My youngest and I hike in a nearby state park that, as a family, we’ve visited for years—Elmore Mountain. Mid-August, in frothy opulence, does not disappoint: rocky mountain path surrounded by leafy forest, summit view, lake, the nearby store where I once bought my daughters ice cream cones and we now eat sandwiches. The trueness of hunger, the satisfaction of satiation.

Fellow novelist Catherine Tudish and I make the long trek to Manchester, Vermont, to read at Northshire Bookstore. There and back, hours filled with writing talk, life stories, the fried dumplings we eat at a fancy bar, the lingering hours at the bookstore’s closing, me buying one and then two books, stashing these in my bag. We talk and talk as the twilight slides into darkness. I laugh and say two days from now maybe we’ll still be driving around Vermont, and Catherine gently prods me to turn left, go right…

Later, after I leave her at her farmhouse and the massive hydrangea — white shot through with pink — shimmering in my headlights, I listen to the Rolling Stones, and now I am keenly intent on the back road through the darkness, cell-free Vermont, navigating by the few road signs I pass. I’ve driven here, but never in the impenetrable darkness. The night is hourless, and I’m giddy, sunroof open, car heater on, giddy not with any kind of writerly fame but enmeshed in this road and this darkness that I know will of course inevitably end somewhere. Giddy with the joy of my third book that has now reached bookshelves, the story of my troublesome main character Avah Lavoie a rough-edged young woman in search of her own coarse salvation. The novel begins in a sour hangover and ends in hunger: appetite.

Home, gracious I’m tired, but I stand holding my books and wallet and looking up at the constellations in their complex gauze, the Milky Way’s arc, bridged over my house and garden, apple trees and that giant goatsbeard and compass flowers shadowy creatures. The thin thread of crickets. I’m furiously hungry.

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner