, Mom, do not do that, my daughter says. 

I used to be able to it, I tell her.

When?

Okay, it was eighth grade. I was a cheerleader at St. Joseph’s School in New Britain, Connecticut. Pretty much anyone who wanted to be on the team could be on the team. Except me, in seventh grade. I got cut. Probably because I froze up in the moment you were supposed to run and jump and do what they called a reindeer. I have literally forgotten this memory until right now, as I’m typing it. I was so humiliated, I practiced the reindeer in my bedroom for a year. I tried out again and did the reindeer like it was nothing. And then I kinda got bored with being a cheerleader.  

The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are so beautiful, they’re unreal. Maybe they’re aliens. It’s possible I have been on vacation a little too long. I don my new pajama pants and head down to the community garden in our daughter’s neighborhood so I can work on her plot. Every day since we’ve been crashing at her apartment in DC, I’ve been weeding and watering, shuffling pots around, picking lettuce and radishes and sweet peas. 

On the walk back I stroll past the other plots. There are at least one hundred here, every small section some other gardener’s wildly different vision. Tomato plants and exotic tropical plants. Herbs and rose bushes. 

The pajama pants swish when I walk. I wander around the garden and pretend every plot is mine. Lavender poking its purple branches through the fence. Seven-foot-high sunflowers. A plant that looks like a trumpet. Or an alien. 

How could you not be filled with wonder and awe?

Vacation

The big house on the hill has roosters crossing the road, a pool, a lawn game set up to play on the lawn, and a bird room. The bird room is a room with bird-patterned wallpaper, windows looking out at the treetops, a pair of binoculars nearby in case you want to watch birds. 

I want to want to watch birds. I want to want to swim in the pool and play the lawn game. But I can’t shake this unsettled feeling. How did we get here? my husband and I keep saying to each other. We say it when we’re idling in the car, waiting for the roosters to cross the road. And later, when we’re playing the lawn game, and after, when we’re floating in the pool. He means how fancy the place is and how beautiful. 

I mean, no really, Where the hell are we?

The pool is heated. A nice touch. The people who own the house have invited our daughter and son-in-lawn to stay in the guest cottage while he does his stint as a chef at a nearby restaurant. Make yourselves at home, the people said. We ran into them on the road with the roosters and they said it to us too. 

Make yourselves at home. Meanwhile, we are living out of suitcases. There’s something I keep forgetting. 

Oh, right. I don’t have a home. We bought a house, but it won’t be ready for weeks. And what if the sale falls through? Every other day we are on the phone with our mortgage person Dianne with two N’s. Everything is looking great! she says, before asking us to explain every financial transaction we have ever made in our lives and then she wants us to upload another document. 

We upload the document. We leave the Airbnb where we have been staying and drive back up to the big house to see our daughter and son-in-law. We go for a walk along a stream and everyone gets ticks. They hop at us from all directions. 

They’re easy to pull off and flick away, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’re crawling on me. I slip on my reading glasses and do an inch-by-inch check. I dip back into the pool. When I get out, I can’t find my reading glasses. Never mind, they’re on my head.  

Let’s go out to eat, our daughter says. But how will we justify the expense to Dianne with two N’s? At dinner we make up a story about her, a meticulous mortgage broker just trying to do her job when she stumbles onto a seemingly mild-mannered couple who might be hiding something. The husband is cool under pressure. The wife is a loonytoons who catastrophizes about ticks. 

I have been watching too much Law & Order. The theme song dum dums into my dreams. I am not the kind of person, apparently, who can make myself at home when I have no home to go back to. 

But we have a home to go forward to, my husband reminds me. Anyway, we’re on vacation. 

This is mostly true. After dinner, we order dessert. Dianne with two N’s will be beside herself. But I think she will get over it. I’ll upload a picture. 

  

Comfort Zone

The horse trots up to the fence and suddenly flops down on his back. Is he having a stroke? This is the first thought that pops into my head. But then, he rolls around and pumps his legs like a puppy, before hopping back up and trotting away. What was that? I have no clue. I have no clue about a lot of things lately. 

