So tired

My office moved this week, or more accurately, I moved the office this week. I did have the help of good movers, though my assistant chose a bad time to flake out completely. She is now done, as they say in Vermont. I sent her off with her last paycheck and words of cheer, nary a syllable chastising her for leaving me to do all the packing alone. Surely there must be some good rationale for such behavior from a person that I had come to trust, but I do not assume the right to intrude on her privacy once she has refused to answer questions.

Oh well. We have all been there. So tired and fed up with a job that we phone it in for days or weeks or longer. So weary that we tread on bonds of long association, heedlessly snapping them in our rush to get on to the next thing.

Moving from one town to another, I have also spent three evenings in meetings in the hope that I can reassure constituents that they will enjoy uninterrupted, solicitous attention to their needs. My tolerance for evening meetings is about one per week, but making change successfully requires heavy doses of reassurance.

I enjoy moving, actually. I like walking into a new space and seeing possibility, then making it happen. But there is no denying how much work it is, how draining of resources physical, mental and emotional. Yesterday I started to feel it. The kind of tired that when you bend down to plug in a printer, you just aren’t sure you have the energy to stand up again. The kind of tired that makes the carpet look like a good place to lie down for a quick nap. The kind of tired that makes you start to make silly mistakes, that makes you think seriously about having somebody come pick you up from work and take you home for a long soak, a long sleep, returning to our animal nature its due.

So tired.

Clicker training

Bright puppy Cassandra has figured out that many of the best things in life are immediately preceded by the click-click-click of the car's turn signal. Now that sound is associated in her furry head with arrival at a place to run or swim, even return home. She now loudly signals her approval with "uunh...uunh...UUNH...woowoo."

We have been enjoying outdoor Vermont this summer with walks and swims and road trips to new places to walk and swim. It's fun to watch Cassie learn. She prefers wide, deep brooks to rocky spills with deep pools. She likes to watch canoes and kayaks come off the lake. Task-driven, she likes to go after sticks, although retrieval is not her strong suit.

Toby meanwhile finds rocks and moves them. Sometimes he makes pyramids, sometimes he takes a rock across the brook and buries it in a new place. I think back to college geology class lectures about all the ways that rocks and soil get transferred from place to place and I wonder if they thought about Toby.

Vacances de blog

It has been a summer not for blogging. Too much to see and do, too many new places to swim, too much to paint. We are still in this vacation mode, still feeling as if the summer will last forever.

But the trees have begun to turn. And the first frost warnings have sounded for the coldest hollows. Time to get the wood in.

The painting continues, although all other house and garden work has been put on hold. I don’t care if I ever cut the grass again—well, maybe once before frost—but I am determined to finish my painting project.

It’s gratifying to hear comments from friends and neighbors.

From the wife of a fellow Rotarian: “I am following your progress with interest. It looks like it is going well.” -- “Oh, please keep sending those positive thoughts every time you drive by.” –“Should I honk?” –“Yes! No, wait, perhaps not while I am on that tall ladder.”

From the guy in the hardware store who lives up the road in an impossibly well kept house: “I like the color. It will really ground that house. Good choice!”

From a colleague who lives even further up the road: “Did you fall off the ladder?”—“No, I am moving to the next section of wall, and it is hard for me to move that big plank, so I left it tilting from one ladder while I move the other around to the far side.”—“Oh, good, I was worried.”--"Thanks for watching and worrying."

And from everyone who sees hands or hair or even dogs, “What are you painting? Are the dogs helping?”

Why yes, they are. Toby sports a racing stripe from a porch windowsill, Cassie has frosted the tips of her ears.

Beaver beaver

Beaver beaver
Build your dam
We’re the best team in the land
Beaver beaver
Bite and chew
We expect a lot of you!

(Old MIT fight song)

Our relaxation regimen these days consists of two dog swims a day, morning and evening. Yesterday we did a road trip to some swimming holes further away; today it was nearby Green River Reservoir. We drove all the way to the end of the road, then hiked for awhile, passing beaver ponds and following moose tracks.

A beaver pond is a remarkable achievement. It is a little spooky to be walking on a trail with a pond to your left two feet higher than the trail. You can see why the MIT boys at the turn of the century referred to the beaver as “nature’s engineer.”

One of my Vermont books says that seeing a beaver is unlikely, although you might see a nose in the center of a v-shaped ripple. And you very well might hear the sharp slap of broad tail as a warning. We heard two loud splashes today at the beaver pond, and Cassie made a swim for the source, but turned back. Whether it was my command or her native caution, I don’t know.

