Getting Lost & Found.

There’s that old saying You can’t get there from here, which in Vermont means, It’s not easy to get there, but use your wits and you can. Yesterday afternoon, leaving for a Vermont town I’d never visited I hedged bets on the map, avoiding the route that I guessed had wash-outs and detours yet, and headed down two-lane blacktop through villages where hydrangeas are just beginning to bloom.

I was invited to read with Alexander Chee at the Meadow Meeting House, a righteous 1830s former Baptist Church. The ceiling was stenciled in original colors, over straight-backed wooden pews not designed for the listeners’ comfort. The entryway has two wood stoves. The black pipes extend over the pews before exiting. That would have sufficed for heat.

By chance (or maybe not), Alexander Chee and I each read about spaces — churches and homes — particularly apt in that lovely building that had its own generations-long story. It’s a question that fascinates me: how do we hold the past and also make our lives anew? The question links inexorably to the physical places where we live.

Afterward, in a sunlit house surrounded by gardens and apple trees heavy with fruit, I met a woman who’s the daughter of a long-ago friend of my father. Our conversation pulled me back to my college days. (How would I ever explain that I first fell in love with rural Marlboro College lying in fields, awestruck at the undiluted Milky Way and constellations?)

Driving home, threading my way back along unfamiliar roads, I had the strange sensation I held that afternoon and that conversation in my ribcage. Outside of my town, Hardwick, I had a long wait at a temporary red light on the broken highway. The asphalt washed down the Lamoille River. I stood up and leaned out my Subaru sunroof. In the gloaming, I saw how the river had cut a new course, its old path a great swath of boulders.

In the cavern of my ribs: wildfire smoke. The stories of my past, that afternoon, the future, too.