The cliché about a small town is you know everything and everyone. By far the simplest part of my day yesterday was the boy who walked into my library, returned books, and asked how many he could check out. He’s the hungriest kid reader in the library, and we mutually agree he needs to stock up on books for the Christmas break.

Maybe 7 years ago, I laughed with this boy’s mother at a friend’s birthday party. Shyly, the little boy and his even younger sister crawled beneath her long skirt. I wrote his father paychecks the summer he worked for my now ex renovating the large yellow inn in town.

How little we really know, though — of each other, of our own selves.

I jammed so much into that day — hours of solitary work; a doctor’s visit with my teenager where she used her voice, ringing with the righteous truth of adolescence; an hour at a selectboard meeting with people I’ve known in one way or another for years, together in one room, united in concern for the future of the school and the town. The future’s unknown path hovers above us.

Outside the town clerk’s office — a former one-room schoolhouse — the moon shone in the cold dark, caught in the bare branches of a maple tree.

How time moves on — and yet it doesn’t. For a moment, I stood talking with a friend on the moonlit snow. Then she went her way. I went mine, home to daughters and an algebra problem with a flipped sign and the cats sprawled on the rug.

More reading recommendations from my father:

It’s the same with the wound in our hearts. We need to give them our attention so that they can heal. Otherwise the wounds continue to cause us pain… But here’s the trick — they also serve an amazing purpose. When our hearts are wounded that’s when they open. We grow through pain. We grow through difficult situations. That’s why you have to embrace each and every difficult thing in your life.

― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

Summer memory!

Sunday afternoon, the 13-year-old girls  watch a movie in Montpelier while I walk down the street to Capital Grounds. For two hours, my world is writing and a woman who sits beside me and eats a bowl of chili meditatively and the reflection in the storefront windows across the street of a flock of pigeons swooping in flight. I never actually see the pigeons — only their darting reflection.

At a table behind me, three men laugh. When they came in, one man had a walker, and I turned and asked if they needed me to move. He said no, and that the nice thing about this coffee shop is how everyone is on top of each other all the time, anyway. I remember visiting a different version of Capital Grounds years ago, in a winter when I was at home with a three-year-old. I caught myself reading a man’s newspaper over his shoulder.

When I leave, the November sunlight is thin, but it’s there. I take the long way back to the theater. Far overhead, the capital’s gold dome beams.

I don’t want another chicken, but the flock belonging to my daughter’s friend was killed overnight. Eviscerated, to be more technical. A lone barred rock survived.

At cold twilight, I’m in Greensboro Bend with three 13-year-olds chasing the bird.

Chickens are flock animals, I remind myself — the very first thing I learned about chickens.

My daughter’s chickens are this hen’s new flock. In the dark, she holds the cardboard box containing a chicken in her lap. We drop off her other friend, and then it’s just the two of us and the chicken, following Route 15 twisting along the Lamoille River, going home. My daughter’s quiet, with her arms folded around the cardboard box.

When she was much younger, her father was involved in a political protest against an industrial project, beginning with a phone call when someone asked him to be arrested, traversing through the court system, a trial, another arrest, costing our family so much money and so much misery. I was infuriated at the hopeless, poorly conceived mess he had brought into our family, and how my daughters had borne so much of that failed struggle.

And yet, the better part of me knows we’re flock animals, too. My daughter must know this, too.

In the coop, one barred rock flaps at the new arrival and squawks angrily. My daughters and I stand back and watch. What will the flock do?

The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

— Madeleine L’Engle