No snakes, no apples, no verdant paradise surrounded us. We were fully swathed in mod weavings of microfibers, which we donned in layers to protect our warm-blooded bodies from the cold. There were no strategically-placed leaves to hide behind. It was deepest, coldest wintertime.

Our Eden in Woodstock, Vermont, was aglow–lit from more than 238,000 miles away by an off-the-grid celestial power source, hard at work shining up the snow for our excursion into midnight lunacy. It was the moon, flashing in and out of the black branches of trees, casting criss-crossed shadows onto the snowpack of our trails. Four of us walked over the webbed patterns of branches, like black spiders in the silent night.

*****

Earlier in the day, my husband and I had ventured out to this White Garden of Eden on Mt. Tom for a cross-country ski adventure. The trails are carefully maintained for civilized pursuits like trail running, walking, snowshoeing, and skiing. We were skiing before midday and passed only two other people–one of them a speed skier who blasted past us like a low-flying dragonfly that was either early for summer, or failed to notice it had ended several months ago. He was dressed in black, with red sleeves on his jacket. He bent his body at the waist as his powerful legs propelled him forth over the slick surface. We stopped to watch the graceful motions of his style–the way his red wings flapped, the way his body hovered over Earth. “What a machine.” We thought at first. Then reconsidered. “That’s human-powered flight.”

My sister had taken me to Mt. Tom for a summertime stroll many years ago, and she showed me a cabin in the woods there. The cabin is open to all who use the trails. There’s a wood stove to make a fire, a porch with benches, there are picnic tables and there are some chairs. It’s a church–without locked doors, or schedules, or a hierarchy of leaders, or established prayers, or rules that no one follows. In this church, most are inspired to honor the few rules. There is also a makeshift altar upon which are scattered a collection of holy bibles containing the works of contemporary prophets, wild partiers, happy people, sad people, children, lost souls, lonely hearts, and all kinds of other wayfarers and wanderers and daytrippers. My husband and I took a break from our super-easy ski tour to sit at the cabin and decided to come back later in the day with our nephew, who would be arriving to stay with us in Vermont that afternoon. Our nephew is almost 19. We camped with him all the years of his youth. He is blessed with one of the greatest football throwing arms on any dude who still enjoys playing the game just for fun. He is also a talented artist, a foodie, an accomplished fisherman, and he can sing. Right now, he is trying to make some difficult decisions about whether or not to enlist in the armed forces.

While my husband and I took our short break at the cabin, I sat on a cold wooden bench, reading through the cabin-bible writings. The sentiments, proclamations, and reportage, were not so different from what might have been carved into the walls of caves and cliff dwellings, painted onto the stones of abandoned cathedrals, scribbled over the metal and wooden confines of bathroom stalls, or committed to cyberspace on the world-wide accessible networks of social media, since the beginnings of human history.

Yet how alone so many people in the world feel, when the world presses in on them. How different we think we are. How much more troubling are the ways our paths seem to ramble–tearing us up with briar patches, blocking our way by avalanche, drowning us out in the river, choking us off by the thick gunk of dirty, shameful, smog. Here are some of the cabin-bible writings: My favorite part of this Found Poem is the last line: “I walked all the way up here and I never walked this far.” I have said a version of that prayer of gratitude to myself so many times in my life–I never thought I’d be able to walk this far. 

*****

By the time my husband and I returned to the car after our early-morning ski excursion, the parking lot was full. (If you want the trails to yourself, go early.) We decided, at the last minute, to abandon the civilized carriage-road trails and head into the woods for our descent back to the car. Hills, ditches, sharp-banked turns and briar patches, booby-trapped the route. I am happy to say I never fell, but my husband did. Whenever I saw him drop from sight in front of me, I knew to downshift.

After our nephew arrived with his mom, we had a nice afternoon of cocktails, dinner, and dessert. The sun set, the moon rose, and it was getting late. We told them about the cabin in the woods and invited them to take a midnight snowshoeing excursion. Everyone began leaping into snow pants, coats, and boots.

