Even the Robins Are Acting Differently

Today, I said goodbye to friends I’ve known for years. It’s not the first time we’ve parted company nor the only time they’ve broken my heart and left me lonely as they drifted away. 

I always go through this when I return to a favorite book and finish it again. John Irving’s older books always do this to me. He makes my heartache as no one else can. 

I’ve read The Hotel New Hampshire several times, but this was the first time I listened to the audiobook. It came out this past month, and I’m happy to report that narrator Kirby Heyborne was superb. 

So here I am, once again moving through the wreckage of the Berry family and their three Hotel New Hampshire's. This passage is in one of the book’s last pages: “So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother, and someone’s older sister—they become heroes, too. We invent what we love, and what we fear. There is almost always a brave, lost brother—and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.” 

No wonder I will miss them so.

Last year, I listened to Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany while walking the same woodland paths day after day. In the months that followed, whenever we walked those trails again, I felt like I was returning to a place I used to frequent with friends. Those characters came to me like the ghosts of those I had known and loved. 

Comfort is crucial to me as we do our best to navigate this brutal coronavirus landscape. Change comes daily, if not more often, and we find that nothing is the same as it once had been. So favorite old books, and the characters who live in them, offer me a safe harbor. It’s a brief visit to normalcy. 

As I write to you tonight, we are now in for the evening. Our two walks stretched over ten miles of solitude. Before the second one, I prepared my favorite soup—a country lentil with potatoes, celery, mushrooms, and carrots—in the Instant Pot so it would be ready when we returned home. That also brought some comfort. With Samwise and Emily gnawing bones on either side of my desk, so entranced in digging deep into the marrow while Fantasia On a Theme by Thomas Tallis plays, this could almost be like any night in the past few years. 

Alas, it is not. 

Although it’s not been reported in the media yet, a friend told me one of his former employees died from COVID-19 the other day. She lived in the lower valley. 

The beast is getting closer. I know it’s already ravaged other areas of the country, but now it crawls into out of the way nooks and crannies, most likely brought to the country by those who sought refuge from busier and sicker states to our south. Even pokey, backwoods northern New England is not safe. 

For the first time, I wore face protection today. Other than that, it was a typical Sunday morning at Grant’s Shop ‘n Save. Picked up asparagus, unsweetened apple sauce, and mushrooms; looked in vain for marrow bones and fresh, affordable greens; and checked out with Deb Davis. It is our Sunday morning tradition—me choosing Deb’s register. That too, was a comfort. Only this time, I looked like a bank robber wearing my purple bandana. 

The thaw continues up here. Slowly, snow and ice melt, leaving behind mud. The rivers run high, but they are not flooding. I wore trail runners to the woods this evening. Shorts, too. Spring is slowly moving in. I hear it in the bird song, smell it in the whiff of April air, and see the increased scurrying of forest groundlings. The notoriously anti-social robins have even been floating through the trees together. A round of robins. 

I felt the same way when we were driving home from our walk and spied our friend Christine’s car parked at a trailhead. We pulled over and sought her and her four-leggeds out. Notoriously anti-social at times, like a robin, I was happy to walk an additional mile in good company. 

The comfort of the familiar is the medicine I need in this unfamiliar world.

(*PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL. It is coming to you from a mailing list and we never see the responses, and responding removes you from the mailing list. If you wish to unsubscribe, you can do so at the bottom of the page.)