by Lynn Darling
Learning the ways of the little Defiant, sitting like a squat toad in the trim brick fireplace, began to change all that. I began to move with the rhythms of this more demanding, more physical way of living, where light and weather dictated the day’s routine. In the mornings, on days that promised sunshine, I would do the laundry. The afternoons yielded earlier and earlier to shadow, and the low light that shot under the clouds struck everything gold before swallowing the house in darkness, save for the one pool of light where I worked or read.
The coming cold meant other challenges: I was not the only one who spent more time indoors. In the evenings, I began to hear a low thunder overhead in the rafters, like a tiny herd of migrating wildebeest. I thought I could live with the invisible hordes, as long as they stayed invisible, but one evening I opened the kitchen cupboard to find one of my coinhabitants looking back. A mouse stood on the shelf, holding a bit of cracker in his paws. He peered at me curiously, as if to ask if there was something he could do for me. I was flummoxed. I thought of mice as timid creatures, instantly put to flight by a human’s terrifying immensity. But the mouse didn’t move, not even when I yelped and jumped back about a foot and a half. After that we stared at each other for a beat. You might at least have the decency to act scared, I said out loud.
I was willing to ignore one mouse, but of course there wasn’t just one mouse, and they became increasingly bold—one ambled across the kitchen floor, right past the nose of the sleeping Henry, who opened a single eye to follow the little beastie’s progress before going back to sleep.
I got lots of advice, all of it pretty drastic: kill them, kill them before they take over the world! At the hardware store there was an entire shelf devoted to mouse eradication, catering to every temperament. There were poisons that induced varying degrees of painful deaths and traps of all sorts, some of them covered in glue, which left the victim alive to starve to death, some of them spring-loaded, which afforded a quicker end. Some exposed the corpses to view; still others functioned more like little hot-sheet motels, where the mouse crawled in and you didn’t have to see what happened next, though you could hear the struggle. There were electronic devices that promised to drive the mice away with a high-pitched sound, and organic sachets full of herbs that mice allegedly hated. My friend Lisa suggested what she called “The Stairway to Heaven”: she and her boyfriend had devised a little gangplank that led up to the lip of a toilet in their country house. The mice crawled up and drowned in the toilet bowl, where they could easily be flushed away.
I bought all of them. I tried the electronic gadget, which simply wasted electricity I didn’t have, and the herbal sachets, which the mice treated as palate cleansers. But the poisons and the traps all stayed on the shelf.
It was hard to dislike these mice. They didn’t look or act like New York mice, all scruffy and worn and harried from the stress of making it in the big city. They looked like Disney mice, small and plump and glossy and bright-eyed. They were absurdly cute; I couldn’t bear to hurt them. Besides, they were company. I wasn’t proud of this admission, and I was pretty sure it qualified me as the ultimate pathetic flatlander, until I met a man at a dinner party much later. He was a tough, native-born guy, a hunter, a Vietnam vet with a reputation for no nonsense. But when I met him he had softened considerably—he had recently married again, and he still looked at his bride with the expression of someone who simply couldn’t believe his good luck. Before he met her, he said, he had been so lonely that he had made friends with one of the mice in his house. Every evening he would put a piece of cheese on his coffee table so he had some company while he read the paper.
Dean, Harriet’s husband, suggested I try the West Lebanon Feed and Supply Store if I was looking for the kind of traps that left their occupants alive. He mentioned the place as if it were a store like any other store, but in fact West Lebanon Feed and Supply, to a newcomer, was an Ali Baba’s Cave of Wonders, exotic and marvelous, one that catered to every rank and degree and nuance of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, addressing every peril and perk of life in the country.
