My, it was clear Bronwen was in her element in the library!  She swirled and fluttered about like a moth, like the head of a ballet troupe where all the books were her company.

After dinner she’d invited me the stairs for a little tour of the bookish part of the ecostery, while Gronigen and Maudlin cleaned up the dishes.  I’d offered to help them but something in Maudlin’s manner—nervous, dark, quietly frantic even—told me I should do as she bid me, which was not to worry about the chores.  I sensed that Gronigen and Maudlin needed to speak of things privately so I gave them some space and foisted my visitorship on the girl.

We carried candles and dripped wax along the way.  The creaking-floor library stretched across the south-facing portion of the house, and the wall opposite the windows was lined with bookcases, full to the brim.  Between the cases and the windows extended one long, oaken table, strewn with papers, while at the room’s opposite end sat a single, well-worn plush armchair.  The holdings of this library were greater than my “bookstore,” and for a stray moment I started to scan the shelves for valuable books.  What a shock to myself I was!  To see my love of books so degenerate to instinctive mercenary moneygrubbing.  So venal, so failing even at that!

I don’t think Bronwen noticed my wincing mental hubbub.  I recovered and asked, “And just how many bookmarks do you need, then?” I asked.

“Well, it’s never enough to have just one, a single parched tongue following your Bedouin eyes across the desert of the pages.  No, I want to remember every page I’ve read.  I want to anchor everything.  I read one novel—To the Lighthouse I think it was—and by the end had a bookmark between every single page.”

She fairly beamed with pride over this feat.

She paused, tapped her fingers along the spines of a dozen books, then added: “I always felt an untucked bookmark among the saddest things in the world.  Look, here’s Bleak House!  There must be at least twenty-five bookmarks here.  Not bad, not bad…”

She leaned close to the window, hands cupping her face, and declared the snow was still falling heavily.  The night was falling so quietly.  She turned to me and said, “It fairly reminds of me Edith Sitwell, dying.”

“Does it now.  Tell me, what are you reading these days?”

“What am I reading.  So many things.  Just look at the bookmarks!  Sappho, for one.  I was sitting here a couple days ago when Merfyn appeared and asked, what are you reading? And I said, Fragments of Sappho.  And he said, Fragments!  Well why don’t you put him back together?  Her, I said, it’s a her.  Her then, he said.  And I said that’s just the thing, there isn’t enough to make a whole.  And he said, I took apart a radio last week and when I put it back together there were extra spare parts, even though the radio worked just fine.  Isn’t it the same with people?  Don’t we all have spare parts?  And I didn’t have an answer for him.  All I could say was that people weren’t radios.”  She laughed and laughed.

“Who is this Merfyn fellow I’ve heard about?”

To ask this question was to raise Bronwen’s astonishment.  Her eyebrows were like solar flares.  I may as well have asked who the president was.  She gave me no real answer—ignored the question, in fact, the way people ignore an embarrassing patch of conversation.  It was an insult to Merfyn’s very existence, obviously, to ask such a question.

She went on to say she’d just started Death in Venice and she was braced for some drowning by the end.  “Who would travel all the way to Venice to die any other way?  I doubt anyone goes to Siberia to suffer a heatstroke.”

“Aye,” I said, but didn’t spoil the book for her.

Bronwen was so beautifully self-contained, and didn’t ask a question of me—not a real question, to which she would await an answer—and I was glad of that.  It was as though I was but a sounding board for her, and that’s just as it should be.  Perhaps she was accustomed to having visitors and skating on the surface of things, chatting away with people she’d never see again, perhaps she preferred the veneer so that no one would come to know her really, perhaps she was just a young girl with a sophomoric blend of intellectual acuity and spinning-top silliness.

Snuffing our candles, we returned to the living room, where Gronigen and Maudlin both sat basking in the glow of the fireplace.  Bronwen returned to her curl, back to the fire, book in hand.

Gronigen immediately challenged me to a game of chess, while Maudlin watched on nearby, her knitting needles galloping along.  Whatever wrinkle was between them had been smoothed away.

I said I used to play some, which was answer enough to Gronigen’s challenge.  He lunged for the board and got the pieces ready.

Now, the pieces of Gronigen’s chess set are not to be distinguished in height and, apart from the horses, scarcely distinguishable in shape, and with each move we diminished toward pitch darkness, the fire sighing and smoking and fading into worthless ashes.  On the board I was bombarded from the start.  His pieces commanded excellent posts and seized the advantage and my effort was mostly rearguard.  The way he swung his pieces to new outposts and redoubts, pulled them inspiringly into battle, laughing and calling the whole way, he’s truly a general’s general.  He responded to my tepid moves at once with a great tempest and earthquake on the battlefield, screwing his pieces into place.  My pawns cowered like a pathetic, weak-kneed, pitchfork-bearing militia, and my bishops failed to admonish them to maintain their moral courage.  My castles crumbled and my king fell into babbling drooling senility.  Worse, as the light dimmed I struggled to distinguish the darkening pieces—the little gnomic silhouettes were almost all the same size.  Soon I couldn’t tell which was which.  I would try to make a move.  “My boy, I’m afraid that’s an illegal move,” Gronigen replied, returning the piece to its square.  I tried again.  “Not so!” he cried, “are you trying to cheat me here?”  “No, of course not, I just got confused,” I muttered, not daring to admit I was nearly blind now.  I might as well have been a field mouse twitching before a barred owl across the board; I hadn’t a prayer.  Some of Gronigen’s chortles did sound like the hoots of an owl (“whose rooks you slew, whose rooks you slew now?”) and soon his talons released me in an elegant—so he said, I couldn’t make out anything on the board—mating combination, whereupon he leaned back and declared himself satisfied.