We love Vermont, but would happily forego close, personal encounters with beavers or with moose. We would just as happily avoid any repeat of Toby’s attempt to capture a woodchuck. This evening we found big goofy dogs at the Reservoir—that’s more our speed.

Water baby

So much younger than her brothers under the skin, puppy Cassandra is almost an only child. I am very conscious of what I want her life to be like, and how her life enhances mine. But after knowing many German Shepherds in my life, I am startled that this one unique and particular girl likes to swim.

I now find myself slowing down at water crossings, looking for likely spots for a puppy to have a refreshing dip. The many possibilities are keeping us both occupied in this otherwise dreary summer. This hopeful exploration is one of the things I need from Cassie, and she needs from me the results: places to go where dogs can splash in contentment, maybe swim alongside a canoe or kayak for a few minutes before the otter imitation fails.

Cassie needs from me exercise (channel the Dog Whisperer chanting Exercise-Discipline-Affection), as I need all three from my interaction with her. It is a happy bond that gets us both out to revel into the Vermont sunshine.

On this day when the puppy turned one year old, we skipped a day of painting and went on a field trip to Dog Mountain. Three ponds! Trails for hiking, Stephen Huneck’s dog art, and the Dog Chapel. I took a step into the Dog Chapel, but could not stay, so overwhelmed the small space was with grief and remembrance.

Toby and Cassie had the right response, I think. They took a brief stroll around, sniffed everything and headed right back out into the sunshine. There was a golden retriever to chase, and something smelly that required a roll in the wildflowers with all eight legs in the air.

Dogs are masters of the moment.

O guru of paint

O guru of paint, I am most grateful for the loan of your ladders and the plank that spans from one to another. I am learning to scrape from that plank, learning to ignore the bounce.

O guru of paint, I used to wonder how I would recognize boards that need to be replaced. Particularly after you told me that with plenty of caulk and spackle, my aged clapboards would last “as long as you want them to.” But today as my scraper plunged deep into what looked like a board, dislodging black mold and green gunk, I could see that even I do indeed know them when I see them. That board needs replacing, as does the one with a big hole full of dry rot, covered over by a thin veneer of masonite, now a red flad signaling all kinds of things that should never have been hidden thus. It is good the former owner has moved away, far away, as I unearth these hidden treasures.

O guru of paint, I thank you for guidance. Is it lead? Am I poisoning myself? “Well, it probably is. Just don’t sand much. Scrape and keep moving.”

O guru of paint, I thank you for power washing. What a lot of old paint that removes! I honestly did not expect so much.

O guru, that tall gable above the porch roof. While I understand your concept of a plank on the roof line, another two by four upright and a couple of screws, I must confess that I do not yet believe. Perhaps another few days bouncing on the scaffold, a day or two caulking from a stable position on the porch roof, and I will be ready to call you for further guidance as I reach for the upper peak.

It’s a step by step process, painting a house, and some of it has to do with building one’s nerve, or remembering the nerve one once had. I used to paint from tall ladders, not happily it is true, but step by step I will do what I can, then call for help.

Water rushes in

When you turn fifty, you become eligible for all kinds of interesting extracurricular activities, including the first round colonoscopy. This is not a fun procedure, although I hasten to add, it is life-saving, and it is not completely unbearable. The day and night before the procedure are trying enough, thanks to a dose that chemically reverses the normal digestion process. That’s how my nurse described it to me. Instead of taking water out of the colon, water rushes in, washing away everything in its path.

I handled the pre-procedure steps well enough, but apparently I did not handle the procedure itself very well, since they gave me double Demerol. Still, eventually I woke up enough to be driven home to snooze the afternoon away.

But no.

Late afternoon, I received an emergency call from the building where my office is located. The afternoon thunderstorms had overtaxed something—whether roof or drainage system is still unclear—but water was rushing into our offices through light fixtures or any tiny gap in the ceilings. Thanks be to the colleagues next door who pulled our computers out before they were swamped!

Two days later, we are on the streets looking for alternative accommodations, but determined not to return to the still wet, increasingly moldy offices that we once inhabited. There are several alternatives, and we hope to have a new home soon.

In the grand scheme of things, it is not a major crisis, but gratitude springs anew, both for the help we have received this week and for the overwhelming good fortune that we normally enjoy. Water was less than an inch deep in our offices—how much worse was it for this year’s hurricane victims?