*****

The wide, snowy trails had been trampled all afternoon–we didn’t even need our snowshoes. We used ski poles, though, for balance and to get us warmed up as soon as possible. The dense cold stiffened our shoulders and slowed the escape of our dreams, which might have sought escape routes back to the cozy, warm pillows of our country house.

By the time we arrived at the cabin, past midnight, and stoked a fire, the night was all ours. We’d noticed the stars, the moon, the clouds coming in. We had listened to one lone hymn–performed by the rhythm of our boots–singing over the path laid down in front of us by the heavens: a trail of fallen snowflakes, every one of them from never-to-be-known origins all over the world.

Moonshine madness.

Our own Midnight Mass.

We huddled close around the fire. My husband and I shared one beer. We’d come to this church along a familiar migratory route–the one that soothes your soul because the rules require that you keep everything just so for anyone else who wants to come too. Anyone else. You have to pick up your trash, walk without destroying the trails, keep dogs under control, and make sure you don’t burn the place down. The church keeps the wood pile stocked and a flashlight on the altar. There’s a fee, too, for using the ski trails in the wintertime–because they are groomed.

In our close circle of heat around the fire, in the first hours of a Sunday morning in Vermont, I thought about the migratory routes we all take throughout our lives. All migrations are driven by hunger and soul food isn’t easy to find. I thought about the routes I’ve found on my own, the ones that friends have led me to, and the ones I have invited others to share.

My favorite and most memorable migrations are marked by churches and church gardens–Edens–where none of us are ever cast out, but invited, instead, to share the heat of the fire–whether it’s the fire of the moon, the fire of the night, the fire of a confusing dream, the fire of bright, sun-shining fear, the fire of joy.

You just sit there, together, feeling the heat. Trying to make sense of it.

Sometimes we do. And sometimes we don’t.

But no matter what, we promise to keep walking. At the end of our excursion that night, my husband’s sister said she was never so happy to see her car in a parking lot.

But I’ll bet she was even more happy to see her bed.

I was happy to have a memory–a touchstone in my heart–of leading our nephew to a church where we all found warmth, even in the dead of what’s been feeling like a long, lonely winter–not only for him, but for those of us who love him, too.

At the end of our journey from NYC to Vermont, we stopped in at a restaurant to pick up dinner. We sat down at the bar.

Where you driving from? The man next to us asked.

We said New York City.

Is that where you’re from? He grinned, from inside a deep, dark, long beard.

No. We’re from a small town west of Boston, we said.

I just want to let you know, he said, I’ve been wearing the same pair of pants for three weeks.

His friends at the bar rolled off their chairs laughing at him and quickly resumed a conversation they were having about plans for next Tuesday’s sushi night.

Have you ever been to Vermont before? Ol Dirty Pants said.

I’ve camped in every state park. Skied every mountain. Hiked every trail. Dunked my kids under every waterfall. Watched every river carry winter into spring. Inhaled the dying breath of every leaf that has ever performed a fainting spell for leaf-peeping tourists. Stuck my tongue out to catch the best of every winter’s snowflake vintages. Swallowed the entire run of maple syrup from the sweetest sugar bushes. Been lost, been found–in the dewy webs of every spider that ever decorated every meadow on the shores of Lake Champlain. Handed over all my dreams upon every island in the northern reaches of the state. Touched every gravestone, of every baby, in every forlorn, forgotten grove alongside hiking trails, biking trails, and snowshoe trails.

Pour me a beer. I’ll cry a cheerful river about how I’ve been to Vermont before.

*****

We gathered up our “to-go” dinner order and left the restaurant after some more good conversation with the folks at the bar.

We only had five more miles to go on the long road cruise from New York City.

Eight years had passed since our last stay in this part of Vermont and I felt my heart start bubbling up into my throat. Our kids were little, then. My sister and her husband and their two children, had created a gracious, country home for their family. No cell service. No Internet.

A babbling brook. Horse-drawn sleighs that glided over the snow as one stared out the windows into the forests. Stars.

*****

I’m huddled in the car outside the South Woodstock General Store. It is a bitterly cold night–8 degrees–but this is the hot spot for free wifi.