The grace of victory consumed his thoughts for a while, until the darkness of the room—really there was nothing left to be seen, everything had fallen away but the voice of a victorious general praising his troops—at last elicited his attention, rousing him to admit languidly, “Looks like the fire’ll need more wood soon.”

I said, “You’ve got a very nice set-up here…the ecostery, I mean.  Thanks again for…”  I didn’t know what I was thanking him for—I half suspected he brought on the snow himself, just to trap me here.  But it was a congenial enough snare, if that were the case.

My bumbling statement was enough to set Gronigen going again.

“Aye,” he said, tapping some chess pieces together.  “We’re in America but not quite of it.  I’ve always admired the Amish but they have their beards and religious strictures, not to my liking.  For us it started when some uncompromising young folk (they’re always young), witness to too many oil spills and hydrofractures and tainted water wells and strip-mined land, gave up (as one turns away from the temptations of the devil) the ping-pong modes of travel: plane train and automobile (the original axis of evil).  Car, I’m told, is short for carcinogen.  These people came together and started a network of stations and hostels, all medieval-like, accessible by foot or bike, all across the continent.  And secretive too—if NASCAR found out we’d be smoked out of here in an instant.  They learned to walk the walk and pedal the pedal.  Early on, some years ago, there was even an oath to take, but now it’s by tacit conviction only.”

“And the ecostery part,” I asked, “where does that come from?”

“What I like to imagine—in the future—are hills unblemished by highways, interstates zipped up and stored away in the Eisenhower presidential library, stripmalls stripped of their legal rights, malls malnourished…and citizens of our all-consuming country pedaling their way toward enlightenment.  Such is what the ecostery stands for.  And we’re one of the keeper-goers, a decade on.   We set up a station (not gas station, understand; instead, think stations Hiroshige-like) for any wayfarer who might be skirting the Catskills.  Look, we’ve been at this long enough to gather some steam (pardon the metaphor), and as for me I just try to ignore the news on the radio and have fun and be—well, hospitable.  Except for those damned guitars…”

Bronwen exclaimed, looking out the window.  “Why, the snow’s stopped and clouds have cleared!  Let’s go see the stars!  Time to get the chalk out!”

“Well, my dear,” Gronigen replied, “I suspect there is enough moonlight to work by, but I wouldn’t expect any visitors to arrive before tomorrow afternoon anyway.”

“But what if they do?  What if they’re heaving up the hill as we speak…?  What if…?!”  She continued to stare out the window.

“That’s her favorite question in the world, Glencote.”

“Oh yes,” Bronwen said, “I have a bulging potato sack of what ifs.  But the thought, the mere thought of one of these fine pilgrims—for they’ve all been, you know, fine—lumbering up the hill at four a.m., serenaded by owls and whippoorwills, well!  Don’t they need to see their names emblazoned on the road?  Isn’t that what we’re here for?”  She trailed off in a whinny of giggles and then, to my surprise, came right up to me.  “Let’s go, Glencote, I’ll bet a literary fellow like yourself knows how to spell adequately well.”  Not waiting for a reply, she threw on a coat and hat and mittens and then took off right out the door.

Astonished, I stared at Gronigen.  He murmured, smiling, “One would be advised not to snub an invitation from Bronwen.  Those are few and far between.”  Then, leaning close, he whispered, “And you do know how to spell, don’t you?”

By the time I donned my coat and boots Bronwen was already splashing snow down the hill, gamboling the whole way, chalk bucket swinging violently.  She waved me on.

“I knew the moonlight would be sufficient,” she said when I reached her at the road.  “It always is.”

She chewed on a mauve chalkstick between her teeth as though it were a cigar, then set to work on the pavement, which had been recently cleared by a plow.  She etched out letters the size of chickens, names stretching from one side of the road to the other.

CORINNE!!!

“How did you start this practice?” I asked.

“Well, don’t you know.  I like to greet our pilgrims, those Luddite lumberers, and let them know they’re on the right path, and almost there.  They come here, all sorts at all times of the year, on their way to or from the city or Boston or the Berkshires, or the Green Mountains or godknowswhere.  A lot of people are heading to godknowswhere.”  She tilted her head as though it were the next town over.  “Few but these hardy souls know about our hostelry, so we’re not precisely sub rosa, but close.  Sub rosa hips, perhaps.  And I like to practice my spelling.”

“But how do you know their names?  And when to expect them?”

“Simple.  They write ahead to Gronigen and tell us they’re coming.  They need the encouragement, for you know how our hill is a steep and long and winding one—to be taken lightly indeed, bless your carbon frame.  Some of our pedaling and perspiring guests, I’ve learned, actually abandon their panniers to the side of the road and gather them later on the way back down.  Such is the trial of the last two miles, a trial even our most spandexed of guests find taxing.  I bet you did, too.  And in the world of perspiration and searing lungs and burning legs there’s nothing more welcoming in the world than seeing your name scrawled across pavement.  You won’t find that kind of service at Motel 6.”

DENNIS!!!