Making hay while the sun shines

The wettest May since eighteen-ninety-something relented with the gift of a sunny weekend, so we all headed out to cut the knee high grass. Hard work! Doubly hard on a holiday weekend, when we all feel we ought to be remembering or barbecuing or both.

When the grass is this tall and lush, it is slow going—take two steps and back up, stop and let the blades clear. Do a chunk and take a break. Normally it takes me three sessions to cut my lawn, trisected into manageable parcels. This time I did the toughest parts first—six hours so far—and I am about two thirds done. Maybe this afternoon...if the sun is still shining...I will finish the remaining hard patch in the back and the easy one in the front. Then I can plan to do everything over again this weekend and be back to summer norms.

I am toying with dramatically decreasing the size of my garden this year, probably just putting half or more of it into green manure. With the aid of the grass, the garden keeps me tied to home all summer long. I’m thinking I may get out more this summer. See a little more of beautiful Vermont.

Besides, the mice ate big holes in my hammock.

Obsession

When I started picking a color for the upstairs bedrooms, I let myself in for gentle joshing at the paint store as I came back again and again for more of those little sample jars. I am the target market for that product. At four bucks a pop, I can afford to try colors over and over again, until I get exactly the right one. Upstairs, I went through seven samples before picking Coastal Fog—the first color I started with, but I don’t care because now I am confident that it is perfect. Now, I am attempting to pick exterior colors. Oh, my.

I live in a classic Vermont farmhouse, which is to say it is a Greek Revival clapboard covered house with a corrugated metal roof. It is currently painted white, and until I ripped them off in a fit of good taste, it had black plastic shutters. I can’t afford to be a preservation perfectionist, but I do draw the line at plastic, non-functional shutters.

I started with the view that it would be nice to have some contrast in the paint scheme to accent the architectural details which now disappear in a blur of white. Historical research is not particularly helpful, since it reveals the following contradictory stances:

1. All Greek Revival houses were always painted white, which was meant to represent pure cut white marble.

2. It is a myth that all Greek Revival houses were painted white—other appropriate colors are light yellow, tan, or gray.

3. Domestic buildings of the period were not generally painted, or if they were, they were painted red or ochre because those paints were the least expensive. Only very wealthy people could afford white paint.

4. Buildings that were heavily used and esteemed (churches and meeting houses) were usually painted in polychrome schemes that we would now find excessively bright.

Well, huh. I took a side trip into investigating deeper colors—maybe a nice charcoal gray—then decided that I don’t want to emphasize all the architectural elements of my house. I particularly don’t want to emphasize the slight bow in the roofline, with corresponding swag in the back wall, which I fear a stark contrasting paint scheme might betray. It was nice to think that a darker color might deter my ongoing infestation of ladybugs, which are said to prefer light colored houses.

I have some other constraints—the rather bright green roof and the white replacement windows don’t fit with every color combination, but I won’t bore you with the details of how I have gotten to one possible conclusion: Clarksville Gray with Lancaster White trim. New London Burgundy doors. I wanted a nice grassy green for the doors, but that green roof...no. I will have the pale blue porch ceiling of my dreams.

I accept the rightness of obsession with colors. These choices stay with us for a long time and have such an impact on how we experience surroundings.

Being boring

Shy people have skills, just not the skills of the extroverted. For example, we know how to fade into the background. We can do it at will.

I remember using this technique on several boyfriends or would-be boyfriends. If they ceased to amuse, I did not need to resort to confrontation or heavy discussion. I just became dull to them, emphasizing the parts of myself that they were unlikely to care for—braininess, attention to detail, rule-following, or a tendency to disappear into books for days at a time. Boring! And soon they would be gone, leaving me to sigh in relief.

Let me emphasize this is not a strategy for long-term friendships which deserve more openness and honesty. When a friendship deserves saving, it is worth risking by exploring what has gone wrong. No, this is a strategy for the short term acquaintance who has turned out to be not quite as interesting as on first encounter.

So I have been boring lately, not so much as a strategy as because I have been busy with house painting estimates and garden planning (is it possible I might take a year off?) and a couple of major projects at work and dog obedience classes (which as everyone knows are really about training the human in the partnership). But partly I have been boring because I was writing for two blogs, Vermont Diary and a group effort that increasingly weighed me down. I felt obligated to write for both, so ended up writing for neither. There is no reason to go into detail as to why I did not enjoy the group blog, but I didn’t. And now that I have been adequately boring, the group blog has thrown me out. All I can say from my cozy briarpatch is “Woo Hoo! Let’s hear it for being boring!”