When I walked into the house, I stood at the doorway of the kids’ room. The beds were neat and tidy. The little desks near the beds didn’t have any books on them. The old wood floors weren’t splashed with the lively brush strokes of mismatched socks, shirts, underwear, wet towels. I knew I had to get out of there.

I was saved by three little paintings on the walls here and there that all of us used to love.

Birds. Wearing shoes.

Thank goodness there’s a little tree outside the country store, where I sit at work in my car. It still has colored Christmas lights on it. They are the ones that twinkle. As soon as I finish this post, I’ll head down the road back to the house.

It’s a route we used to walk with the kids, laughing and freezing all the way.

Today my husband is fifty-five years old. He has all of his hair and, maybe, three or four gray ones. He is the same weight he was in high school. (Thin.) He has the same eye-brain coordinated connections he had in college. So, for instance, when he looks at me, he sees my eighteen-year-old self. (We met when we were eighteen.) He is still a lot of fun and gorgeous.

However you look when Cupid first shoots that arrow–that is the way your love will always remember you.

*****

To celebrate my husband’s birthday we are starting out heading southwest to Manhattan to watch our son perform with his band at the Bowery Electric in the Map Room in Manhattan.  The next morning, we are going to view the Matisse exhibit at MoMA because I just know it’ll be a happy thing to see. Once, we walked to the Musee Matisse in Nice, France. And we were happy. I think the exhibit will look the way a fun birthday party feels. It will look like our daughter all dressed up to go fishing. My husband always loved the way she would put a dress on and a bright, summery hat and then go fishing with him–capable of baiting the hook and slipping around in her bare feet in the mud on the banks of the rivers or the ponds or the lakes. We will be missing her as part of all the celebrations. After Manhattan, we’ll get into the car and cruise north to Vermont.

I asked my sister if I could use her most charming house in South Woodstock for the weekend. The house is within walking distance to the Kedron Valley Inn which has a perfect tavern and more perfect than that, is the South Woodstock General Store next to it. It’s the best general store in Vermont. I have prepared homemade chicken salad and shrimp salad for sandwiches, but I don’t know why I did it, because my husband will only want to walk to the general store to see if they’ll make him a meatloaf sandwich. My husband’s sister is coming for the weekend and she is bringing one of our nephews. My husband’s mother is coming with her special friend–the man who took care of her heart after her husband, my husband’s beloved father, died.

We had planned to ski, but the forecast predicts temps below zero. Last year, my husband and my son raced down Wolverine Bowl at Alpine Meadows in North Lake Tahoe at the top speed of 69 miles per hour, as I decorated the edge of that headwall with a pretty trim of skier’s rickrack–my zigzagged turns so tightly formed together—my toes digging through my ski boots, clinging to the mountain. Neither my husband, nor my son, made a single turn down that steep wall of smooth and fast, packed powder. Those kinds of speeds create dangerous wind chill. And for skiers like me, who cruise along at the speed of dial-up, we are at risk for being exposed too long in the cold. There aren’t any headwalls like the one at Alpine Meadows in New England, but Vermont is no slouch when it comes to creating cold that really hurts.

We plan to snowshoe or cross-country ski instead.

A long time ago, we used to ski with a big group of friends. My husband asked me to resurrect one of those long-ago crowd sustaining meals for his birthday celebration in Vermont. I went into the archives and found tattered notes for the recipe. After a day of skiing, snowshoeing, and/or cross country skiing–this meal sends everyone off to sleepy time, feeling full of satisfaction and ready to do it all again the next day.

Here’s the scatter-brain, tattered-notes version of the recipe:

PENNE IN CREAM SAUCE WITH SAUSAGE AND CHICKEN:

1 large sweet onion and three garlics sautéed in olive oil with a pound of sweet or mild sausage (casings removed and sausage broken into small pieces). Transfer the cooked sausage and onions to a 5qt. casserole pot, pour a cup of white (not sweet) wine over it and cook it down. While you’re cooking it down, sauté a pound of chicken breast cut up. By the time you’ve cut up and cooked the chicken, the wine should be cooked down enough. Add a big can (28 oz) of petite diced tomatoes to the sausage pot. (I used a can labeled “with garlic and olive oil” for fun.) Add 1 cup of light cream to the tomato sauce. Let thicken and simmer–about five minutes. Add kosher salt and pepper. Add one small can of tomato paste. Chop up a loose 1/4 cup of Italian parsley and throw that in. Stir in the chicken. Pack it to go. Take a box or two of skinny penne and an extra can of tomato sauce. When it comes time to have dinner, cook the pasta and mix it in. Add can of tomato sauce if you want to thin the sauce, or add a ladle-full of the water used to cook the pasta. Mix in a cup of grated parmesan to the dish before serving.