ROWAN!!!

 “And,” she declared, “I always for thoroughness’ sake add a fictional name or two, often beginning with vowels.”

IAN!!

EUSTACIA!

There they were—glowing in the moonlight, letters the size of my legs, stretching across the width of the pavement.  The names seem to hum and I wondered whose wayfaring soul they might be attached to, and what their stories might be, and looking at the strange stitch work of letters …all things seemed possible.

Bronwen leaned down again and drew arrows to point the way.

Afterwards she took me on a brief excursion through snow drifts and woods.  We stumbled through a patch trees and then came out onto what seemed like a wide plain.  “See this here, Mr. Cumquat?  Used to be a golf course.  Now I don’t know about you, but I ain’t never seen a deer worried about a three-putt.  Three fracking wells were put in over there, too.  It’s been abandoned in the best sense of the word, and life’s coming back.  Gronigen and I are restoring this patch.  In the spring, I shall plant catnip!  It will be my next excursion.  Call it the Bronwen Brocklesby Reclamation Project.  Acres and acres of catnip.”

Here was a girl all of sixteen years old talking of her next excursion.  I wondered, how many had she already had?  With the snow gracing the ground under a clear starry night, I could well imagine the openings and gaps in the woodland as par threes fours and fives.

“You must have a lot of pet felines to intoxicate if you need a full field of the stuff,” I said.

“Not a single one!  I don’t have a pet anything.  No, what I want to do is be of service to the world of bobcats and lynx and cougars.  Don’t they need catnip too?”

And what struck me was how feline Bronwen was herself, how quick she was to take any sort of evasive offense, but how quick to let go of any semblance of a grudge.  So complete within herself, so balanced, and yet—what was she, some sort of Taoist sage, dancing in the eternal flow of Qi of life?

She added, laughing, “I think you could use some catnip, too.  And what shall be your next excursion?”

I said I really didn’t know.  “Maybe I’ll visit a few different ecosteries.”

“They come in different sizes, they do.  Ah!  Just look at the stars!”

We stood in the middle of a forsaken fairway smoothed with snow and it was silent and the wind was still and in the bowl of the black sky I had never seen so many stars.  They swarmed the moon and the rest of the sky and spilled from horizon to horizon.  They were reflected in the glittering snow.  Bronwen chortled and swooned onto the ground, lying on her back, sprawled out in her woolen attire, as if to make a snow angel.  “Come on, Mr. Cumquat, you can’t see anything from up there!”

So I lay down—careful not to agitate my sore back—and stretched out in the snow beside her.  The view was too exhilarating to admit of any cold.

“Are you one to leave snow angels about?” I asked.

“No, no.  I lay here and imagine what it will be like to be dead.  For my body to become part of the earth again.  I don’t think it should be a scary or sad thing at all.”

And then she sang in poetry:

“When I die, weep not for me,

But bring me a kettle of vultures!

Circling and soaring overhead, in the widening gyre,

No funeral pyre, but welcome and return!”

 I said, “You only feel that way because you’re so young.  When you get to be my age you’ll feel differently, you’ll start to read the obituaries in the paper with a keen and informed interest.”

“You read the obituaries?”

“Religiously,” I said.

“You know what I think, Mr. Cumquat?  I think obituaries and personal ads have a lot in common.”

“That I do,” Maudlin affirmed, greeting us at the door with a comforting nod.  “Good to see you, Glencote.  And as for the starlings Gronigen I swear sometimes you would like our place to be such an open house we wouldn’t have any walls.”

“Walls are only to keep warm, my dear, and to keep Bronwen from roaming away.”

“Are you suggesting I am nothing but a sheep?” Bronwen called out from her customary curl near the fire.  “You know I’ve never liked sheep.  They have fleas.”

“You do have a tendency to…wander, my dear,” Maudlin acknowledged.  “Remember just last summer, you and that orange bobble-headed friend of yours disappeared in the woods for what was it…six days?  Without a word of notice?”

“And six nights, too.”

Maudlin handed me a mug of tea as I sat down beside Gronigen on the long wooden bench.  Outside the clouds were thickening and spittling snow.

Bronwen stared at the ceiling and offered a spirited defense.  “Well you know I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t have a pager, I don’t carry flares in my backpack.  What am I to do?  I did ask five different squirrels—three gray and two red—to run back and give you a message from me, I gave them precise directions and a handful of beech nuts for their trouble, but how can it be my fault if they got distracted before reaching the doorstep?”

Maudlin waved her off.  “Be that as it may—”

“It’s only February, mom!”

Maudlin gave me a mirthful exasperated glance.  “Aren’t you going to say hello to our visitor?”

“We have so very many visitors, I can’t keep them all straight.  If I said hello to them all I’m afraid I’d be repeating myself.  Wait!  Is that you, Mr. Cumquat?”

“The name is Glencote,” I muttered, as I opened my parcel and presented her with the revised copy of Mumford’s volume.  She was charmed immediately, purring like a feline over the marginalia, and I am glad she didn’t ask whose writings those were in the margins.

Smiling, she declared in a sweet voice, “I don’t believe a book is complete until it’s been scribbled in!  And look, Gronigen!  I’ll have something to do while you’re gone, since you’re so set on abandoning me.”