This experience has reminded me of that old chestnut, “Not to decide is to decide.” And thinking of all those old boyfriends has reminded me that not to play along can indeed be a strategy. Maybe I’m not as socially unskilled as I tend to think. Hmmm.

Close your eyes and jump

I’m getting stressed about a major event next week, no make that this week. (Feel the stress increase with that tiny realization.)

Still, I have always been good in crises, whether they arise unexpectedly or are planned. It’s probably something about how I process adrenaline, although there are other aspects of life where that physical function does not serve my best interests. It is certainly something about how I plan. In detail. Obsessively.

After all the plans are laid out, there is—time permitting—a period of secondguessing, re-thinking, burrowing down into even more detail. This is the period when I wake up in the middle of the night with visions of disaster. (How will we hang the banner? Will all the participants show up? Will we all behave ourselves?)

There are so many ways we small humans struggle against physical limits of time and space. But here’s one for what I am grateful, that time marches forward to a tipping point, the blessed moment when all the planning has to be declared finished because it is time to perform. There are still problems to be solved, dance steps to re-choreograph on the fly, but the time for anxious re-thinking is past.

Showtime!

Who’s training who?

We have been doing our homework for dog obedience class, including exercises on attention, walking on a long line (well, maybe we will do this one when the deluge abates), and sit and stay. With roast beef rewards, my two dogs both want to participate.

Cassie is a little shy today, so she retreats to the dining room, and I work with Toby on “stay.” I have him sit, then I put a palm toward his forward and say “Stay!” To my amusement, he slides down into a prone position and executes a perfect stay.

I try it again: sit and “Stay!” Same result. Almost furtively, he slides down. He looks at me apologetically, and he stays. Perfect.

Again and again, the same result. The stay is flawless, but he will not stay in a sitting position, only prone.

Ha! Now I have it.

This is how he was taught to stay when he went to obedience class with my mother in….are you ready?.....in 1998. Eight years ago. A command never practiced, but Toby remembers. He knows “Stay” follows “Down.” And he is mildly embarrassed that I do not know something so simple.

Who’s training who?

First day of school

If you apply the traditional multiple of seven, nine-month-old Cassie is now ready for kindergarten, so we went. There were ten or eleven other dogs in class, along with their humans. Big ones, little ones, pushy ones, shy ones. About half were puppies around Cassie’s age.

After the rains we have had, we were fortunate to have a relatively deluge-free evening. We doused ourselves with the insect repellent thoughtfully provided by the instructor and scoped out a portion of the ball field that was almost free of puddles.

We hung out between Odie, a black-tipped German Shepherd who at six months is bigger and heavier than Cassie, and Tad, a six-month old field Golden Retriever.

Oh, my! That Cassie is so smart! She excelled on looking at me when I call her name, and because she was clearly so good at “sit,” she was selected to demonstrate the first steps of learning “stay.” (The dachshund demonstrated "sit," not too effective as a demonstration given short legs and long grass.)

She is, however, willful, and we amused our classmates with the exercise of walking (dog on a long line) randomly in different directions. This is supposed to teach the dog to pay attention to where the human is going. We don’t have this down at all, not at all. But it was amusing for others to see what happened when I repeatedly went the opposite direction from a seventy-pound German Shepherd girl.

I thought I lavished attention on my dog, but ninety minutes of undivided attention had her enthralled. Did I really need to be reminded how much German Shepherds love to work? How much they crave a job to do? Apparently I did.

Cassie loved school. Younger puppies Tad and Odie collapsed for naps when they got home, but Cassie was calm and relaxed, then ready to try again the following day.

I’m trying to teach her the word “school,” as well as a word my old dogs understand and appreciate: “tomorrow.” In our little language, “tomorrow” means “tomorrow we will do something fun, okay?” It’s one of those words I taught my dogs by accident, kind of like “Max-don’t-lick-that-baby!” You wouldn’t think dogs would be able to anticipate pleasure “tomorrow,” but it seems to work for us.

Why are you here?

I’ve been going through a flurry of routine medical checkups—physical, mammogram, and pap test—and I find that I am not equipped to deal with the medical establishment. I don’t understand their rules. I don’t understand their approach—in fact I am offended when the first question is “Why are you here?”

“I’m here for a physical,” I replied.

“No, you’re not,” countered the nurse. “You only have a fifteen minute appointment.”

Not even testy yet, I said I was quite certain that I had scheduled a physical, and eventually—after reading me far too much of another Karen’s chart—the nurse realized that not only was I there for the wrong reason, but I was the wrong person altogether. I was directed to go back out to the waiting room and fix that.

