Out of the Woods Read Free Page B

in southern New Hampshire where my father had grown up.
    The decision to spend time in Woodstock alone was a last-minute idea, impelled by my daughter’s going to summer camp for the first time, by a July heat wave that made the prospect of an air conditioner–less loft in New York City unappetizing at best, and by the startling realization that for the first time in a very long time, I was facing a month in which I could do as I pleased.
    Parents lead contingent lives, the personal put on hold, decisions of what to do next based on the needs, well-being, and schedules of others. That summer when it changed—if only for a month—was, I see now, a small intimation of what lay waiting around the wide bend of my daughter’s childhood: the beginning of the rest of life.
    The house I rented, sight unseen, and selected from the scant few that were still available, reflected the extemporaneous nature of that decision: it was an odd little place, painted a violent shade of pink, which perched precariously on a narrow bit of ground above the wide shallow river that wound its way through the village.
    My temporary roost sported an eclectic conglomeration of architectural elements and was only sparsely furnished, the result of the recent divorce of the house’s owners. The bareness of the place appealed to me—as did, to a much more limited extent, the ex-husband. Angus was a Ph.D. in botany who worked nights as a waiter so that he could dedicate his days to . . . well, no one was really sure how he spent his days, beyond Rollerblading and executing ill-conceived, highly public pranks, usually performed in costume and received with irritated wonder by the village’s inhabitants. But he was a connoisseur of the country’s beauty: he once took me to a waterfall hidden deep in the forest, a place so lovely that you could almost believe that dryads and fairies were real, I observed. Angus looked at me with a faintly pitying surprise. “Of course they are,” he said.
    For the first time in years my hours were for hire, freelance agents ready for any employment. Zoë’s summer camp was one of those shoestring operations where the 1960s lingered on, sustained by large doses of Joni Mitchell and politically correct entertainments like the daylong reenactment of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was offered up under a broiling sun for Parents’ Visiting Day ceremonies. No cell phones or computers were permitted, which meant that Zoë and I were unbuckled from each other for the first time, apart from the handwritten letters detailing cold morning swims, mean girls, kind counselors, and an aggressive mold population that was slowly turning everything in her tent, including the inhabitants, an alarming shade of gray.
    Every morning I walked down the steep hill and bought coffee and a pastry from the somewhat self-consciously European but extremely good café and then trudged back up again, amazed at the spaciousness of the day ahead. In the beginning I took the coffee and the pastry up the winding stairs to the odd little crow’s nest of an office at the top of the house, where I tried to make headway on a book I was supposed to be writing, although most of the time I just watched the progress of the indefatigable wasp who was patiently attempting, so far unsuccessfully, to wedge himself through a gap in the screen that covered the window. In the afternoons I would calm my anxiety over the work I didn’t do by climbing Mount Tom, a gentle old hill laced on its southern side by an easy switchback that used to bring turn-of-the-century ladies and gentlemen up to the summit for the view. Or I would walk along the Ottauquechee River and up into the hills on rolling country roads, hypnotized by the green buzzing beauty of the place.
    In Woodstock I felt lighter, at least when I wasn’t trying to work. Here was a place where I was none of the things I had been, not widow nor