Gronigen didn’t reply; somehow we’d lost him to the drama outside—he was riveted at the window, wide-eyed at the landscape outside.  His brow was furrowed and he seemed not merely to be staring at the falling snow—it was quite heavy now—but silently conversing with it.  As an afterthought he said quietly, “Bronwen, we are expecting some visitors tomorrow, you know.”

The girl slammed her hands on the table.  “Bless my loggerhead!  I plum forgot.  I haven’t even chalked them up on the pavement yet!  I have the list of names in my pocket, just going to waste.”

“Well, now you’ll have to wait until the snow stops.  It’s gathering quick and fast.”  He turned to me.  “And what about you, Glencote?  Have skis on your bike?”

“That I don’t,” I said.

“Well, you better settle in, because I don’t think the roads will be passable until tomorrow.”  And indeed the view out the window had turned utterly white.  The world had fallen away.

Maudlin said, “Would like a postcard to write home, saying you’ll be held up for a day or two?  I’ll get you one.”

I said that wouldn’t be necessary and tried to extricate myself for a speedy departure, but she and Gronigen won me over—how unwise it would be to challenge such a squall.  I was not one to be unwise.  The quiet undertow of me was glad to stay, even if my impulse were to return to familiar grounds.  All the same, at home I had neither pressing business nor anxious family waiting.  As with snow I let things fall where they may and happily shadowed Gronigen as he went about his daily tasks around the ecostery.  I tried to be useful where I could.

What soon became apparent: living at an ecostery is not a plateau of recreation.  There was much to do—and this was the slow season, Gronigen said.

We braved the blustery snow—and the starlings, who chattered away in the branches above us—and shoveled to the nearby rickety old coop, where the chickens were greeted by name—about twenty of them.  Then to the attached greenhouse, which even in late winter yielded small hardy greens.  Back inside we spent a long spell puzzling over the wiring to the solar panels, which Gronigen said had been acting up the past few weeks.  We even indulged in some bicycle repair, as he decided to change his rear derailleur in preparation for his trip.  Then there was chopping firewood—a project which, spread out over the entire year, required only twenty minutes each day.  I offered to help but I suspect Gronigen didn’t trust me with his sharp axe.  I did help to stack the wood and quickly learned the limits of my back.  Meanwhile Maudlin was in the kitchen, and out with the animals, busy here and there as well.  They share kitchen duties, Gronigen said, as he has fortes—baking bread, making fermented foods—and she has hers—presiding over the cauldron of bone broth soups that made up their daily nourishment in winter.

Wood shavings, the smell of wood smoke, the frigid winter air vanquished by the intense labor of just living—checking email every ten minutes and tapping on the keyboard were not part of this gig.  And yes, Gronigen said, they often have visitors—like myself!—helping out here and there.  Sometimes half a dozen or more, staying for a few days or weeks or even months.  He summarized by saying, with a rueful shake of the head, “It seems there’s always at least one person in the house who plays guitar.”

Bronwen should help more, he admitted, but she’s in her own world of books, a veritable librarian during the winter.  Call it homeschooling.  In the summer months she roams and wildcrafts for the family, and helps out in the garden, too.

“Does it ever get old,” I asked, “having so many strangers—people—pass through here so often?”

“Au contraire, my fellow.  It’s the one thing that keeps me from getting old.”

Dinner was served at dusk, a simple but dense soup from the cauldron, as Gronigen called it.  I was surprised by how casual the affair turned out to be—no prayers, no monkish silence.  It was an elbows-on-the-table sort of meal, and like any house in the world weather was a perennial, spirited topic of conversation.  I told them I had checked the weather report this morning and swore there was no chance of snow today.  The three of them seemed to share conspiratorial glances as Maudlin said, sententiously, “Well, Glencote, you are down in the valley, there.”

I said I noticed there was an upright piano in the living room, and mentioned that I knew how to play some.

“We’ve been trying to convince Bronwen to take it up for years,” Maudlin said.

“Tell me, Mr. Gunnysack,” said Bronwen, rousing herself from the reflection of her soup bowl, “do you prefer the white keys or the black ones?”

Such were my thoughts when I rolled my bicycled up the path of the Bog Turtle Ecostery to where Gronigen stood, welcome, always welcoming, broom in hand.  A fortnight had passed since I’d seen him last and with little snowfall where I live but here in the hills—not the rooftop of the world but maybe its attic—everything was still white, and as such full of possibility.  As he watched me approach Gronigen held his broom at half mast, poised for adventure.

“What’s new in the world of tracks?” I asked by way of greeting.

“Everything, everything.”  He surveyed the horizon.  “Well, the coyotes in particular have been making their presence felt hereabouts.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He smiled and leaned his head a little to one side, unsurprised by my appearance.  He asked me about my ride and then explained, while scrutinizing the cloudy sky, how he himself was leaving soon for a journey along the old Catskill Turnpike.  It would take over a month and he would get to stay at a dozen stations like this old farmhouse that were located along the old road (sometimes following current highways, sometimes reverting to smaller byways) every twenty-five miles or so.

This year was the first where they had enough stations—call them hostels, lodgings, ecosteries, what you will—off the carbuncular grid to enable a bicycle journey from Vermont to the Finger Lakes.  In the winter, even.  He’d been working toward this for a decade, bringing people together and inspiring them to see beyond the end of their fenders, to give up the tailpipe dream that claimed a god-given right of 2.5 cars per family.  To simply share.  To be hospitable.  “But you know about that already, what we’re up against.”  He all but called me comrade.

