On the Leonardsville Road this gusty April morning, the wind is inhabited—by pine voices and widow-makers, squirrels and warblers, and the echoes of people I have never known or imagined. As I walk down the road on the center yellow line, I hear them speaking, singing, humming through the woods. They are the spice in fall air, summer’s perfume and wrinkled petals, dry leaves in wind, ideas and obsessions that live on in the forest and beneath the fallen roofs and collapsed ribs of abandoned houses.
They are the characters of unwritten stories.
They are the keepings of finders.
I can’t understand what they’re saying. Maybe it is simply, I am here.
Unlike most who come to live in the Adirondacks in the second half of life, I have no childhood history here or in any other wild place. In my late 30s, I astonished myself and everyone I knew by learning to hike and camp and climb mountains with a man I’d met in a Soho bar. Bob and I fell in love with each other and the woods at the same time. We bought a tiny log cabin on six acres in the sparsely populated hamlet once known as Leonardsville, and spent 15 summers and countless holidays here, until Bob’s early retirement from New York City’s public schools. Then we denned in for the winter. And stayed.
I step off to the edge of the road and poke the toe of my boot into the snow piled on the shoulder. It’s four feet deep, and crusty. No sidetracking into