*****

Happy birthday to my true love.

I locked myself out of the house. First I thought about breaking a window, then I moved on to set up the drill and try getting through the door that way, and–finally–I called a locksmith.

He said he’d be right over.

He started out trying to pick the lock and I watched how he listened for clicks so quiet, that the sound of the juncos using their beaks to get seeds from dried flowers still standing in my winter gardens, would seem ear splitting. He also tuned in with what he was feeling through the two metal instruments being jabbed into the keyhole. Then he made some diagnostic comments about how there was one pin inside the lock that wouldn’t let him get past it.

I said, “You must have an engineering mind, with a flair for visualizing intricate mechanical patterns.” He said he did and that he’d gone to Worcester Polytechnic Institute to study engineering.

“But my grandfather was a locksmith.” He said. “He taught me the trade.”

I asked him if he liked Minecraft. Yes, he said. But he made sure to let me know that he wasn’t a total freak about it.

We tried another lock on another door. No go. “I always thought our doors had kind of crappy locks on them.” I said. The locksmith told me that people buy fancy door handles and locks, but the lock configurations inside are often the same as the cheap handles, and most are pretty good. He got out his drill, and dismantled the stubborn lock for good.

We went into the house and he began to put together a new handle and lock for the door. He set up his tools, and opened a box divided into compartments containing teensy metal “pins” separated by sizes and colors. I thought the collection of pins, inside the box, was pretty. It was like a box of paints, or beads.

I said to the locksmith, “You must have broken through some cool locks.” He said the most difficult break-in was a bank vault. They are super duper secured, he said. Somehow, a toddler had escaped from his mother’s side at the bank, just as the vault was closing for the day. The child ended up trapped inside. No one could open the vault–the security system had been set up to shut the vault, and lock it electronically, at a specific time every day. The mother of the trapped child became frantic. It took the locksmith more than two hours to break in. He said, “I don’t know how a mother loses her kid like that.” I didn’t say anything. I’ve lost my kids plenty of times, but never inside a vault filled with money. I thought of all the possibilities and opportunities…an innocent child, wearing a coat, with big pockets, casually allowed to get trapped inside a bank vault.

Putting together the new lock for my door, and matching it up to my existing keys, took some time. Next, I asked the locksmith, “You must love stories of bank heists, or detective stories that solve complicated mysteries.” He said he did, but then he told me that what he really loved, were the stories of hidden treasures from shipwrecks.

“My grandfather left his boat to me when he died. It’s a 43 footer. My cousin and I are going to use it to search for buried treasure from the pirate ship Whydah. Do you know about the Whydah?”

I said I’d been to the Whydah Museum in Provincetown when my kids were little.

He brought me further into his obsession: “The ship went down in a nor-easter off the coast of Cape Cod when the captain changed course to visit his girlfriend. It was loaded with stolen treasure. Barry Clifford discovered the wreck in 1984 and you can’t search within the claim areas. But we can search for treasure beyond the claim zone.”

“A nor’easter!” I said. “We’ve got a good one coming today.”

“Yes,” the locksmith said, “A lot of my calls during the winter are from people who lose their keys in the snow.”

I was going to ask him if he just uses a metal detector to find the buried key. But I didn’t.

Instead, I turned on my computer and looked up the Whydah.

The ship was originally a British slave trading ship. It was just over 100 feet long and, as was the design for slave ships, it was easy to maneuver, heavily armed, and fast–being able to reach speeds up to 13 knots. The Whydah set sail for the port of Ouidah, West Africa, (from which it might have gotten its name), and could handle trades of 700 slaves for gold, silver, sugar, indigo.