I was quiet.  I didn’t wish to disappoint him by honoring the truth—that my devout bicycling was more accident than design, more poverty-induced pragmatics than a Gandhian gesture to change the world.  Of course I preferred bicycles to cars, aesthetically and I might even say ethically, and as such I lived at a certain oblique angle to the rest of America, but I held no romance that therein lay salvation.

“Have you been training for your journey?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.  Every morning the roads are clear Bronwen and I take our bikes out and retrace the roads around us.  She’s so disappointed she’s not coming.  Poor child.  But next time, next time.”

I explained that I had a gift for Bronwen—or, at least, a gesture of customer servitude.  Perhaps it had been forward of me, but I took her letter as a kind of summons—or, at least, a hint by the universe, whose stars and constellations only speak in hints.   After her letter I got right to work and bicycled to the bookstore in town where by luck they had a copy of Mumford’s tome that had so offended the girl.  I paid for it with some of my store credit and then back home wrote to Bronwen explaining I would deliver a replacement copy in a week.  This copy I bought was clean of any markings, so I turned to page one and with pencil in hand embarked on my own marginal commentary.  It took me a week to fill it from endpaper to endpaper.

Gronigen seemed to understand perfectly.  “I’m sure she will be aglow with gratitude for your conscientiousness.  I’m surprised by how she’s taken to Mumford—that old stalwart can inspire still!”

He gestured toward the farmhouse and we headed that way—and how I was looking forward to another cup of tea around their blazing fire!  Just before we arrived at the door, though, Gronigen leaned down toward a shallow stone bowl sitting next to the path.  It was filled with sunflower seeds.   With a mischievous grin—as though testing my faith—he scooped up a handful and tossed them over his head.  The seeds fell like a dash of black sparks against the snowy stone path and instantly hailed a flock of squawking starlings, all iridescent, a full convergence of them, like something shattered suddenly reassembled.  Dozens of birds, like stars falling, suddenly there, milling along the path and picking at seeds.  Where had they come from?  How do you train two score starlings so?  I shivered with incredulity.  A seed landed on my shoe and a bird followed it there.  I had to resist the urge to kick it away, an urge stirred not by the bird itself but what it represented, a wild confusion and perversion of things, a sort of black magic even.

“Mustn’t dawdle!” Gronigen cried out, taking the three steps to the door in a single bound.  He chortled quietly, and I suddenly feared for my sanity.

As he entered the cottage he glanced back at me and I could see the hull of a sunflower seed lodged in his teeth.

Then I googled myself and joined Gronigen among the unmapped interstices of the internet.

As I googled and googled I could see my reflection in the hallway mirror—and what a slumped slouching figure I cut!—something Beardsley or Schiele might have drawn.  I felt ashamed.

I turned off the computer, determined to think no more of bog turtles or ecosteries, dismissing what I saw in the morning as a mere luddite caprice in these new York hills, an enclave of eccentrics of no consequence to the world.

Besides, I had my own problems.  My book sales had been slumping for months, and of late I’d found myself scarcely able to pay the bills.  It was a common bookselling lot, every bookseller I knew was being driven into austerity, starved by each other and bewildered by a wildly changing market.  Soon enough the steady creep of life reasserted itself and I returned to my paltry yoga of checking email, processing and packing orders (what few there were), losing games of chess online, putting water on to boil for pasta.  And so the winter day threatened to become like countless others in my life, sinister in its dullness, as the horizon on the west tilted up and devoured the sun.

One week later, as the universe tilts, an envelope appeared in my mailbox.  It was adorned with the drawing of a wren and the sender’s name was Bronwen Brocklesby.

Just last spring some wrens built a nest inside my mailbox.  The door of the mailbox didn’t close properly, leaving just enough room for egress, otherwise nicely sheltering their young.  The birds didn’t even mind the postman’s occasional deposits.  Now I’ve had vines cover my windows, mushrooms grow in my bathroom, and raccoons colonize my attic, so birds in my mailbox was of no concern whatever.  The eggs hatched, the young fledged, and had not heard from them since—until this letter.

To speak of surprise doesn’t do my eyebrows justice.

Of course I savored the envelope before opening it—I savored it and held out as long as I could.  The line drawing of the wren was done expertly, without the care of a trace.  The script, fine, almost calligraphic, was addressed to “The Bicycling Bookseller,” capitalized and in quotation marks, thick with jest.  I turned it over and over in my hands.

Enough already! I chided myself—what are you, some stuttering lovelorn adolescent clutching his pen-pal’s latest volley?  I tore open the envelope and found a single sheet inside.  It read:

“Dear Mr Glencote—

Thank you for the books.  I am still reading them—some I like to start to read at the end and work backwards, some I start in the middle, and one or two I even start at the beginning.  However, I am writing because I would like to return one of the books.  Mumford’s The City in History.  There is no writing in it!—I thought that these books, being ‘used,’ would be well-tended, marked up as they say with notes from previous readers in the flyleaves and margins.  Your other books have at least a signature in the front, but this book is so clean it may as well be new.  What a disappointment!  Of course I could annotate it myself as I go along, but that’s not nearly as much fun.  I want to know something of the people who read the book before me.  Would you be able to find a replacement copy with some signatures and notes and marginalia?  I’m not one to speak of false advertising, but you are a used bookseller, aren’t you?  On further thought—I assumed that the used referred to the books and not yourself, so I am sorry if I was mistaken in that regard.

