Nate pointed out the sugar maples on the back hill and said they could tap the trees, boil the sap, and make syrup. “Can’t get much more quintessential Vermont than that!” he said excitedly.
As they walked around the land, Helen had this strange sense of familiarity, of déjà vu almost, like she’d been there before. Silly, really.
They saw the flat area with good southern exposure that would make a perfect building site and the old green trailer that stood on the edge of the clearing.
“We can live in the trailer while we build,” Nate said. Then he leaned in and whispered excitedly to Helen, “It’s perfect! It’s got everything we’ve been hoping for and then some.”
And it did seem perfect. Almost too perfect—it was exactly like the land Nate had been describing that they would find, the land he’d promised her. Helen had this sense then. This land—their new home—was meant to be; it had been waiting for them, calling to them. But the thought was not entirely a warm and comforting one; no, it was more like a prickle on the back of the neck. It both drew her to the place and made her want to get in the car and race all the way back to their condo in Connecticut.
“I don’t know what kind of shape that old mobile home’s in,” the realtor admitted. “The seller was using this place as a hunting camp, but he hasn’t come up in a long time. It’s got plumbing and electricity, but I don’t know if it works. It’s being sold as-is.”
Helen looked at the vintage trailer, aluminum and faded green, and guessed it to be about thirty feet long and maybe eight feet wide, up on cinder blocks. The roof wasn’t falling in, and the louvered windows weren’t broken.
Nate was looking at it, at all of it—the trailer, the woods, the clearing—with an excited sparkle in his eye. He’d brought his 35mm camera, the one he used to take photos on his birding trips, and was snapping pictures of it all.
The Hartsboro land enchanted them both, even on that frozen day in January. Helen led them down the hill, finding the path to the bog through the trees easily, like she knew the way. She loved the otherworldliness of the frozen bog. They’d walked out into the center of the bog while the realtor waited in his heated Suburban. “You folks take all the time you want,” he’d said.
Nate pointed out tracks in the snow: deer, snowshoe hare, even the wing marks of an owl that had lunged down to swoop up some unsuspecting rodent from a bed of snow.
“It looks like an angel landed,” Helen said, thinking of the ghost the realtor had mentioned, wondering if ghosts left marks in this world. If a ghost left a mark, she thought, it would be like this—delicate wing prints in the snow.
Nate poked around, pointed out the drops of blood. “An angel who snacks on tasty voles,” he said, grinning.
Nate had spent his summers as a boy at his grandparents’ farm in New Hampshire. Helen had known him only as an adult, but maybe he was secretly meant to be a country boy again, not cooped up in the suburbs where the only wildlife you encountered were the chickadees at the backyard feeder and the noisy squirrels battling them for choice black oil sunflower seeds.
The land was about a mile up a dirt road from the center of the village, which consisted of a general store, town hall, pizza place, Methodist church, tiny library, and gas station.
“We can walk to town,” Nate said.
“I bet they have church suppers,” Helen said.
“Square dances, maybe even,” Nate said with a smile, hooking his elbow into hers, skipping around in a circle over the crusty ice covering the bog.
When they stopped, winded, cheeks pink, boots soaked through, Helen said, “I wish my dad could see this place.”
Nate nodded. “He’d love it, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Helen agreed, eyes going back to the wing prints. “He definitely would.”
And so it was decided. The asking price for the land was well below what they’d budgeted, but still, they put in a lowball offer just to see what the counteroffer would be. To their surprise, their offer was accepted immediately. “I guess the guy really was a motivated seller,” Nate said. Two months later, they closed, never actually meeting the seller—a lawyer represented him, saying only that Mr. Decrow was down in Florida now and was unwell and not up to traveling. After the closing, Helen and Nate went out to breakfast at a little café on the outskirts of town. It was a celebration—they were now the proud owners of the land!
But Helen felt self-conscious: they were too well dressed, wore inappropriate footwear and dressy coats; they were clearly outsiders. When they came back, they’d need to work harder to blend in, to not seem so out of place. Helen pulled out her notebook from her purse and started a list of the things they’d need: sturdy leather boots, wool sweaters, fleece layers, flannel shirts, long underwear. Then she started a list of the tools they would need, putting an asterisk beside those they had already collected from her dad’s basement: circular saw, keyhole saw, hacksaw, framing hammers, finishing hammers, squares, levels, a chalk line, a plumb bob, and on and on. There was comfort in making lists, in knowing just what to put on them, in checking off items accomplished.
. . .
They had sold their condo and Helen’s father’s house. Both sales were quick and easy, despite dire warnings from well-meaning friends about the crappy real estate market in Connecticut. They’d quit their nice, secure teaching jobs at the Palmer Academy, giving up not only the bimonthly paychecks but also their health insurance and the matching contributions to their 401(k)s. They’d even traded in their little Prius for a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. They’d sold or given away a lot of their belongings, putting the things they were most attached to into a rented storage unit.
Their colleagues and friends thought they were crazy when they described their plans to build a house, grow a garden, raise chickens and goats.
“Mmm,lovely.Sounds like all nine circles of hell,” Helen’s friend Jenny had said at the going-away party Jenny and her husband, Richard, hosted. Helen had laughed.
“Did you ever think maybe you were born in the wrong century?” Jenny had asked, narrowing her eyes, topping up their glasses of pinot grigio. Helen had nodded. Yes. She thought that often.
Jenny was Helen’s oldest friend—they’d known each other since kindergarten.
“Think of everything you’re giving up,” Jenny had said. “And what for? So you can go freeze your asses off in the middle of freaking nowhere while you act out this 1960s back-to-the-land fantasy? You’ll be isolated. We’ll never hear from you again.”
“Of course you will,” Helen had promised.
