careers. Pia had worked in advertising and I was a partner at a graphic design firm. The firm was well established by the time I sold my portion of the business back to my colleagues, but I had been there in the early days, before we had an in-house gym and black-tie holiday parties.
Pia and I fell in love with our Vermont farmhouse on vacation earlier that year. We had taken an extended spring weekend on Crystal Lake. It was too cold to swim, so we took long drives around the Northeast Kingdom, basking in the slowness and serenity. On the last day of our stay, we drove past a perfect yellow farmhouse on a slanted dirt road with a just-posted for-sale sign out front. It was our sign, we decided. We had been waiting for it.
Years before, Pia and I had made a pact to live a different sort of life one day. We had only the vaguest plan to escape the city and remake ourselves, but we were sure the details of this plan would present themselves when it was time. So when we found the farmhouse, we recognized it as the natural extension of the dream we had created together. I sold my piece of the firm and stayed on as a long-distance consultant. Two months later, we were unpacking in Vermont. It was such a fast and easy process that we didn’t have time to iron out all the wrinkles of our new life. Pia didn’t have a new job lined up yet and we hadn’t met a soul there.
It sounds reckless in the retelling, but that was an important part of its appeal. Pia was great at embracing the new and unpredictable, but I was far more cautious, so this leap to a new state also felt like a leap toward my wife. We were going to forge a new path together, armed only with years of shared daydreams about a country life.
The hammock rocked gently as the breeze picked up, and I could smell the goldenrod that was being mowed at the farm upwind. Pia was still listing things that would need to be addressed before The Storms came: gutters, faulty wiring in the basement, a stuck bedroom window. I knew she was probably right; if this storm was for real, then we did need to start preparing. But I stroked her hair and suggested that we spend the rest of the now-enjoyable Friday relaxing. We could get to disaster preparations tomorrow.
“Hey, dudes. What are you doing?” said a squeaky voice.
Approaching us was our seven-year-old neighbor, August, whose dilapidated little house sat on the other side of a thick wall of trees and shrubs to the east. His place was invisible from our porch but connected by a short, neat path that I had helped August clear to facilitate easy movement back and forth. I had met August on the first day of our arrival, when he walked through our open front door and began peppering us with questions. He seemed desperate for friends and bubbling with curiosity. Since then, I’d seen him almost every day. He’d come over to kick a soccer ball back and forth or invite me to check out the new fort he’d built in the woods behind our homes. Pia thought August was sweet, but it was I who spent so much time with him. I wondered sometimes about the adults in his life who had left him so hungry for attention, but I didn’t ask many questions, mainly because I didn’t know what exactly to ask, but also because I enjoyed our time together and wanted to just be with him. And August was helpful. He’d spent his entire short life in those woods and he knew more about self-reliance and country living than Pia and me combined.
“What’s up, buddy?” I said, reaching a hand out for a sticky high five.
As usual, August was barefoot, filthy and smiling. The burdock lodged in his curly auburn hair appeared to have taken hold days before.
August wanted to play Frisbee, so we hoisted our bodies out of the hammock and met him on the lawn. The mood had shifted and we were happy to play. That was the way things changed with Pia: she could be crying and sad, but the minute it was over, it was really over. Most of the time, this was a relief, though there were times when I knew we probably should have actually worked things through instead of just riding them out. But it was so much easier to just wait for storms to pass, and the highs were so high that we didn’t want to look back at the lows once we had escaped them. We just drove forward, secure in the knowledge that we were in love and nothing was worth dwelling on. This unspoken arrangement required a willingness on my part to indulge every emotional whim that Pia wanted to follow. In return, she kept things uncomplicated and asked very few questions. Abiding by the rules of this dynamic felt intimate. It worked for us.
Pia dived theatrically as the Frisbee left August’s hands, which made him double over in laughter every time. I laughed along with them but let my eyes wander to the group of flycatchers above. They were migrating south, no doubt, but they were several weeks late. They should have been in Central America by then. These were the details of nature that I never got wrong. I was as passionate about nature as Pia was about art, and I knew bird migratory patterns like the moles on my left arm. I assumed they were just as immovable. But the birds were confused and their travels had changed.
Our backyard was magnificent that day. The enormous sugar maples along the lawn’s perimeter swayed cheerfully as the low sun illuminated their drying leaves. It would have been a perfect July day, were it not for the fact that it was late September and there was no shaking the feeling that everything was off. The leaves seemed to be skipping past their most brilliant orange-yellow-red phase and going straight to the browning at the end. We were playing Frisbee in shorts, for Christ’s sake.
Weather was the primary topic of discussion in the Northeast Kingdom that summer—even more so than usual—because it was all so wrong. Everyone was nervous: the farmers, the maple sugarers, the people who relied on ski tourism, the ice fishermen and the hockey fans. Pia talked a lot about a global-warming government cover-up, but I was the one in our household who truly mourned the changing Vermont climate. I had grown up there (technically, I grew up in Rutland, a sturdier, postindustrial town in central Vermont). Every milestone of my life was tied in some way to New England weather; and every romantic vision I had for our new life relied on the weather being right. Some part of me understood this to be unrealistic, but I wasn’t ready to accept that.
When the sun finally disappeared and our toes started to chill in our flip-flops, we sent August home and Pia and I went inside to make dinner. I loved making dinner together. It was an activity that could lay the groundwork for hours of sexually charged companionship. It wasn’t just sex—though that almost always came later—but also wine and storytelling and laughter and touching. Those nights always felt to me like scenes from a movie. I envisioned someone watching us through a window, not hearing exactly what we were saying, but being impressed by the ease and tenderness of our home life. It was the shade of domesticity that I liked marriage in.
Pia browned fat chunks of bacon in a pan that would soon be joined by split brussels sprouts and a drizzle of maple syrup, an addicting recipe she had acquired from the little girl who ran the farm stand down the road. These were the details we relished but worked hard to seem cool about when we breathlessly relayed them to our friends back in Brooklyn. We buy our sprouts from a farm girl down the road! That’s where we get our eggs, too—you have never eaten eggs until you’ve had just-laid eggs. I can’t believe we ever bought our meat vacuum-sealed at the grocery store. Just-butchered and free-range is the way to go. It’s just the way life is here... The narrative we’d created about our life in Vermont was almost as important as the experience itself.
I massaged salt and pepper into a local sirloin and carried it out the back screen door to place over high flames on the grill. Pia joined me minutes later, slipping a hand around my waist and lifting her pinot noir to my lips. I took a sip before leaning down to kiss her hard. I loved that I was almost a full head taller than her. Being tall and broad was my best physical feature. Without expending much effort on appearance, I projected the illusion of general fitness, even as my stomach softened slightly and my dark, groomed beard sprouted grays. I drew most of my confidence with women from my size, which worked fine for Pia, who liked to be enveloped by someone larger than herself. On cue, she melted into my chest and then pushed me away, darting back inside to tend to her sauté pans.
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“I