In between house-selling and new-house-buying, my husband and I are hanging out with our daughter and son-in-law for a while at an Airbnb out in the country. A little town in Virginia where our son-in-law is working as a chef on the weekends. The Airbnb has a pond with loud frogs and horses that graze on a hill and sometimes flop around for the heck of it. 

What should we do today? When I was home, I had my routine. The same food each morning, coffee and a smoothie. A short walk with the dog. A shift of work at the library. Home and a walk around the neighborhood. Some writing. Dinner and another walk (I am big on the walks.) (I am big on my routine.)

But now everything is up in the air. 

The smoothie-maker is packed up who knows where. The library is far away. It’s actually not easy to walk around out here, unless you want to endlessly circle the perimeter of a buggy field. I can’t seem to find my stride. Last week when I was house-sitting for a friend, I couldn’t figure out how to work her TV. The only thing that seemed to want to come on was the show Law & Order. 

So I binge-watched Law & Order. It was weird how I kept falling into episode after episode. It’s a comfort thing, my daughter told me. 

A crime show? I said. How is that comfort? 

It’s called competency porn, she said. You like watching people who know what they’re doing. You like seeing problems get resolved in less than an hour. 

This is true. I don’t even have to give it my full attention. I can keep the show on in the background and know that everything is going to work out okay. At least one thing these days is for sure. 

Our daughter takes my husband and me to the local farmers' market. It’s like the one at home except we are in a field instead of on a city street. I am instantly at ease. I buy a coffee and a scone. I poke around the plants and the spring greens. The house we are hoping to buy is far away and in a place that is radically different from here, different from home. 

But what is home? A smoothie? A walk? A library? Not too long from now we’ll unpack the smoothie maker. Check out the local library, maybe volunteer. Walk a different landscape. Make a new routine. Today, though, I’ll eat another scone. 

Forget binge-watching crime shows and instead, carry a book and a blanket up to the fence where the horses graze. Watch as they wander and play. 

Between the Rings

The dog didn’t know it was our last walk through the neighborhood. She tried to stop at her familiar sniffing places, and now I wished I’d let her linger, sniff to her heart’s content, but I was already tugging her along. Toward home where we were all packed up. The various liquids you’re not allowed to load onto a moving van were loaded into our cars. Who knew we had so many liquids. Cleaning supplies and toiletries. Laundry detergent, lotions, cooking oils. I had a list running in my head. 

Clean out the fridge. Vacuum out the cabinets. Sweep the garage. Cut one last batch of lettuce from the garden. I forgot that one. Too many things to check off, and in the end, it was rush rush rush and no time to fiddle with lettuce. Also, I had come down with some kind of bacterial eye infection. For a few days I put off dealing with it, but then it got too gruesome. 

Hmm, the eye doctor said. What have you been up to lately? Any break in your usual routine?  

We’re moving, I told her. 

Well, that could do it. All that dust stirred up. She poked and prodded while I took a breath. Sitting in her office was the first fifteen-minute stretch of time in I don’t know how long where there was nothing to do but sit and blink away tears. 

And then it was right back to the ever-scrolling to-do list in my head. What happened was we made an offer on a house, but it won’t be ready for a month, so for now, we’re house hopping. Remember that nice image my friend Deb shared about being on a flying trapeze, how you have to let go of one ring before you can latch onto the next? 

Well, this is us now, fumbling in mid-air. A few days housesitting for a friend who’s out of town, a couple of weeks in an Airbnb, a visit with our daughter. 

An extended vacation! another friend said, excitedly, and I am trying to embrace that, but it’s not easy, as my husband and I unload the bins of various liquids from the cars, the multiple coolers, the bags of medicines, now including antibiotics and eyedrops, the multiple boxes of dog-related paraphernalia.

Cars emptied, and suddenly I find myself sitting again. After weeks of frenzied cleaning and packing, of a house closing and a house hunting, and more packing and more cleaning, of quitting the job that I loved, of going-away parties and goodbye lunches with friends, followed by more packing and—how much crap do we own and do I even care about any of this stuff?—

here I am, on Day One, between the flying trapeze rings. 

My friend’s house feels unfamiliar without her in it, her neighborhood lovely and strange. I’ve never walked around here before. In the morning the dog and I set out to explore. A new to-do list is building behind my eyes, but I blink it away. 

