Out of the Woods by Lynn Darling Page A

believe me.
    The tomato plant died.
    I tried again to settle in. I swept the mudroom, put some books away, unpacked a box. But the stone would not move, and I was scared. This was the beginning, yes, but the beginning of what? I certainly hadn’t seen this coming, this feeling of being punched in the stomach, of wondering whether I could even bear it, whether the grief of Zoë’s leaving might be something I could not survive with any degree of contentment. I had never known such nights before, nights that grayed into days that darkened back into nights.
    I turned to books for solace. “No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength,” Jack Kerouac wrote. But Kerouac died before he hit fifty. What if I didn’t have any true or hidden strength? More to the point was poor Alice James, after brother Henry left for England, brother William got married, and her father died. “Those ghastly days, when I was by myself in the little house in Mt. Vernon Street,” she wrote in her journal, “how I longed to flee . . . from the ‘Alone, Alone!’ that echoed through the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered from the walls, and confronted me, like a material presence, as I sat waiting, counting the moments, as they turned themselves from today into tomorrow.”
    When I was little, the nuns at the Catholic schools I attended loved to tell the story of the ninth-century Irish monks who sailed across the ocean in deerskin curricles in search of a holy solitude, with little more than their prayers to guide them. For me the story had always resonated with possibility, with the faith it took to cleave to yourself, to escape the future as it had been shaped for you in favor of one of your own choosing. But when I looked back, it seemed that I had never done much to influence the path my life had taken. Life had formed itself around whatever canker or happy chance had come my way. I had moved to Vermont to change that, to reach bedrock, the essence of who I was, and to decide for myself what happened next.
    But now I remembered that bedrock can be treacherous. Take away the stuff under which it is buried—the topsoil, the dirt and roots, the living things that tunnel beneath the surface—and there is nothing to hold back the drenching rains that can carry away everything of value.
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    O ne Sunday afternoon, the soft whisper of the trees outside convinced me it was time to take a walk. Then the quandary: where to go. Not the usual roads, down Route 106 to the country store, or Noah Wood or Long Hill Road. I felt awkward and embarrassed to be out and about on such a fine day by myself, one of the last beautiful days of September, a time when families were gathering outdoors for end-of-season barbecues and picnics. And not the woods behind my house, which were dark and strange—I was so tired of everything that was strange. For days I had listened to the slow drip of rain from the leaves of the trees and the birdcalls and the occasional wild cries and screams. I didn’t know the names of the birds, or the trees, or the animals that made those nearly human sounds. Was it better to know the names of things or not to know? When my husband was alive, we had had a summer house in a beach community not far from the city. On Fire Island, I knew, because he had told me, the name of the bird that perched on our roof every day and scolded us when we walked up the path to the house. It was a redwing blackbird, he said, a male, protecting his nest. And because the bird had a name, he acquired in my head a personality and a romance: he was our protector, too, and every spring when we came back he was there as well, our guardian spirit. Then one spring the blackbird didn’t come back and that summer Lee was diagnosed, and I hated that bird