In March 2020, we left New York City to live in Western North Carolina, in the mountains up the road from a clinically shirtless man who thankfully blasts only the good classic rock. It wafts up to our home on the weekends, competing with the lofi beats that I pipe near constantly, hoping they quell any underlying anxiety and inspire me to, you know, be an artist. Lofi beats are the audible equivalent of that foggy coffee smell that hits you upon entering a cafe and latches on to your clothes so that you smell it hours later, at a bar. Initially inspiring but later so disorienting.
We have a pickup truck and a gravel driveway that is so steep and cratered that I have to wear a sports bra when I drive up or down it. Even though I’m not blond, it makes me feel like a country singer, driving along a cratered moon. Green-gold moss covers the ground in the front yard, a term I use loosely - is it even a yard if there’s no sidewalk or neighbor or Saturday Dad washing a car nearby? Sprinkled about the perimeter of the house is a large propane tank, a rhododendron that blooms in May, bird feeders fashioned out of metal pipes, and piecemeal gardens for flowers, vegetables, and Instagram. We considered making the old satellite dish into a bird bath but didn’t want to be too on the nose or disappoint our parents. The road we live on is named after a local woman named Peggy.
The we I’m referring to is me and Hall, my betrothed. He does all the crafty and physical work things while I mostly transfer bags of pistachios into plastic containers because that’s what the people on New York Times Cooking do. We buy nuts in bulk because we’re so far away from the grocery store. After a huge haul that April, a month into our stay, Hall was unloading groceries and I noticed a container of sour cream so big that I started crying. What happened to the days when we could buy our groceries, daily, from two shelves at the bodega? That Daisy was just so damn big. How many dollops did it even contain? What if we didn’t use it all? Will my family die of Covid? Funny the things that manifest tears.
On Easter Sunday I hid a few Cadbury eggs around the house for Hall to find. Again, Hall is my fiancé, not my son, but we’ve all tried some questionable activities during the pandemic. He looked around and found them (even the one I put in between the grooves of the vintage buck saw hanging on the wall!) while alerts came in on our phones of potential severe weather.
Hours later we were awoken by apocalyptic thunder, and the type of lightning that blinds you even with your eyes closed. We migrated to the living room, away from the windows, where increasingly urgent alerts came in on our little weather radio. Tornado spotted four counties over, tornado spotted three counties over...You know you live in the middle of nowhere when everything is in relation to counties. We sat there until the sound of a tree hitting the house scared us into the basement. Carrying wobbling candlesticks, sleep deprived and bickering like two Ebenezer Scrooges in love, we crept down the stairs as Jacob Marley over the radio warned us of what was to come. Between gaps in the emergency alerts, we somehow managed to fall asleep on the concrete floor. It must have been around 3 something when I awoke, suddenly, to:
Hall: “SOMETHING BIT ME”
Me: “WHERE”
Hall: “MY FACE”
A spider had bitten Hall’s face which was already swelling up. We couldn’t Google anything because we had no power. Numerous tornadoes had been spotted nearby. As the siren went off on the radio, and trees hit the ground outside, Hall swore and I sat there, feeling both terrified and whatever emotion it is when you wish you had the plush life of Eloise. It’s strange to be so upset by the weather. There’s no one to blame and because life, or so we think, usually has a person or thing to blame, it’s unsettling and humbling. After an hour or so, it quieted down outside and we trudged back up the stairs to sleep like garbage. I awoke at 10:30, feeling disgusting and in a terrible mood. But as soon as I had that first sip of coffee that Hall had made on the propane grill outside, I felt like Eloise herself.
For the first couple months, Hall and I went to town five times total just to pick up groceries. I now “go to town.” Who am I, Laura Ingalls Wilder? I’m actually more like Pa - love a hearty lunch. I was depressed one day (and many others) in June and realized that I hadn’t driven anywhere alone yet. This sounds psychotic, I know. I’d go for “my walks” in the forest as I am an Artist, but had obediently stayed near the premises as if Hall was my captor in our cult of two and said stuff like, “You know you can always leave...Anytime...” He pauses to lick the cigarette paper he’s just rolled. “But...do you really wanna go back out there? Back to...that life?” I’d shake my white bonnet in wide-eyed fear, having convinced myself that no, I didn’t need my family or job or consistently spending $17 on salads or wishing friends would cancel plans or a gym I joined just because it had a smoothie bar even though I’m ambivalent about smoothies. I didn’t need that life. Hall lights the cigarette, stares off to the filthy chicken pen, and pats me on the back, signaling me to make supper, where I’ll use the 1 pot we own. It will probably be beans or something gray and we’ll wash it down with dented tin cups of well water. At sundown, he’ll read verses from scripture while I think to myself - I can’t believe I wore Ann Taylor pants on my first day at a startup when everyone else was in ripped jeans - and stare at my red hands, raw from the handwashing of our woolen underthings.