When the dog stops at a never-before-sniffed fire hydrant, I let us both linger.

 

House Cooling

We had a moving-away party. The idea was this would be a nice way to say goodbye to our Columbus friends. We’d have pizza on paper plates and drinks in plastic cups. We’d set ourselves up out in the backyard (because the house is full of boxes), and we’d urge people to take something with them when they left. A plant, books, garden supplies we’re trying to get rid of before the movers come. 

But it rained. Actually, it was the rainiest day I can remember in a long time. 

That morning I was roaming around the mostly boxed up house in despair. I had casually invited a lot of people. I had no idea how many of them might show up and how many pizzas should I order? Should we even be throwing a party in a house that we no longer technically own? 

Pivot, a friend told me, and move the party inside. 

Pivot is a big word with this friend. Okay, this friend is my daughter. It was her idea that we have the party. A House Cooling, Mom, she said. Get it? Like, the opposite of a House Warming. No one's going to judge the state of your house. They just want to get together one more time. You want that too, right? 

I wanted that. So I pivoted and drove out in the rain to the pizza place to put in the order. The order taker was a guy named Nick. Nick was excited when I said how many pizzas I wanted. He also talked me into chicken wings and salad. He’d supply the silverware, he said, and I’m so glad he said that because the idea had literally never entered my mind. 

When I offered him my credit card, he waved it away. Just pay when you pick it up, he said. I walked back out into the rain. I was thinking, I don’t have any kind of receipt for this order. I don’t even have Nick’s phone number. The reason I’d driven out in the first place was because I couldn’t figure out how to do an order like that online. And now, what did I have to show for all the food we might need for this party, but a guy named Nick saying he’d take care of it? 

I told my husband when I got back to our soon-to-be-not-home. He said, You’re going to have to trust him. I said, But you know how hard that is for me. 

Not trusting people is baked into my soul. I am working on this! But it’s hard when you grew up in a world where you learned, repeatedly, if you trust people, you’re a stupid idiot fool. 

Put it this way, my husband said, Nick also has to trust you. 

That seemed like a fair point. It kept raining. The dog was following me through the maze of boxes around the house and I was catching her anxiety wave and/or she was catching mine. What are we going to do with her during the party? my husband said. 

Another thought that had never entered my mind. It was thirty minutes before the party and our lovely neighbors said, Don’t worry about the dog. She can stay at our house. I wanted to hug them. 

Then my husband went to pick up the pizzas. He said the workers were high-fiving each other. He could hear Nick in the backroom going on about how great his team was for getting this stranger Jody’s pizza order all put together on time.

By now people were knocking on the door, closing up their umbrellas, kicking off their wet shoes. Somehow there was enough room inside and enough pizza. When the party was over and everyone left with the leftovers and books and plants, I couldn’t remember what all the stress was about. These were my friends, are my friends. 

I am so glad we had one last chance to say goodbye. 

Can I Live Here

The ferry was pulling in when we arrived in the town. The lake was very blue, the mountains on the other side, gray green. A family strolled by, eating ice cream cones. I was thinking, Can I live here? A fair question to ask because my husband and I are on a house hunting trip, and this is the place where we are planning to live. It was a long drive up. 

We had to break it into two days. In the morning we went to the title company office and closed on the house where we have been living, in a city where we lived for nineteen years. It was a funny feeling driving away, knowing that for the moment we are floating around in a no-permanent-address limbo space. 

It’s like you’re on a flying trapeze, my friend Deb said. She’s a head of a school and is about to retire (another limbo-y space) but first she has to give a send-off to her graduating seniors. She said, This is exciting. You’re flying along, about to let go of one ring before you can grab onto the next. 

I hope there’s a net, I said, and we both laughed. 

Our son and daughter-in-law live in this town, and we all took a walk along the lake. There’s the library. There’s the post office, the ice cream place, the old inn. I’ve visited several times and already knew the layout, but now I was looking at it through a different lens. Resident vs tourist. Can I live here? I was thinking about the first time we bought a house, how young we were and how clueless, scrabbling together a down payment, but possibly in over our heads. 