Uh?

After I was called back for a second look on the mammogram, another nurse greeted me—without actually looking at me—with “Why are you here?”

“Because you called me back. Surely that is in your records.” By now I was getting testy.

Yesterday the routine pap test. “Why are you here? Did you want a pap test or a full physical?”

“Well, your office called me to say it was time for a routine pap test, and that’s what we scheduled, so I guess that’s why I am here.”

Since when do physicians attempt to up-sell? And if you’re going to pursue that revenue enhancement strategy, you might want to do it on the phone at appointment time, not when I have blocked time for a simple pap test. Not that I wanted a physical.

“Have you ever had a negative pap test? Are you still having periods?”

“Gosh, I think that information must be in my file, since I have been coming here for four years.”

This is the second time I have had this experience with the same nurse. I would change doctors, but it appears that it is standard practice in my town to greet a patient not with “Good afternoon, Karen. I see you are here for your test. I’ve taken a look at your file and this seems to be routine. Do you have any questions?” but with an abrupt and disorganized “Why are you here?”

Speaking as only one patient who—thank heaven!—does not see a lot of the medical community, I find this greeting disrespectful.

Perhaps there is something about the medical community that I do not understand. Perhaps I am oversensitive—well, actually, I am. Perhaps it is that I spend a lot of time trying to create an environment of acceptance for the clients who walk into my office for business advice. I just know I would never use such a blunt greeting. People looking for help with their businesses are a little vulnerable, and they need to be encouraged that it is okay to ask for help and that help will be forthcoming. Are patients that different?

Demolition

As a hobby, it has a revolutionary ring.

“What are your hobbies?”

“I’m really into demolition.”

As stress reliever, there are few better ways to refocus the mind from grant-writing and job descriptions, budgets and the details of annual gatherings.

As instrument of history, the crowbar is a surgical tool, prying away layers of cheap building materials, dirt and accumulated crud to reveal the beautiful bones of old houses—instant gratification in which we indulge at our peril. Some of that admittedly substandard material provides insulation—important not to remove more on a sunny summer day than can be replaced by the time the snow flies.

Sometimes the payoff is a startling discovery. When I ripped up carpet from my living room, I found fourteen-inch maple boards. Not exactly pristine condition, but I far prefer their scarred and pitted warmth to cheap carpet and accumulated dog hair. This weekend, the carpet in one upstairs bedroom came up. While not as dramatic, the payoff was still sweet: a painted floor in reasonably good condition. A new coat of paint, and it will be much easier to sweep away the piles of ladybugs. (Can you have too many ladybugs? Oh, yes.)

One more bedroom and a hallway to go. It is such a pleasure to watch the house become mine, project by project. Every owner of an old house dreams, I suppose, of having the money to do it all at once, but I’m not sure we would make wise decisions if we had all that money to spend in a single swoop. And we wouldn’t have any demolition projects left to brighten rainy weekends.

The outright destructive steps—swinging hammer or crowbar—are relatively short, satisfying as they are. Demolition is a process of removing material layer by layer. It requires a fine touch, attention to detail, and always more hauling of debris than you imagined possible. It takes patience. It takes an eye to see where to stop. It takes listening for the house to tell you when you have peeled back to its essentials.

Demolition is more than a hobby, more than raw escape. Demolition is a metaphor.

Love suddenly

Bang bang bang bang bang!

In rural Vermont, it is a shock to hear someone banging on the door at 8:30 in the evening.

“I didn’t know what to do,” said the nice man in the baseball cap. “There is this big black dog in the middle of the road, looking like a deer in the headlights.”

Oh. I see her, and I let out the universal puppy call. “Puppy, puppy, puppy, puppy-eeeee”

And the dog head back down the side road along my property.

“Ah, uh, okay,” says the nice man, who then leaves me to watch for the dog.

Sure enough, I get into the car and head down the side road. There’s the dog, but when I stop, it moves on. I toss my cookies in the dog’s directions—the dog biscuits in my sweater pocket—but no joy. The dog is having none of this. I give up, and turn my car back toward home when the owner meets me on the way.
“Her name is Love,” he says, “I guess she must have followed my truck.”

They say that great new jobs and wonderful love does not come to find you in the confines of your home. Today I wonder.

Faithfulness rewarded

It probably was not lost to Toby. He probably knew right where he put it sometime last summer on a day when I didn't manage to intercept his trip outside with my boot. By the time the snow came, I gave up hope and replaced them.