So, when life gives you a pandemic, and June gives you a sad day, you drive yourself 40 minutes to a CVS. Playing country music on the radio, I thundered down the driveway and set my sights on town.
Country music is hilarious. Every song is a game to see what the singer loves most: his truck, his town, beer, whiskey, his girl, Jesus. Country songs by men are about the girl who’s not like other girls, while country songs by women are about how they aren’t like other girls. Who is this “other girl” I wonder? Jk, we all know. She likes wine and cities and having a career. She might only want one child, or worse, none. There’s a country song called “I Called Mama” and there’s a part in the chorus that goes, “So I stopped off at a Texaco, bought a Slim Jim and a Coke.” It’s as if a Super Bowl commercial was a song. Whenever I hear it, it Pavlov’s dogs me into imagining seven layer dip, Jennifer Lopez in a silver outfit, and an excuse to go to work late on a Monday. Ah, the Super Bowl - if dips had a day.
After two stoplights, I made it to the CVS, where I bought a hair product and a frozen pizza and talked to my Mom for an hour in the parking lot. I drove back elated. I liked CVS before the pandemic; since, it’s become my go-to, my Central Perk of the Appalachians, if I may be so bold as to use a ‘90s reference to a show I never watched (sounds like a brag, but it’s mostly because we weren’t allowed to watch tv after school. One year, my older brother won a bunch of spelling bees and got written up in the local paper. The journalist really played up the whole “he’s a good speller because he and his siblings can’t watch tv and so all those nerds do is read” thing. I was so embarrassed at 5th grade that day, assuming everyone had just devoured the scoop. Here I was, with a famous brother, but the whole experience was ruined because of my parents’ stupid rules and the fact that some hotshot reporter had put us on blast).
When you live in the country, you live amongst the mice. There are plenty of critters here, but mice are the most upsetting because they eat your chips and take shits on your chaise lounge. It’s tolerable but disgusting, especially when four of them die in the engine of the car and you have to drive with the windows down because the inside smells like hot rat. Fortunately, we have a pregnant, hungry cat lurking around which should take care of the problem. But then we’ve got a real Catch-22 on our hands - the more the cat hangs around, the more likely she’ll kill the visiting birds in addition to the mice.
Did you know that cats are the leading killers of birds? I read recently that birds don’t die of old age and that made me really, really sad, in part because I’d decided in March that birds would be my “thing.” Of course my new hobby has to be ruined. We can only make calls on our landline but on one occasion the line wasn’t working, so a guy came up to inspect the situation. He found that a rat had made a nest in the phone box down the road. One day, closer to home, there was a massive black snake relaxing by the back steps. Hall threw some plastic tent stakes at it to try and scare it off, but it didn’t move. The stakes just stayed on that snake.
In June, I bought a cookbook written by a woman who’d divorced her husband in her 20s, moved out with her son, and started a small restaurant out of a renovated van. It really inspired me to live boldly, so I had Hall cut my hair on the deck. I needed a little change and we both needed something to do after dinner. There was no time to get special scissors so we just used the regular ones - you know, the ones we use to make construction paper chains for counting down the days to Christmas. (This is a joke, but due to my childish behavior with the eggs on Easter, I must clarify.) But scissors are scissors, right? And meat thermometers can also be used under the arm in the middle of the night during Covid scares? Sure.
Hall steadied my head while I assured him I wouldn’t blame him if the result wasn’t to my liking. As he clipped away, I shed my insecurities, my fears, my self-doubt. I got closer to my new dream of 15 minutes prior of owning a van, making food in it and having a 10-year-old. I wondered if I should change my name. After the last lock had fallen, I retrieved the broom and collected my hair. I held it gently between my palms like a wounded bird, probably a bird a cat tried to kill, and walked down the steps past the garden, to a sloped area of bushes and ferns. Raising my hands into the sky like I was pleading with God, I threw the mass into the wind. I thought it would float away gracefully, in delicate whispers like the memory of a sad spring, but it stayed softball-shaped and fell to the earth like a fat sigh. The next morning, I called into a meeting for my marketing job, my hair a little shorter. No one noticed.
Nasty fauna aside, I have found beauty here. There’s a valley of cows I’ve befriended on my weekly walk to the post office, a stand of tall trees that give me “warbler neck” during spring migration, and hiking trails cushioned with pine needles that bake in the sun and smell like spa. It’s a corner of the earth that showed the green promise of spring when the world was proving otherwise. Some day, Hall and I will share it with our 12 kids that all have J names. Until then, I’ll keep venturing out, risking whiplash on the driveway and taking shallow breaths of a rodent air.