Devotion by Dani Shapiro
Author:Dani Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-12T05:00:00+00:00
49.
In Connecticut, on our hilltop, life was quiet. Gone were the city sounds: the sirens, hisses, street fights, car alarms, the teeming, throbbing, ceaseless pulse of life. Our pace slowed. A different kind of pulse surrounded us now. I noticed the reddish hue of bare tree branches as they began to bud; the silvery frost at dawn. Baby chipmunks darted into the cracks under our front steps. We were surrounded by crickets, field mice, bats, hawks, frogs from the pond across the way. A gray fox roamed our meadow. There were reports of a bear. At night, coyotes howled in the distance.
Suddenly, there were enough—more than enough!—hours in the day. There was no traffic. It took exactly sixteen minutes to drive Jacob to school. No more, no less, barring the unforeseen event of being stuck behind a tractor pulling hay. It took nine minutes to get to the market, eleven minutes to the little French bakery. The thriving metropolis of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was precisely an hour, door-to-door. It was quiet, all right. So quiet that we could hear the sound of a truck straining uphill a mile away.
In the silence, something shifted. I had left a certain kind of anxiety behind, back in the city. The urban life I had loved for so long—the constant motion, the sense that there was always something exciting happening somewhere—that life had turned on me, once I became a mother. (Or perhaps once my child became so sick. The two events—new motherhood, the near-loss of Jacob—are grafted together in my mind so that it is impossible to think of one without the other.) In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn’t known was there. No wonder I had been running as hard and as fast as I could! Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself.
Who was I, and what did I want for the second half of my life? I mean, I was in the middle of life, the middle of midlife, the middle of a midlife crisis. I had been shaped by choices and decisions, not all of them conscious. I had turned left instead of right; had taken (or not taken) the trip, the flight, the challenge, the chance. Everything I had ever done had led me here—and while here wasn’t a bad place at all, it also wasn’t enough. Some essential piece of me was missing, and in the quiet of the country I had an opportunity to figure out what, exactly, that missing piece was.
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