Yard Work

It’s a beautiful fall day, and I am outside doing yard work. 

A row of cedar trees in front of our house needs pruning, the branches twisted and bunched up in a way that is quickly driving me crazy. It takes hours over several days to cut out all of the dead bits and pieces, and then I have to break it down further to cram it into our car and haul it away. 

Meanwhile, I am listening to an audiobook called The Wreck. The book is a memoir about a family secret that seems to permeate every aspect of the writer’s life. Before she was born, her father’s family—wife, mother, sister, brother-in-law and niece—died in a terrible car wreck. The author looks very much like her grandmother and aunt. So much so, that when older relatives see her, they gasp. But what really happened the day of the wreck? I can’t stop listening to this book. 

My arms are scratched up from twigs snapping. I turn my ankle over a knotted tree stump. I bonk my head on a branch. I discover half buried plastic planters and the remnants of an ancient-looking stone wall. I’m thinking about the book I’m listening to, and at the same time, I’m plotting out the book I am trying to write. 

What is it about family secrets? How can you grow up knowing something bad happened and still feel completely in the dark about it? 

Neighbors walk by and make comments about my project. The gist of the comments boils down to: 

Wow! This is a big project! 

And, 

Why are you doing it? 

What I want to say is: Why does anyone do anything? Instead, I tell them that I'm enjoying the lovely fall day and I like doing yard work.

They tell me stories about the old cabin that used to be here. It sat right where the ragged row of cedars is. Also, the stone wall isn’t ancient. It was put in place twenty-five years ago when the cabin was torn down and the new house—our house now—was built. That’s when they planted the cedars.

You’re doing a good job with those things, one of the neighbors says. Clear out the old stuff, get some new life around here.  

They saunter past, and I grab my clippers and head back under the tangled trees. 

(After)

(Before) 

 

Raspberry Picking

Every day I go out into the field at a nearby farm to pick raspberries, and every day, there are more raspberries than I can pick. 

I walk between the rows, grabbing the ripest ones closest to me, eating one berry for every three or four that I toss into my basket. Bees buzz around my hands, but I’m not afraid of them. Should I be afraid of them? 

Are you allergic? A young friend asks me. She’s visiting this week, up in our neck of the woods for a string of college visits, and I’m along for the ride. This friend is a senior in high school and light years ahead of eighteen-year-old me in every way. 

No, I tell her.   

Then, you’re good.

She sets up the college tours online, signs herself up for the info sessions, comes downstairs in the morning dressed more fashionably and professionally than I have ever dressed in my life. Is there a gene for this? If so, I don’t have it. She takes my phone and finds the admissions office for the schools, taps in the locations, and hands the phone back to me. 

How long has it been since I’ve been on one of these tours? My own whirlwind visits a million years ago when I had no clue about college, only that I needed to go to one as far away from home as possible. The dozens of visits I took with my own kids, who were like my fun, smart, Gen Z (or whatever she is) visitor. Wise beyond their years, comfortable in their own skins, curious. 

I am curious too. What would it be like to go off to college now, to be starting out as a young person in this strange, crazy, dark world? How can a school help them navigate AI, climate change, fascism? (Of course, I don’t mention any of this to my young friend.) She loves the colleges we visit. I love them too! 

All of the possibilities. The classes to take. The clubs to join. The study abroad programs and internships. One school has its own ski mountain and you can take ski lessons for free. Another school has its own equestrian team. The campuses we tour are as different as can be, but also, somehow, exactly the same, the peppy tour guides walking backwards, spouting off stats about job opportunities and financial aid packages. 

We rehash the pros and cons of each school on the drive home, and then we head back to the farm and the raspberry field, where the raspberries are as abundant as ever. I have enough for today, but now I am picking for the future, freezing and storing for the winter that everyone up here keeps warning me about. 

I admit it. I'm afraid. The long dark days that are coming. The snow. The cold. But wouldn’t we be fools to let a day like this pass us by? 

The sun bright and warm on our faces. All of these bees buzzing. Our fingers stained with berry juices as we nudge aside the branches and reach for what we have been given. 

Still Life with Banana

All of the news this weekend is about AI accelerating and trying to kill humanity, but meanwhile, I am at a destination wedding in Maine where you can barely pick up a phone signal. 

The drive here was through a part of the country where I’d never been, on a ferry across Lake Champlain, and through the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We kept losing our GPS signal. Can they find us if we can’t find them? I bought a paper map at a gas station. 

I had it splayed out on my lap, and I kept running my finger over the road lines, trying to pin us down, but then I would look up and remember we are here in real life. The ferry cutting through choppy water, the mountains rising up. We were telling stories about ourselves, the friends we were going to see at the wedding, people we love. 

We went on a hike with them in the morning. The hike was called “moderate.” The trail wound past a beach and into the woods. It ended at an outcropping of boulders. 

But no, the trail continued, a splotch of blue paint at the top of the boulder pile indicating that was the way we should go. We all burst out laughing. We were supposed to climb that? And if this is a moderate hike, what is the strenuous version? 

We climbed the boulder pile. My friend had been eating a banana on the way, and now she was holding the banana peel, because this is a rule at the park, leave nothing behind. But the banana peel was making the climb more challenging, so we took turns carrying it. When it was my turn, I stopped on a ledge and held the peel up like it was a flag. 

The wind was blowing and you could smell the trees and the ocean. I took pictures and tried to send them to friends in other places, but my phone said No Signal. And where was the trail now? We found the blue paint mark far down below. I was marveling at these trail makers. Were they nuts or visionaries? And could we trust them? 

I let someone else take a turn with the banana peel. I was looking over at my friend. She’s the one getting married at this destination wedding, but for now, we were just two humans planning our descent down a mountain. 

We made it, with only a few stumbles. 

Teapot Trail

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

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

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

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

What. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six Things I Learned in Six Weeks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at us! 

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

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!