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.