Here I am at the end of adventure. The quiet house. The woods. I sit on my deck like a bird-watcher, like a hunter in a blind, wondering if my neighbor will poke her head out. I finish one mystery and start another, this one about a young woman trying to solve her family’s murder. I look up from blood and bodies to gaze at the still blue pond. Blue when the sunlight’s on it, gray otherwise. This is a metaphor for something. When I grow weary of that I go inside and sit where I sit now, at my desk, in the room I call my study, though what am I studying here? This desk was once my father’s, and it’s imposing, as was he. Dark shiny wood, bigger than a desk has a right to be. It must weigh a great deal. I have nicked it here and there, banging it with my cane, and left a stray ink mark or two on its surface. I’ve cluttered it with papers and books, though at least I have no computer to offend its old-fashioned sensibility. Still, it is dignified and reproachful, which are also words that belonged to my father.
I am personifying the desk. Am I so lonely I’d like it to come to life, and sing and dance with the silverware, like in a fairy-tale cartoon? No, that’s not right. Loneliness is not my problem. My problem is restlessness, forever and ever, amen. I’m restless. I want something to happen, though it’s been quite some time since anything happened to me.
Jennifer Young. Jennifer Young. What are you doing here?
People used to tell me I must be looking forward to retirement, after all those years of working so hard. I worked until I was in my seventies! But some of us don’t work so that we can rest. Some of us rest so that we can work. I belong to the second group, but for a while, at least, I mistook myself for a member of the first. When I bought this house, I thought my restlessness had burned itself out, and that it was at long last time to retreat into peaceful solitude, free of all the world’s demands. Isn’t that the end of the story, for soldiers and adventurers? At least for the ones who fail to die.
Let’s talk about this house, this mountain, my paradise on earth. After I moved here I was seized by a sudden interest in local history, and there is little I don’t know about this place, though I don’t find the facts of it quite as interesting as I once did. I live on the Cumberland Plateau, one thousand feet up, with its caves and its waterfalls and its highways blasted through rock. So many delights for the nature-minded! Trails to swimming holes and wildflowers and other species of the picturesque. When I first moved here I was nimble enough to walk the less challenging trails. No more. When I want a view from the bluff now I have to drive to an overlook in Sewanee. I like the one with the Cross. The Cross—it’s a war memorial, white, sixty feet tall. Around its foot there’s a circle of spotlights, so that at night it glows and draws bats and moths of all sizes. Moths as big as bats.
There’s always been religion on the Mountain, though that’s not why I moved here, as the war long ago cured me of any belief in God. Sewanee is an Episcopal school, a bishop’s notion. Then there’s the Assembly—founded in 1882, as a summer-long Sunday school. When I first came to the Mountain, as a girl in the 1930s, we were visiting a friend of my mother’s who had a family cottage there. I could have bought a house in the Assembly when I moved here, but I wasn’t looking for community. What I have in this house is community’s opposite. My house is on a winding road off the main highway with its two lanes and its too-fast drivers. The road to my house goes past the little airport, which has little planes that putt-putter down little runways. They remind me of the war, but in a way I like. They remind me of a movie about the war. My house was built by an old couple who got divorced, or maybe a young couple who died. I can’t remember which. I know it wasn’t old/died, young/divorced, because I remember that when the Realtor told me the story I felt surprised. Behind it is a pond. Around it woods. The woods are also around the pond. The only other sign of human habitation is the deck of Jennifer Young’s house, and her house’s brown exterior wall. When I sit on my own deck I can see sunlight glinting off the windows. But for a long time no one lived there. As for my house? My house has too many rooms.
I was born the year women got the vote. That’s an interesting fact about me. I changed everything. “Things are different now,” my mother used to whisper, smoothing back my hair after she’d tucked me in at night. “Things will be different for you.”