Bronwen B.

PS

The night after your visit Coyote ambled down our path, crisscrossing your footprints, and left a thick deposit of scat at the base of the tree where you’d leaned your bike.  Here is a rendering.”

And befitting Bronwen, a line drawing of coyote scat adorned the bottom of the page.

We walked up the snow-swept path to the farmhouse, which was a rambling old clapboard-sided home, two stories tall with steep gables, surrounded by numerous outbuildings—coops, greenhouse, garden sheds—as a chicken is surrounded by its chicks.  The roof was inlaid with solar panels and the dark coils of solar hot water system, but otherwise the place looked as though it were presiding over a homestead a century or more ago.  We passed through a mudroom by the side entrance, where we shed our boots and coats, and came into the kitchen, a long room enlivened by a roaring fire and dangling ladles and pots, the smell of baking bread in the oven, and a woman vigorously scouring pots in the sink.  She greeted us with a smile and warm hello.  She toweled her hands, brushed back her graying locks, and offered her hand to me.

Her name was Maudlin and she gestured for me to sit down at the large broad oak table, and went witout hesitation to fill the teapot.  Ah—she and Gronigen had the air of folks accustomed to a regular influx of visitors—they were unceremonious but warm and quickly attentive.

Maudlin spoke over her shoulder.  “So you’re the bookseller on wheels!  You must be like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, always in haste with a burden on thy back.”

“Well, I have panniers,” I said, “to spare my back.”  I refrained from admitting that the post office conducts, with this trip as the single exception, all my deliveries.

“Antiquarian tomes and spandex should never mix!” called out a young woman from the far end of the kitchen table.  I hadn’t noticed her till now.  She was curled up reading, holding her book as one would a hymnal, her eyes riveted on the page, though broadly chuckling to herself, no doubt at the thought of my modestly rotund person in spandex..  Her lustrous black hair, shoulder length, was tucked in under a wool hat.

“That’s Bronwen,” Gronigen said, as he handed me a mug of tea.  “Bronwen, your books have arrived.  Bronwen?  Ah!  I never have seen anyone go so suddenly and deliberately deaf.”  No further introduction needed, it seemed!

“We haven’t owned a car in a decade,” Gronigen said as he straddled the bench across the table from me.  “And we’re seven miles from town.  When we heard about hydrofracking, compulsory integration, the whole excrementous lot, we ripped out our natural gas lines.  So we go slowly, if at all, and for energy we use the sun, and the trees, which use the sun.  We huddle along in the winter.  And we use our own muscles.”

“And ligaments,” piped in Bronwen from her book.

“And ligaments,” Gronigen acknowledged.  “She’s a stickler, sometimes.”

“I just like to remind you of what you teach me.”

I said it’s sometimes downright exhausting, doing the right thing.  Gronigen shook his head in disagreement.  No, he said, if an action is done in the right spirit, with a pure mind and open heart, fatigue should rarely come into the picture.  “We all have such resources,” he said, tapping his chest, “such reserves of energy and spirit that are so rarely ever used these days.”

“Where’s the fault line?” I asked.

“Distraction,” he said, without hesitation.  I felt the truth of what he said in myself.

I unwrapped the books and slid them across the table, and Gronigen delighted in them one by one.

“Ah, yes!  Just perfect.  And excellent condition, too.  You can’t trust—well, you know, you can’t trust everyone out there.  Thank you so much!  See, Bronwen is homeschooled and she devours books and she’s just about to finish her schooling, aren’t you Bronwen?  And then what?”

In a maladroit effort to engage the aloof girl, I asked, “Off to see the world, right?”

“I’m no cosmonaut,” she replied in a wispy, junco-like tone, her eyes still on the page.  “I’d rather stay home, thank you very much.  I’d like to stay home and be…a toad herder!  Yes, that’s what I’d like.  There are enough goat herders in the world, I think we need more toad herders.  You should see these woods in July!  All the hopping about out there makes one downright paranoid.”

I didn’t know what to say to that and so said nothing.  Nonetheless, they all unaccountably raised my spirits.  Gronigen had a bristly gray beard and a visage always on the verge of a smile.  When he spoke his hands and arms would widen and his fingers would dance as though playing a piano.  He raised your wind horse, and it never ceased to inspire me to double my efforts to be pleasant, conversational, worthy of their time.

Maudlin, drying dishes, drifted back into the conversation.  “So how many books do you have to sell?”

“Round about three thousand.”

“Gronigen!  Think of it.  Three thousand author dedications.  Three thousand acknowledgments!  That’s my favorite part of books.  Most just go downhill from there.  I’m a connoisseur of dedication pages.  I have a mind to compile a book of them.  Tell me, what’s your favorite acknowledgment?”

“I really don’t know.  I can’t say I’ve given them much notice.”  Maudlin’s brow furrowed in quiet disbelief.  She leaned her head to one side and stared off into space, trying to contemplate a life without acknowledgments.

Gronigen took over the conversation and we talked bikes for a while.  He was preparing a trip through the Catskills—yes, in February snows—and he wanted to know my take on salt stains.  I told him of my experience, all the while feeling his was wider, and he asked not to humor me but because his generosity and kind humility knew no bounds.  I answered as best I could, warming in the glow of his spirit.  Why are you bicycling to the Catskills? I asked.

