Out of the Woods by Lynn Darling

didn’t know whether the second cut was better or worse, and why it mattered. What was hay exactly? Such details had seemed exciting and curious once, but a visitor sees things differently than a stranger trying to settle down in a place, and Woodstock, as the days began to shorten and the nights to cool, seemed more alien to me than ever. There was so much I didn’t know.
    One day I had lunch with Lynne at the same coffee shop where I had first felt the urgent need to belong to this place. Over turkey soup she mentioned she would have a great deal more mulch this fall than she could ever use. Would I like to buy some from her?
    For some reason that was the moment when the strangeness of what I had done and where I had landed became overwhelming. Mulch? What the hell was mulch? I thought about faking it—I have all the mulch I need right now, thanks . . . I’ve decided not to mulch this season . . . mulch doesn’t go with my furniture—but I didn’t have it in me.
    I don’t know what that is, I said. And stupidly I started to cry. People keep telling me I’m brave, I told her. Why do they say that? Do they know something I don’t know?
    You’re a woman living alone in the middle of nowhere, Lynne said. Brave is polite for crazy.
    Â 
    T he more foreign Woodstock became, the more time I spent in the house. I tried to establish some order, but the floor remained a maze of half-emptied boxes. One black high-heeled pump sat on the kitchen counter waiting for its mate to appear. A small sea of crumpled newspaper stirred with the breeze, eddying around stacks of books waiting for a bookcase. Instead of unpacking, I moved furniture around. Obsessively I dragged carpets from one side of the house to the other, and rearranged the lamps, determined to find a combination that looked cozier. I lugged a huge table upstairs to the room that was supposed to be the study if I ever got back to work, and then back down to the room that was going to be the dining room, if I ever had friends to invite to dinner. But none of the rooms ever looked right, no matter where and in what combination I put things. Only the green leather La-Z-Boy remained where it was, too heavy to go anywhere.
    Gradually a kind of lethargy set in. The drowsy late-summer heat, the humming of the cicadas, the tumble of creek water over its rocky bed, and the rush of the wind in the trees were a narcotic, a lulling babble in my ears drowning out the imperative to get things done. The emptiness of the house was a presence of its own, an oppressively silent contrast to the murmur of life outside.
    I dreaded the evenings. I had craved solitude, but what I had found instead was a loneliness that pressed like a stone on my chest. Sometimes I was almost grateful for that stone; it kept me weighted down when I was sure I would float away, so little connection did I have to the world.
    Zoë’s departure inaugurated a second grieving for her father. I had prided myself after his death on my independence, declining to confront the awkwardness of middle-aged dating; now I had to blush at my conceit. Without my daughter I was truly alone, and I wondered if one could actually die of loneliness, the pain of it was so physical.
    I called my friend Cynthia on the West Coast. We had met in our early twenties, two young writers at the Washington Post, and while she was as deeply neurotic about work as I was, she was also the most practical, confident, no-nonsense negotiator of life and all of its pitfalls I had ever known.
    I asked her how she had handled the departure of her daughter, her youngest child. I went nuts, she said cheerfully. I knocked on the doors of women I barely knew, women who had gone through this, and said, I don’t think I can survive this. I’m pretty sure it’s going to kill me. They told me it wouldn’t kill me, and I’m going to tell you the same thing, but it will be a while before you