You could buy anything at West Lebanon Feed—horse vitamins and dog food and boots for mucking out stables, leashes and bridles and fireproof gloves, ointments that would heal the crumpled horns of breeding cows, or repair the inflamed anuses of baby pigs, and complicated devices, festooned with pulleys and cranks, for pulling balky lambs out of their mothers. There were flowering bulbs and fertilizers and potions to encourage the most finicky plants. There were bird feeders of every variety and different kinds of seeds designed to attract songbirds and hummingbirds and nesting birds. Simply walking down the aisles made me happy. I left the place with a half-dozen Havahart live-capture mousetraps, more toys than Henry would ever need, and a fifty-pound bag of birdseed.
I laid the traps in strategically chosen corners of the kitchen and the pantry and I caught a lot of mice in the beginning. But mouse trapping is a labor-intensive business—mice, I learned, must eat frequently, so if you didn’t want them to die of starvation, the traps had to be checked frequently and the mice released quickly. On the other hand, you couldn’t let them go in the front yard, or they simply made a beeline for the house. For a while I got up every morning and walked down the hill with my traps to release the mice into the woods, where it probably took them all of an hour or two to make their way back. Then, suddenly, the mice disappeared. I rejoiced—could they possibly have learned their lesson and moved on? No, as it turned out. The next time I went out to the garage I found the contents of the fifty-pound bag of birdseed spilling onto the cement floor, courtesy of a neatly chewed hole at the bottom of the sack. I went to fetch the broom and dustpan but stopped short. It occurred to me that the mice and I had found a compromise: the mice stayed out of the kitchen, and I stayed out of the garage.
That first fall in Vermont was like learning to live all over again, figuring out what it meant to take care of myself. It’s a lesson we sometimes need to learn more than once. I had a friend whose girlfriend left him after a relationship of many years. He was in shock; he hadn’t seen it coming. He had met her in college, and they had lived together ever since. Now he was almost forty. I have to figure everything out, he had said, shaking his head at the enormity of it. This morning I got up and went to make coffee and then I wondered—Am I the kind of guy who makes espresso? Or am I the kind of guy who buys his coffee from a truck on the street? He had no idea who he was on his own.
I had learned how to stay warm, and that initial attempt at comfort led to others, equally basic, equally important. When I had first moved into Castle Dismal, I stopped making real meals for myself, partly because it had been hot and partly because it didn’t seem to make sense without Zoë. I lived on cans of tuna and frozen dinners. But now I began to cook again, comfort food for cold weather: squash soup and baked apples, lentil stew, chicken with rice. And for me, cooking has always demanded music: you can’t cook if you can’t dance. In the beginning, the rooms had been under a spell of silence I couldn’t break, as if I were a monk, abiding by the rules of an unseen abbot, but now I listened to my old favorites, the Cowboy Junkies, Dylan, Coltrane, as the pot on the stove simmered and the smell of something good replaced the caustic odors of paint and sawdust and the fire glowed in the woodstove.
There were days of putting down small filaments of routine as well. The voracious porcupine that cut the cable line and destroyed the Internet led me to the village library, an impressively pillared pile built in 1883 and named after a veteran of the War of 1812. It was a place to do research and get e-mail and be in the company of others. When school let out and the library got crowded I walked across the village green to the Whippletree Yarn Shop, and sat at a table and knit socks, and chatted with the owners: Shelley, just recovering from the end of a thirty-year marriage, and Andrea, whose giant schnauzer sometimes slept in the corner. Andrea in turn led me to Runamuck—I was looking for a place for Henry to play when I worked in the library, so he could be
around other dogs, and Andrea directed me to a recently opened animal boarding and day care business just north of the village on Route 12.
Runamuck consisted of a shambling old house on the side of a hill, the right side of which was occupied by Cathy and John Peters and their two children, three-year-old Ondine and infant Amelia, and the left side of which belonged to an ever-changing assortment of dogs (first floor) and cats (top floor). Out back was an enormous yard separated by a chain-link fence from grazing sheep and their guardian donkey, while the front of the house was dominated by the big yellow school bus John drove to make ends meet.