“Work.  By that I mean, practice.  I mean, building bridges with people I know, working for what little future we have on this planet.  To fight for the future?  Well, not exactly.  I’m not much into fighting.  Nor am I into teaching—that is, hearing myself talk.  I just focus on the work—what needs to be done.  I for one am looking forward to a life without planes—and cars.  Won’t be too long now, I suspect!  But on the whole contemplating the future just mires you in despair.  Better to carve out what we can with that sharp knife’s edge we all have call the present.”

I was invited to stay for dinner three times, and I declined three times.  Out of pure instinct, though my curiosity almost got the best of me.  Soon I was on my way home, having warmed my belly with tea and my feet against the fire in their hearth.  It was only as I left the farmhouse that I saw the sign “Bog Turtle Ecostery” hanging from an ash tree.  I wondered what that could mean, and whether it was anything more than a relic of a Luddite-inspired hippie past.  To my surprise, it was not long before I had a chance to return there and find out.

What we silly mortals do to honor a blank check.

As my resentment grew I pedaled faster and faster and found to my astonishment that I was gliding up the undulating rising road with euphoric ease—the hill was steep and the road lonely, like one from the Pyrenees, but nothing burns cleaner than the white flame of indignation and in this squall of anger and snow I cycled straight past my destination, and it was nearly half a mile down the road before I realized my mistake.

Having circled back round, I approached the mailbox of 1435 Swamp Oaks Road, and found there a man standing in the driveway. He was dressed all in wool and held a large wide broom with both hands. “Looks like you have a book delivery,” he said, smiling.

“That I do,” I replied, catching my breath. As the fog faded from my glasses I recognize the man as the same one from the booksale, Gronigen, and his calm, kindly air caused my anger to evaporate. He seemed genuinely delighted to meet me, and his delight was infectious. Later I would learn that almost everything delighted him, but it nonetheless always made me feel good, especially on a frigid January day, and I would come to always feel I could share his joy unjealously.

I stepped off my bike and began untying the package.

Gronigen demurred, softly waving his broom at me. “I bet you need some warming up. Let’s go inside and get you a cup of tea, and settle our account in there.”

I didn’t believe we had an account to settle, but tea and warmth were indeed inviting, so I gladly leaned my bike against a tree, removed the package, and followed him up the path.

The broom, he explained as we walked, was used during the Canadian Olympic trials in the 70s, in the sport of curling. Did I know what curling was? Was I a curler myself? No, I cannot say that I curled. Well! He used the broom for smoothing out this path here. Not for curling proper, you understand, but for keeping the substrate—the snow—a uniformly smooth surface one to two inches deep, perfect for registering animal tracks. In the woods, this time of year, the snow ran twelve to eighteen inches deep, and most animals had no choice but to plow along in ungainly way, and this made track identification rather difficult. It was a matter of great interest to him which animals passed by their home, and what they were up to, and this practice—smoothing out the snow each morning—was his way of staying in touch.

“Now to see what I mean,” he said, waving his broom in the air, “turn around and take a look.” And indeed we were well registered. The tracks of our boots made parallel lines, chiseled in the thin snow. His tracks carved a perfect, tidy narrow thread. How clumsy and sprawling and splayed my tracks were by comparison!—with each step my toes coughed up little showers of snow. You would think I waddled like a goose. I had never before considered that walking might not be innocent.

I blushed and acknowledged, as we walked on toward the farmhouse, that maybe I should take up curling, after all. He laughed and said he’d never yet met anyone for whom curling wouldn’t do some good.

It got me thinking.

I thought of the last library booksale I attended.  It was in November and the weather had not yet been challenged by hoarfrost.  This particular sale was held in a fire station.  It was a sunny day, the air—in the sun, out of the wind—was mild, and the fire trucks were parked in front, glistening red, as though at the ready for any sudden conflagration from the paperbacks inside.  The firemen were suited up like yellow astronauts—maybe to stay warm, I don’t know.  Inside its cavernous walls were rows of tables on which spread lines of books, spines up.  Echoes abounded.

Now I always feel slightly unclean at these sales, I am sheepish about accepting my trade as a book “dealer,” setting myself up in life as a middleman muddleman.  And anyway I have so many colleagues who give the trade a bad name.  Scanners, anyone?  At this sale, as always, I endeavored to make myself inconspicuous, poking around and humming with the glow of a genuine book lover.  Because I am.  Technology has devolved our trade into pure widgetry, but I still relish the feel of a good book.  Well made, beautiful binding, perhaps charming illustrations, or simply a writing that boasts of actually contributing something to the world.

But thanks to bar codes and satellites and scanners, the dim-witted mercenaries—usually overweight, usually nearsighted—who aim only to make a dollar—and a tattered dirty one at that—can sweep through a sale, shooting their red lasers against the zebra stripes, and part the valuable from the dross in no time.

Scan me a river—I’d rather be a bipedalling poverty-picketed bookseller.  And I am.

At this sale the scanning booksellers were doing their disco thing, blinding us all with their laser show, but I kept my head down and found some interesting older volumes, mostly in the world history section.  After an hour I was fatigued of book titles and so, content with my bounty of two tote bags, I paid my fare and lumbered out to my bicycle to make the six-mile journey home.

As I was about to straddle my bike, I heard a voice behind me.

“Ever race the Amish on that thing?”