The day of the closing, we drove up to the house to do a walk through and I burst into tears. The lawn was overgrown since we’d last seen it. And we didn’t own a lawn mower! Oh my God, now we would have to buy a lawn mower! The realtor couple we were working with were very nice. The wife said, Let’s go to the closing and not worry about this right now. 

When it was over and we had signed all the thousands of papers, I was sick to my stomach. How much money we owed and could we really afford the monthly payments and how were we going to pay for a lawn mower on top of it all? The realtor drove us back the house, our house now, and her husband was out there in his suit, just finishing up mowing the lawn. I started crying again. 

Cut to many years and two kids later and we were a few days into another new house. It was Thanksgiving and the day was bleak and cold. The big tree in our new front yard had shed all of its leaves at once. We had no guests for the holiday. It was only the four of us, the kids, my husband in his new job, me with no job, all of us trying to figure out our way in this new place. 

I was looking out the big picture window at the yard, a pit growing in my stomach. Had we even unpacked the rakes yet? A low hum, and into the picture window frame, came a neighbor on his riding lawn mower, scooping up all the leaves.  

People are kind is what I am saying, in every time, in every place. But it is jarring, this moment in flight, the moving van packed up, the house you loved empty, your heart still holding on, the new house whirling toward you, but for now, unknown, uncaught. 

We take another turn around the little town, the ferry pulling in again, the lake so bright you have to blink. 

We can live here. 

Goodbye, Strangers

I read something online about how just a few minutes each day interacting with strangers can uplift your mood and make your overall quality of life better. The key point seems to be that sure, you may have quite a few lovely relationships with family, with good friends, but those one-minute conversations with strangers remind you that most people are generally kind, that we are all part of one community, and the world is not always a scary dark place. 

I want to believe this. I should. It’s what I experience every day at the library. What they don’t tell you is that eventually these people start to feel like friends and what happens when you move away and have to say goodbye to everyone? Which got me thinking: maybe I’ll just tiptoe out the door and not tell anyone. 

But word got out. Some of the kids scribbled cards. One of the cards was signed by the two little kids in the family and a name I didn’t recognize. It took me a minute to realize it was the nanny. Here I had been chatting with her for years and never knew. She hugged me. She said, who will give me book recommendations now? 

Write to me, I said, and I shared with her a final rec, The Correspondent. Then I went home and slumped on the couch with the dog and tried to gear myself up to keep packing. I don’t want to poke fun of my husband, but the other day someone asked us how things were going along with the packing, and he said, in a confident tone, “We’re about 80 percent done.”

I almost fell out of my chair. 

He said, What? 

I said, You’re forgetting all the stuff in the closets and the drawers and weirdo room in the basement with the sump pump. Plus, all the pictures hanging on the walls and the lamps and the three sets of dishes we have. Why do we have three sets of dishes? It’s crazy. Also, we own approximately two thousand glass jars, because remember at our old house when we had the freaky moth infestation that originated in the box of brown rice and we vowed never to bring food boxes into our home ever again and from then on transferred all of our non-perishable food into glass jars with tightly fitting lids?

Oh right, he said.

I heaved off the couch and spun around the room, building boxes to fill, tearing up my fingertips on the $^#&%^ tape dispenser. Pro tip on the packing: you can use soft items, like towels, sheets and your floofy sweaters to wrap your breakable things. I imagine this will be a fun surprise on the other end when we find our old DVD player wrapped in a bathmat and the china cups stuffed inside our socks and nestled in my bathrobe.  

But we’ll worry about that later. 

Meanwhile, I’ll keep saying goodbye to strangers. The mailman who jokes every afternoon about how much our dog loves him (this is a joke because the dog is barking like a maniac and the only thing keeping the mailman from certain death is a flimsy screen door and the fact that the dog is 90 years old in dog years). And the lady at the farmer’s market who each week sets aside a carrot cake flavored crescent roll for my husband (when we told her we were moving out of state, she wrote out the recipe for him). 

And the mom at the library who I met when the kids were four and two and newborn and now the older two are in school and the newborn is four and there’s another baby on the way. 

Friday the four-year old skipped up to my desk with a gift bag. Inside was a ceramic mug decorated with books, and I almost cried. 

How breakable this beautiful mug was and how carefully I’d need to pack it to carry it with me. 