Henry took to the place immediately, and for a few days a week I had a schedule. I would take Henry to Runamuck early in the morning, talk to Cathy, a young woman with an imperturbable calm in the maelstrom of small children, barking dogs, spilled Cheerios, and ringing phones, or sit on the floor with Ondine—she was teaching me how to draw with crayons, and I was proving to be a very backward student. After that the day was mine, to go to the library and the yarn store, or back home to work, or to run errands, stopping off at the post office in South Woodstock to gossip with Jena the postmistress or to simply sit at one of the wooden tables in the South Woodstock Country Store and pretend to read while the regulars, big weathered men in thick plaid flannel, would discuss the prospects for the hay or the price of gas. Then at the end of the afternoon, I would make the rounds of the butcher and grocery store and the town’s recycling center before heading back to Runamuck and a bounding welcome from Henry. The drive home against the cold, against the dark, made the prospect of homecoming all the sweeter—Halloween was drawing near, and there is no place spookier than New England at Halloween, especially in a place where the houses along the way are mostly dark and shuttered. (On some of the back roads, the inhabited houses were scarier than the empty ones—for a while I avoided taking one of my usual routes home after the only house in view put up a single decoration: a witch hanging from a homemade gallows.)
After dinner, right before bed, Henry went outside for his last walk of the day, and I accompanied him to take a final look at the night sky, to catch a glimpse of the distant silver crescent high in the sky to the east, or, if the time was right, at the fat full moon suspended low, surely close enough to touch. Bathed in that moonlight, I was content.
Looking back, of course, I see that I was recasting this new life in terms of the old—with trips to Runamuck substituting for my old routine of Zoë’s school pickup and drop-off. No matter—the library, the post office, the yarn store, the doggy day care center—these were my first waypoints, the landmarks by which I could steer a course. Here were moorings—wobbly perhaps, but anchored—on a new map where I could knit myself, however tangentially, into the lives of others: watching Jena bloom after meeting a man she liked, or Allison grieving for her old dog, or commiserating with Holly, co-owner, with her brother Dan, of the general store, over the emotional ups and downs of our daughters’ freshman trials and tribulations.
One morning I woke to a white world. It had snowed during the night, just a frosting, but the world was transformed, a dazzle of light and silvery branches and bitter cold. That morning my fingers stiffened and the sheets turned to cardboard on the clothesline and when I brought them in again they smelled of snow and pine. On the eaves, thick icicles had formed; I broke one off and gave it to Henry. He nearly keeled over with delight.
The snow brought its own difficulties—the ice-glazed snow was slippery, and it took a long time to find kindling dry enough to get the fire going; by the time I got back inside I was wet and full of complaint. And yet the ice-clotted trees, the cracking sound of breaking branches, the roaring wind and scudding clouds, were beautiful. Wasn’t it better to be walking through slippery snow after some sticks of wood than to be trudging in the rain at rush hour to the corner store for milk? I am liking it here, I thought, a little startled.
5
A Gibbous Moon
Say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
—C. P. CAVAFY, “The God Abandons Antony”
In November I went to New York for a long weekend. I had looked forward to the trip, to seeing Zoë most of all, but also to being in New York again, surrounded by the familiar.
I drove down a few days before her fall break started. At first the frantic city provided no comfort: the brazen storefronts with their lascivious mannequins, the billboards with their insistence that happiness consisted of tight clothes, expensive drinks, and women who would do anything to get them, were now nearly as foreign as lineaments for the nether regions of pigs. But gradually the culture shock faded and the knowledge that I was happy to be back asserted itself in a worrying sort of way. I had wanted not to like New York; I didn’t want to be tempted away from Vermont.
And then Zoë arrived, and the little hive that had been my life buzzed back to life. The apartment was full of her friends and music and news, the days filled with the city’s kaleidoscopic images: an art exhibit set in a pet store and featuring animatronic food; playing cribbage in the park while a lonesome fat guy wandered about with five green parrots on his head and shoulders and a poet pecked at a typewriter producing verses on demand; a young father holding his infant high in the air, smiling; the well-dressed wedding guests spilling out of a church on Christopher Street.
