don’t have to do this—not now, love,” I said gently. “Let’s have a cup of tea and then go to bed.”
To my surprise, she nodded and stepped out of the mess of objects into my arms. I led her by the hand to the couch in the living room, as if a stranger might still be lurking around a corner, and threw a blanket over her while I prepared mint tea for each of us. It was cold downstairs. We had turned the woodstove on earlier that week for the first time, but it had burned out hours before. I focused on making the tea, unsure of whether I was angry or frightened.
It wasn’t uncommon for Pia to find inspiration at odd hours or obsess over a project for a few frantic days. Those episodes were exciting for her, but never upsetting. And often they really did produce something inspired, like the time Pia made an entire quilt to hang on the wall in our old apartment. She had taken a workshop in abstract quilting and spent hundreds of dollars at the fabric store. Oddly shaped strips of colorful torn fabric shed threads around the living room for days, until one sleepless night, I awoke to find a striking quilt the size of an entire wall draped around her as she trimmed stray ends. The vibrant colors danced together in an explosive design that looked something like a sunrise. It hung in our apartment for two years, until we moved to Vermont. The quilt was a symbol of Pia’s exuberance and artistic gifts. I don’t know why we hadn’t hung it yet in our new home, but I missed it as we drank tea on the couch. The quilt always helped to explain and excuse the erratic aspects of passionate Pia.
We sat quietly for a while, staring forward at the inert television.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I don’t like this about myself. I wish I could change it.”
I hugged her. “I know.”
“I’m just...scared. I can’t explain why.”
I wanted to be entirely there for her, to dedicate myself to conquering the internal and external threats that frightened her. But I was scared, too. The future that we’d planned for had been unmoored by the storm reports, and I wanted comfort now, as well. I didn’t know where self-care ended and selfishness began or what my obligation to my wife should have been then. I only knew that suddenly I didn’t have that selflessness in me. I was afraid, too.
We shivered together under a blanket, each privately fearing the changes afoot.
“I THINK YOUR joists are rotting,” August said with authority. “I’ve seen this before.”
We were on our knees in the backyard examining the underbelly of the porch steps, which appeared to be melting into the earth. This was the sort of handyman challenge that little August excelled at. In all his solo wanderings to neighbors’ homes and nearby farms, he’d gleaned useful information about just this sort of thing, so I was happy to have him close by as we tinkered. Plus it was an effortless way to keep an eye on him under the new arrangement.
I squinted to see deeper into the dank cavern. “Do you think we need to rebuild the steps entirely, or can we just replace a few of those pieces?” I asked. I had no idea how to do either of those things.
August stood up and put his finger in the air like a cartoon character signaling that a big idea had hit him. “We should go see Peg! She has a buttload of leftover wood from when she fixed the doors on the stable. It’s walnut, which is wicked hard. I’ll show you how much it hurts when we punch it.”
Lacking any other ideas and curious to meet our neighbor Peg, who lived just through the woods on the other side, I agreed and followed August’s determined march toward the road. Pia was reading a book about candle making inside and seemed happy to have us out of the house, so I didn’t bother disturbing her.
It was late Sunday afternoon on November 3 and the autumn cold had finally arrived. I wanted to bundle August up in one of our extra winter coats, but that wasn’t the kind of relationship we had; not yet. We both watched the sky as we walked, which was as magnificent as any I had ever seen that time of year. We were entering the part of fall when everything shifts to gray. It’s a transitional period between the fiery explosions of foliage and the austerity of winter, and you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention—but everyone was paying attention in those days. The sky wasn’t steely as it should have been, but speckled pink as if a firecracker was suspended in the clouds. It had something to do with the wild temperature fluctuations and the hurricane that was, on that day, attacking the Carolinas. The effect looked magnificent and felt eerie as we walked along the road.
Although Peg was our immediate neighbor, I’d had very few interactions with her and knew virtually nothing about her life. As far as I could tell, she was a busy sixtysomething woman with a lingering Irish accent and no immediate family nearby. Even August was light on details about her. Some people move to the woods to be left alone and I assumed Peg was one of those people. So it was a surprise when she opened the door with a big smile and personable ease.
We stepped inside to find that Peg was involved in an elaborate applesauce-canning project, which she left unattended to make tea for the three of us. Because of the applesauce, we were surrounded by a heady fairy-tale scent, but hers was not the home of a kindly granny. Everywhere I looked, there were artifacts from different parts of the world—African masks, Chinese vases, tiny Russian dolls swimming in a bowl with stray pennies and paper clips. It was dizzying but beautiful and utterly natural, not the curated gallery of someone looking to impress. This was the cluttered house of a woman who’d lived a full life.
August and I immediately forgot the purpose of our trip and instead drank tea on worn, mismatched furniture in the living room while Peg told us about the objects around us and the circumstances of their acquisition. August had never been inside her house either, and he peppered her with one breathless question after another, which relieved me of the job. She gestured constantly while she spoke, pointing to trinkets and tucking behind her ear the stray gray hair that kept falling from a loose ponytail. I noticed that her clothes looked as if she might be scheduled for a safari later that day. She wore a white linen shirt tucked into those polyester khakis that looked like rain would slide right off them. They had multiple pockets of varying sizes that I assumed were intended for compasses and jackknives.
Peg was a botanist and a professor at Lyndon State College. She had published two books on the reproductive patterns of conifers and lived in several countries, which she would drop into the conversation like afterthoughts (“that was when I was in the Philippines, which has a sensational culture but disappointing food...”). She never married, but there were pictures of a younger Peg with tanned men in adventurous settings displayed around her home. August inquired about a large instrument that occupied the corner of the living room and she explained that she played the cello in a local ensemble “not terribly well.”
I loved Peg immediately. She was expressive and a little kooky but obviously smart and accomplished. I wondered about the men who appeared in her pictures. She seemed like the type who might casually refer to them as having been lovers, a word that made me shudder but seemed completely natural on her. I also liked that Peg had made her way from Ireland, around most of the globe, to Isole—and that she seemed to think it was as wonderful as I did.
“And what about you, Ash?” Peg asked, picking up her teacup after a summary of her time spent studying shrubs in Senegal. “What brings you here?”
I wished I had something less conventional to tell Peg than the fact that I was returning to my home state to eat organic food with my lovely wife, who’d been acting strange lately. Instead, I gave her a version of the truth that emphasized my love of nature and new furniture-making hobby, which I thought might make me seem slightly less boring.
“You didn’t like New York?” she asked.
“Oh, no, I love New York,” I replied. “The energy and the culture... I know it’s a cliché, but all the things people say are great about New York really are great. I will definitely miss it.”
“Then why did you leave?”
“Well, Pia and I had always dreamed of