Passing Through

We’re moving in four weeks but I planted lettuce. I planted lettuce because it’s spring and that’s what I do in spring and I need one thing to be normal. Also, I sowed spinach and weeded the flower beds and pruned the raspberry bushes. 

Listen, I want to tell the new owners, if you keep harvesting the lettuce and spinach, it’ll keep growing well into June. And just wait until all the raspberries start popping up. And I guess I should give them a word of advice about the toad that hangs out in the herb garden (he scares easily, so no sudden movements when you’re clipping back the oregano), and the multi-generational mourning dove family that nests on the back porch and frequents the bird bath. (They like that water to be clean, please.) 

I should make a list. How there’s a secret peony bush tucked behind the garage and a clover patch in the front yard where practically every other clover has four leaves. I’m not exaggerating. Look:

Meanwhile at the library where I work, I have been jotting down my daily tasks for the person who will take my place. When to clean the toys and tricks for hiding the scavenger hunt pieces and where the Youth Librarian keeps the special stash of glow-in-the-dark stickers. Oh, and the little seven-month-old who comes in every Monday with her grandparents? She will eye you suspiciously for five weeks but then suddenly, she will smile, and one day, when you’re across the room arranging a book display, she will give you a whole arm wave. 

Wait, said my husband. Why did you plant the lettuce, when we won’t be here to eat it? 

What can I say? Why prune the raspberry bushes or worry over the toad? Why do we do any of the things we do? Our last house we’d barely backed the moving truck out of the driveway and the new owners were hacking down the pine tree in the front yard. That tree held a hawks’ nest. You could see them sometimes, circling overhead, swooping and gliding, and who knows now where they’d land.  

But who am I to judge? When we bought our present house, we tore out the old owners’ koi pond. True, the filter was broken and the pond was mostly muck and rotting vegetation, but there were more koi than we realized darting around in the murk. I gave them away, but missed a few, scooped those into a bucket, and before I could find a home for them, they were gone. 

Snatched by a hawk, a birder friend said, when I confessed to her in tears. 

I left them out there like sitting ducks!

Hawks have to eat too, she reminded me. You gave them a gift. (This is the friend who I trust will always talk me down from a ledge.) 

Okay. But, but, but-- what if the new owners tear out the raspberries or forget to clean the bird bath or turf-grass over the four-leaf clover patch? 

(Jody. Meet ledge. Step down from it. Now.) 

My last Monday at the library, and I wave back at my little friend, and then it's home to a house I am just passing through, have always been passing through, 

on to plant something elsewhere, scattering seeds as I go. 

  

 

Moving

We’re moving. 

It was an idea my husband and I had for a while, and then it was a plan, and then, suddenly, it’s happening. We sold our house. 

Last weekend we put it on the market, and thought, maybe it will sell in a week, two weeks, a month. It took three days. So many people signed up to see it, we had to pack up the dog and flee the premises. We hid out in an Airbnb in German Village, which is a lovely neighborhood south of downtown Columbus. We’d visited a million times but never stayed there before. Why would we? It’s twelve minutes away from where we live.  

The Airbnb house was in an alley, and every time we stepped out, to walk the dog, to visit a café or poke around our favorite 32-room bookstore, we got turned around somehow and had to use the GPS on our phones to find our way back. The dog and I kept stumbling. The streets are made out of 150-year-old bricks and the sidewalk slabs are kicked up by tree roots. 

Also, it was non-stop with the phones pinging, the realtor giving us updates about our house showings, the potential buyer comments, a bidding war brewing. 

Is this really happening, we said to each other. Are we really doing this? 

We GPS-ed our way out to pick up dinner. We sat at the bar to order something to go. The restaurant was busy with kids dressed up for prom and tourists in town for some important sports thing we hadn’t realized was going on. 

Let’s get a glass of wine while we wait for our food, we said. Let’s get an appetizer to share. The bartender was funny. Why don’t you just admit you’re going to eat here, he said. 

We ate there and talked about the past. Other times we moved, the search for houses and new schools for the kids. The time I had to find an OBGYN, fast, because I was four days away from having a baby. The night we spent on the floor in sleeping bags because the moving van hadn’t arrived yet with our furniture. We talked about the present. The packing up and the saying goodbye to friends. 

