Early evening on Friday, after a long workday, I’m in a nearby town’s general store, talking to an old acquaintance on the porch. The store’s door is propped open. A warm breeze swirls. Rain isn’t far in the offering.

A few years ago, a stranger stopped on the porch steps where I was eating ice cream with my daughters and said my name. She’d read my first book, she said, and loved it. That conversation: a shift for me.

On my way home, I stop at the town beach and lean against the tall cedars, whitecaps chopping on the lake. The breeze is no longer so warm here, and I have the beach to myself. Last fall, weekend afternoons and stuffy evenings, I swam here, when everyone else was too busy or too disinterested to swim at my usual places. With my youngest at college, I lived alone again, and I determined not to drench my empty nest with tears. For those hours, I brought pages of my manuscript. Dusty sand drifted into my printed words and into my bag that held my ever-present things: library books and knitting. I’d swam here before with my daughters, but I began to know this lake in a new way: how the bottom drops quickly and few boats venture to this far end. I kicked far out, leaving the weeds and the strangers on the beach behind. Curious or not, the loons joined me.

And a line from the mesmerizing Annabel Abbs’ Windswept about women, walking, solitude, and creativity: “She purged her inner clutter with outdoor space.”