The last night of her visit, I had Zoë to myself. I had seen her only a few times since school began. In the early weeks of the semester she had called often, nearly every day, and nearly always when she was in crisis. Her class schedule would never work! First-year Russian and English symbolism conflicted—her academic aspirations were in flames! The drawing class was oversubscribed! The boys were drunken, fatheaded jocks! The girls wore sweatpants to class! I would give her the best advice I could and try to soothe her and then spend the rest of the day worrying. When I didn’t hear from her, I was frantic, imagining her weeping into the red throw I had knitted. If the silence went on too long, heart in throat, I would call, and she would answer, sounding a little offhand, a little distracted, nothing like the hysterical child I had envisioned. Tentatively I would ask how she was. She was fine, she answered, as if this was an odd question, which for the sake of our long association she was willing to entertain. I mentioned the despair, the friendlessness, the lack of meaning in a meaningless world. Oh that, she said. Everything’s fine. Could she call me later? She and six dozen pals were on their way to a party.
“You see, the good news is that they still need you,” said my friend Susan. “The bad news is that they only want to talk to you when they need you.”
Those calls had some benefit—I began to appreciate the distance. And sometimes, when I stood behind some highly strung stylish mother grappling with her rude seven-year-old in the local bookstore, wavering between polite admonishment for the benefit of onlookers and the urge to throttle the kid right there in line, I had to smile, glad to be exempt from at least some aspects of parenthood, to acknowledge that it was time for my daughter and me to go our separate ways.
But I forgot all that, lying next to her on the bed watching some dumb TV show we both loved. She was happier at school now—she had a close-knit group of friends, she was working on the school newspaper, she loved her classes. She was changing, growing up, and for the first time I had not been a day-to-day witness to the anecdotes and insights that were shaping her. The next morning she would be gone. I braced for the jolt of misery that should accompany that thought, but it didn’t come. Instead, I thought of how, when I bent down to kiss her good night on her forehead, she still carried a faint trace of the scent that had been hers since the day she was born. I had not lost her. I never could.
I drove back to Vermont the next day and reached Castle Dismal late in the evening. The house was cold and dark. I groped for the wall swi
tch. The house remained cold and dark. Something was wrong with the generator again. By candlelight I lit a fire in the woodstove and unrolled the sleeping bag and settled down to watch the flames and think about New York.
Yes, it had been lovely to wear nice clothes again and to watch the pageant of the streets, lovelier still to be back in the middle of things, to be connected, to be vital to someone. But I wasn’t unhappy where I was, lying on the floor of a freezing cold house in the fitful firelight. There was something equally necessary here: the winter was coming, in the woods, in my life, a time when much happens out of sight. It would take some getting used to, but wasn’t it possible that once I had, the perspective here at the margins would be as interesting as it was from the center, if not more so?
Growing old meant inevitable loss, yes, but that wasn’t all it meant. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to be done but to live through this time, to take possession of my grief, to claim sovereignty over my own sadness. One thing the country reminds you of forcefully is this: the darkness is as necessary as the light and must be met on its own terms.
Outside the window I caught the blurred outlines of a gibbous moon, but whether it was waxing or waning—and that night I very much wanted it to be waxing—I couldn’t tell.
By the end of December, loneliness had begun to give way to a more comfortable solitude, the kind I had been hoping for, in which I was, for better or worse, most truly myself. In the fairy tales, in the old stories of wanderers and hermits, the forest was a secret, mysterious place of testing and transformation, where castoffs found their birthrights and wronged innocents their defenders. But there have always been those who repaired to the wilderness hoping for less miraculous results, who looked to Lenten seasons, untouched by daily distractions, as a way of coming to terms with themselves and their choices. Admiral Richard Byrd, the polar explorer, spent the winter of 1934 alone in an advanced weather base in the Antarctic. Apart from the scientific research he was doing, he wrote later, “I had no important purposes. There was nothing of that sort. Nothing whatever, except one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to know how good they really are.”