The future, and what comes next?  

All weekend I was reading a book. The story was about two families who lived in the same town in Ohio for forty years. It’s about other things too. Family secrets and betrayals. One person saying I’m sorry, and the other person saying, It’s easy to say you’re sorry, but it doesn’t change anything. 

But I was still stuck on the part where the families went on living in the same place for forty years. I don’t know what that feels like. The longest I’ve gone without moving is twelve years. Sometimes it was not my choice. But just as often, it was my idea. What makes us want to stay? What makes us itch to go?  

We didn’t use our phones on the way back to the Airbnb. The truth is you can’t get lost in German Village, even with all the zigzagging alleyways, the blur of brick and stone. Eventually, you always end up at the park or the sausage restaurant, and from there you can find your way anywhere. 

The realtor called and we accepted an offer and drove the twelve minutes home, to the house that in a few weeks will no longer be ours. 

This is scary, we said to each other. 

This is an adventure. 

Countdown

I am not a creative genius, but apparently 98 percent of the world’s five-year-olds are. I read this in a book. 

In the book it says they did a study. They tested the same five-year-olds a few years later and the creative-genius-ness had leaked out of half of them. By the time the group made it to adulthood, it was 2 percent. What happens during that time? Who knows. School and thinking you have to come up with the particular right answer? Social pressure and not wanting to stand out like a weirdo? Creative geniuses don’t care if they sound like weirdos. 

I was chatting about this with a preschool teacher who was visiting the library with her class of five-year-olds. The five-year-olds were skipping around shaking tambourines. They didn’t seem to care about coming up with the right answer or worrying if they looked like weirdos. The librarian had given me a tambourine to shake, and I shook it and felt like a weirdo. 

Why are so many five-year-olds creative geniuses? the preschool teacher asked me.  

They think outside of the box, I said. They don’t even know there is a box.

Meanwhile, I was feeling jittery. I can’t remember if I wrote about this, but my husband is making plans to retire. He has a countdown on his phone. The number at this moment is two months, 7 days, 7 hours, 13 minutes and 42 seconds. 

41 seconds. 38. 

35. 

Shh. Don’t tell anyone. He hasn’t told people at his work yet. Also, he might still change his mind. He is leaving his options open. 

I am keeping my options open too. It hit me that every decade of our lives, we have shaken things up. We moved to different states, tried out different houses and neighborhoods, had children, adopted pets. My husband has had a job with the same company for thirty-six years, but during that time, I’ve had multiple jobs. I was a high school English teacher, a PTA mom, a clerk at a children’s bookstore, an author who went on a book tour through California and spur of the moment, got a tattoo of a foot on my foot. 

I’ve never stayed at the same job for more than seven years. Unless you count motherhood and writing. Which, or course, I do. But listen, I have worked at my present library job for seven years. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. 

The end of another decade is looming. The world is nutty. Some people I loved have passed on. The jittery feeling is telling me it’s time to make a change. Think outside of the box. Or, forget the box. 

I am not a creative genius, and I am a light-years-away from being a five-year-old, but standing here shaking my tambourine, I have a sudden desire to skip.

     

 

  

Nettled

Today is the day I am picking the stinging nettles and eating them. 

I am writing this now, so you can hold me to it. Although, already, I can feel myself slipping. The truth is I am afraid of the stinging nettles. I can’t remember what I was thinking planting them. Something I read in one of my herb books about how they’re chock full of nutrients? And after a cold dreary winter they’re often the first shoot of green in the garden? And something something about medicinal tea and helping with arthritis? Or the kidneys? I can’t remember. 

Three years ago, four, I bought an adorable nettles seedling at the farmers market and planted it in a pot in the back of the herb garden, but I haven’t touched it since. Except one time, I did brush against it, briefly, on my way toward something else, and it was like I was shot with a stun gun. Not that I have ever been shot with a stun gun, but I can imagine. 

I steered clear after that, but then, a couple of years ago, I actually ate a nettle salad at a farm my husband and I visited with our son and daughter-in-law way up in up-up-up state New York. The nettle salad was tasty, and I gushed about it to the farmer-host. But also, I had to ask the guy, How did you pick these without feeling like you were being shot with a stun gun?