Somewhere in my psyche there must have been a grain of faith because I didn't discard the remaining boot, the left boot, the one on the right in the photo.

Today the right boot came back. I walked around the house, and there it was between house and dog pen, as if it had just been brought outdoors in the mouth of a boot and rock loving dog.

It is not in bad shape, all things considered. It doesn't appear to be much worse for spending the winter outside under snow--a little algae, a little damp, but it does not seem to have been buried.

There must be a moral here somewhere, but for now I am just enjoying the surprise.

Beautiful girl

Ah, Oceans, it does not take much to get me to post pretty puppy pix. How are your girls (Cassie's sisters)?

Gal pals

Friday I got a message that the puppy was loose, so I came tearing up the hill. I found Miss Cassandra sitting regally at the top of the driveway, all her chest fur fluffed out. Chin level, she panned left and right and back again, scanning for likely intruders. Every molecule of her eight-month-old body screamed, “I’m in charge here.”

It’s a German Shepherd thing.

Digging under the gate is not so much a German Shepherd thing. Cassie’s accomplice was her best gal pal, Lola, who is an escape artist of retriever-ish extraction. Leap tall fences at a single bound—that’s Lola, formerly Sweet Pea, one of the puppies born at my house last year—although my six-foot dog fence foiled even her remarkable jumping capabilities. Undeterred, they went under.

It can be daunting having a smart dog, but I take comfort that I am smarter, sneakier and have the only set of car keys. I put concrete blocks in the holes they worked so hard to dig, and I don’t leave these two alone for long.

But, oh! it is a delight to watch them romp! They take turns rolling each other over, biting at legs, tail and snout. They part covered in doggy drool, but neither blood nor toothmarks appear. The noise Cass makes is remarkable, somewhere between a whine and a roar, something like a low flying jet both in decibels and in how it grates on human ears. I never knew a puppy could make that sound.

Here they are plotting escape. From right to left, it’s Cassie, Lola’s friend Amiga, Lola, and mournful old Toby, who can only take a little of the girls’ society.

Seeking society

A card-carrying introvert, I cherish my time alone. I need it. I crave time to let the many potential responses to colleagues, friends, neighbors and family—especially family—settle to the point that I am measured and calm in what I actually say. I conjure up a stunning variety of scenarios as I try to figure out what is “really” going on. There is no question that I am over-sensitive—my life experiences have led me to where I am, as yours, gentle reader, have led you, although we would all like to think that we can rise above such simplistic conditioning.

All that therapy, all that writing, and I am left with the irony that if I want to respond simply and authentically to another person, I have to spend a lot of time processing, thinking, mostly just musing about not only how I want to respond, but more basically, how I want to perceive the situation and my range of possible responses.

I do have friends and family, some more distant than I would prefer, but that is not in my control. And I understand that my social safety net of human connection is frayed as a result of moving three times in the last decade. Big moves, like divorces, take about three years to re-establish equilibrium. I do have a life, which has many, many satisfactions and much happiness, and I am blessed that I enjoy my own company.

But all that thinking, all that time alone—there is a sense in which it is unhealthy. There is nobody to pull me out of abstraction, nobody to say to me, “Just a cotton-pickin’ minute….you are way off base,” preferably in a loving and respectful tone. Oversensitive, doncha know.

So, I’m thinking I need to meet more people. Can you sense how my teeth are gritted when I say this? It is so much work for me! And yet, I know there is a payoff. Two decades ago, when I was first living in New York, a painfully shy bumpkin, I undertook to conquer my basic shyness by committing to talk to three new people a day. Anyone. The counter man in the coffee shop, people on the subway platform, the person sliding by on the opposite escalator (very safe, that one!) It worked. Very soon, I was talking up a storm to anyone and everyone. I ended up dating someone from the subway--one of my healthiest relationships with a very nice man.

Meeting more people in rural Vermont is tougher, but I refuse to believe it is impossible. Now past the magic three-year mark, I get invited to parties from time to time and I make a point of going. It is time to take up contradance again, and maybe some group hikes. The first step is getting out in the world more, since nobody is likely to come uninvited to my front door to bring me a fuller, brighter life.

The next step will be to pay attention. Again and again in my life, prospective friends and would-be lovers have stopped me, lectured me, whacked me silly to say, “Hey! You! I am trying to be friendly. Could you please notice my efforts?” Who knows how many interesting new people are circling even now, while I make my oblivious march through a good but solitary life?