Standing with his own totebag of books was a kindly faced gentleman, a slender fellow fortyish with unruly graying hair.  Confident and intense was his posture, and overall I would say he had about him the look of a recovering hippie.

“I am the Amish,” I replied with a smile.

He tossed his head back, unbewildered.  “Ah, yes.  I bet you are.  That helmet of yours gives you away.  You know, I once raced the Amish down an empty lane…”  He gazed into the distance, trying to see to the end of that very lane, perhaps to recall who won.  Giving up, he declared, “They are not to be fooled with.”

“I believe you.”

By this time he was heading for his own bicycle, and I was mortally afraid he would be going my direction.  Riding two abreast with a stranger down a state highway was not a prospect I relished.

Surveying my bags, he asked of the books: “Do you read them or sell them?”

Weighing the karma of my response, I decided against lying.  “Both,” I said.

“Ah!  I’m glad.  So many here, you tell they only do the latter.  Seems a sorry way to earn beer money.”

“And you…?” I asked, hoping he might have an equal confession.

“Oh, no, these are just for the library—our library—that’s all.  Heading south?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my journey home takes me to the Swamp Oaks.  Farewell!”

And that is how it started.  Happenstance, and then a sudden letter.  Soon I found myself—midwinter—lumbering along a salt-stained country road in search of a man who sent me a signed blank check.  It was a sunny cold January day, clouds parting everywhere, and the last mile was all uphill.  I had no idea what would follow.

It’s early January and the high holy days of the shopping—not to say religious—calendar have passed.  It’s bleak out there and the books aren’t selling and my inbox isn’t filling so I head across town to the thrift store.

The roads are salty-white but clear for riding.

I don’t bother to look at the books (I’ve enough unwanted tomes in my orphanage) but instead I head for the sporting goods department, where I try out all the tennis rackets.  For snowshoes.  I find two rackets with wooden frames and lace them up on my feet easily enough, then clog my way over to the checkout counter.

Back home, I walk half a mile through the pine woods behind my house, leaving a trail of tennis racket prints in my wake, up to the bald patch at the top of the hill.  It’s a nice spot.  I’m still in the city limits and can hear trivial whines of police and fire sirens, but gazing east I see only rural white hills rolling, hills hitched together without end, hills that gently thicken and deepen and at last become the Catskills fifty miles thither.  I love to look on the rolling folds of land, though they do make me a little seasick.  I try to catch the foggy nexus where one hill fades into the next behind it, and imagine myself riding my bicycle across them, riding away into the sunrise.

It’s a good place to welcome winter.

Something I did not anticipate, when I adopted this trade, was the compulsion to shift the books about on shelves, to consider each book in relation to those around it, to rearrange and find just the right symmetry of spines.  I’m at the far end of the commodity spectrum.  This is housekeeping by another name, and with a melancholy tinge too because these books for sale online never are browsed by anyone but me.  Selling books from home is my bit of sand-castle building, on a largely deserted island.  Or rather, glass-blowing and sending the bottles on the waves one at a time.

Keep all the books in one place and the house is apt to get bedsores, I suppose.  Maybe I take the business principle of moving inventory too literally.  Perhaps this restlessness is inherent in a sedentary tapping-keyboard kind of livelihood.  I have a fear of laziness and for all its easy-chair ways, bookselling can actually be an excellent way to keep in shape.  All you have to do is to get the hankering, once in a while, to rearrange your books.   Booksellers have a reputation for being a pasty-pastry sort, but I know one stalwart of our trade who gave up his gym membership in favor of bench-pressing the complete works of Kipling.  There’s honesty in one’s body as much as one’s words, and moving books around hones the blade of that integrity.

So I have decided to arrange my books by color.  Consider it a Rothko experiment.  I have four rooms lined with bookshelves—there are only four rooms in my modest hacienda, not counting the kitchen and water closet—and each, I think, shall be devoted to a different piece of the color wheel pie, and I will know for certain where my green gables lie.  I shall not stutter when the friar appears and puts forth his query.  I will be ready.

Today, as I stand at my window watching a nuthatch wind its way down a basswood trunk, I think of my old school, and I hope it is still sinking after all these years. I never thought to tend to my reunions. Thickly surrounded by books, thicker than my high school’s library ever was, I wonder how many inches I lose every year. I would hate to be, ultimately, yet another victim of insulation.

To stop someone from flying, one simply produces an adequate anchor. But how do you stop something from sinking? Would a habit be of help?

Received an order yesterday—an obscure chapbook of poetry, sixty-four pages of nearly tolerable rhymes, published two decades ago. The order (welcome as all orders are) was unremarkable except that the customer’s name matched the author’s. I thought, this is the saddest thing in the world. I will package this book with my condolences.

I have never thought of being an author and to judge by the proliferating creative writing programs I fear I am somehow deficient, somehow unamerican. Everyone has a book in them, they say; even so, I imagine to extract that book requires considerable surgery, a lot of scratching of the scalpel.

But if it is a source of freedom to let a book go off into the world to seek its destiny, what is the meaning of calling that journeyman back into your hand? I can’t imagine, I admit, but if I were to leave breadcrumbs on the trail behind me I don’t think I would have the courage to gather them up a score years later. I am certain they would be covered in mold or perhaps cached away in the underground nest of a white-footed mouse, and I would never wish to deprive a mouse of anything.