As the stories go, the pirate Black Sam Bellamy gave chase to the Whydah for three days, after its maiden voyage, and took it to be his flagship. It was February, 1717, during the Golden Age of Piracy which lasted from 1680 until 1725.

Bellamy had plundered more than 50 ships, gaining the still-standing record as the wealthiest pirate known upon the pages of written history. When he took command of the Whydah, it came stocked with gold and silver–all the riches earned through the sale of slaves. Bellamy began to sail north, from the waters near Cuba, bound for Cape Cod, where they say he wanted to see his girlfriend, Maria Hallett, who lived in Wellfleet. Maria was know as the Witch of Wellfleet because she had been cast from the town of Eastham after she bore Bellamy’s child out of wedlock. The child died. To this day, the legend of her hauntings along the coast of Wellfleet endure.

As Bellamy sailed north, a fleet of winds chased after him–the North-East gales. He floated forth, into a danger zone where all the mercy of slavers, combined with all the mercy of pirates, matched all the mercy of coastal storms. The sea beds between Chatham and Provincetown are vast graveyards, overflowing with the remains of more than 1000 shipwrecks. Wintertime was especially treacherous–on average, two ships per month were consumed by the violent rushes of winds and water. In fact, the regularity with which ships were smashed into the shifting sandbars near the coastlines, inspired the local populations to have on hand wagons and carts for the “finders keepers” looting that followed every tragedy at sea.

Pirate Black Sam Bellamy sailed into an ominous blend of thick fog and shifting winds. The fast-forming nor-easter flung 70 mph gusts throughout the air that licked with furious greediness at the surface of the Atlantic, lifting the water into 30′ peaks, with cavernous gullies that swallowed The Whydah. Tempest tossed, the ship was reduced to all the might of a child’s floaty toy, made of twigs. Trapped in the surf zone near Marconi Beach, off Wellfleet, the massive supply of cannons aided the gusty gales and lusty seas in breaking the ship apart. It split in two–the stern sinking one way, the bow sinking another. Its gluttonous belly–filled with blood treasures–spilled everything into the insatiable Atlantic.

All but two people lost their lives to the powers of the north-east gales. 143 men and one boy, who somehow talked his way into being a pirate. When the townspeople showed up after the storm to take whatever the sea tossed up, corpses littered the wrack line. The indifferent currents started the constant work of burying treasure troves into hidden, underwater sand vaults.

The Witch of Wellfleet never saw her bad-boy pirate again. Or did she? His body was never found.

But his pirate ship became known as the most authentic shipwreck in coastal New England lore.

Pirates lived by a surprisingly democratic form of unique governance aboard their ships. I found lists of the rules, one was entitled: The Articles of Gentlemen of Fortune: A Pirate Crew’s Constitution. And, often, when a ship was plundered by pirates, if there were slaves aboard, they were given the option to become a pirate, or take their chances as a slave.

To this day, nor-easter storms like the one we are about to get walloped, slammed, hammered, and buried by, arrive packed with curious combinations of romanticism, anxiety, dread, excitement. And the powers of these storms have not abated over the almost 300 years that have passed since the Whydah sailed right down the throat of a howling nor’easter

Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, is a favorite beach of the world. Each year, I embark on an excursion at the end of wintertime to have a look at how the storms have reshaped the beaches of Cape Cod. It is always dramatic. On dreamy summer days, I like walking at Marconi Beach and looking all the way to the horizon to imagine where I’d end up if I set sail and kept going. Now, I’ll look about 500 feet out to sea and think of the Whydah, going down in only 16 feet of water and having all its secrets buried under 5 feet of sand for about 266 years.

When the locksmith completed his artfully-crafted doorknob and new lock, he handed me his bill for the work of breaking into my house and sculpting the new doorknob. I gasped.

I wanted to say, “That’s a lot of pirate coin!” But he had also told me he planned to name his boat The Whydah and that his dream job would be to work as a gunsmith (designing, repairing, taking apart and putting back together, guns) and he also wouldn’t hesitate to become a mercenary, keeping the seas safe from modern pirates, using sophisticated machine guns.

So I let it go.