I can’t remember what he said. Okay, I looked it up. You’re supposed to wear heavy gloves. You dunk the nettles in boiling water for one to two minutes. You immediately plunge them in ice cold water. Supposedly, this removes the sting. 

(nettles)

I am really going to do this now. 

But first, I am going to fortify myself with a second cup of coffee. While I’m drinking it, I want to tell you a story about how the other day a stranger came to the door wanting to give me a magazine. The magazine had something to do with aviation. I have seen this magazine before, stuffed inside my Little Free Library. Every few months, a new issue. I’d let it sit out there and after a while, I’d toss it in the recycle bin. How many pilots live in this neighborhood, is what I was thinking. 

Anyway, as it turns out, it isn’t a magazine for airline pilots. It’s a magazine for pilots of model airplanes. What the guy wanted to tell me was that he subscribed to the magazine and he loved it and he wanted to pass his joy on to other potential model aviation enthusiasts, so he’d been putting it in my Little Free Library and whenever he checked, the old issues had been snapped up. 

He was so excited, he wrote to the magazine, and they featured my little free library. Here, he said, and he gave me a copy to thank me for being a part of our neighborhood’s fledgling model aviation community. 

Did you tell him? My husband said, after I relayed the conversation. Meaning, did I tell the guy that there likely wasn’t another model aviation enthusiast in the neighborhood. It was just me, recycling the magazines without a glance. 

Oh my God no, I said, and a wave of guilt due to my callous disregard for other people’s passions crashed over me. 

I did it. 

I donned a long sleeve shirt and went outside with the gloves, and I glovingly grabbed the nettles. 

I dunked them in the boiling water for two minutes. I plunged them in ice cold water. My husband tossed them into our seafood gumbo dinner bowl, and we ate them.  

They were tasty, and now that I am chock full of nutrients, here’s something else I promise to do: The next time my neighbor leaves a copy of Model Aviation in my Little Free Library, I’ll leave it there. 

 

This Spring

A few nights ago, the dog was sick and I let her outside. She didn’t come back in, so I went out to look for her. It was 2:30 in the morning. I was in my bathrobe and roaming around the backyard until I found her. She was lying on her side in the grass. It was raining. She hates the rain. This is it, I thought. But it wasn’t it. 

I took her to the vet the next day, and after paying approximately ten million dollars, she was better. I sat with her on the couch and she did this thing where she lowers her head and pushes it against me and I kiss her ears and tell her I love her. Then she curled up next to me, and I read the book I was reading. 

The book is about two sisters who stop speaking to each other at the funeral of a third sister. The disagreement has something to do with a cake. For the rest of the book the sisters continue to not speak to each other. Each chapter is a story about a different family member, the sisters’ children and grandchildren. Story after story, and you know a little bit about everyone in the family, and you forget what happened at the beginning. Why did the sisters stop speaking to each other?  

I was savoring this book. The writing was lovely and funny and smart. I loved all of the people, even as annoying and ridiculous as they sometimes were. When I got to the end, I went back to the beginning and read the first chapter again—the funeral, the cake. 

I remembered why the sisters stopped speaking to each other, and I understood. Some things are unforgiveable, and even if you could forgive them, how do you forget? 

I took the dog for a slow walk where I let her sniff to her heart’s content while I searched for signs of trouble. Her back legs wobbling? Her poops a little smushier than normal? But there was nothing. It was like that terrible night in the rain had never happened. 

Except it did happen. 

When I was sitting with her in the vet’s office, she paced and cried and panted. We don’t always know with an old dog, the vet said. There are things we can try. Tests. Procedures. It’s up to you, she added. 

I knew what she was saying. How far was I willing to go to deny reality. 

All the way, I would’ve told you once, but I am no longer that person. Sometimes bad things happen that aren’t fixable. Sick pets. Families that splinter apart. Still, I paid the approximately ten million dollars and we did the tests and one small procedure. 

Back home and the dog is happy and the trees in our front yard have turned pink, turned white, turned green. The lettuce I planted weeks ago didn’t come up and didn’t come up and didn’t come up, but now suddenly, it's here. I don't know why I doubted it.  

In spring, spring comes. It’s one of the few things I know for sure. But today, that feels like a miracle.