Trees

After a three-hour drive through the pink and green on-the-vergeness of a Virginia April, here I am on the first night of my two-week writing retreat.

I was here exactly five years ago. A year before that, I rented a house for a week in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Except for a weekend visit by my then-partner and one of our two dogs at the time, Jake, the bulk of that week in Berkeley Springs was spent alone -- just me with my writing and the other of our two dogs at the time, Fred.

Fred passed away two months later. Because he was and will forever remain the first dog I ever loved, I'll remember that week in West Virginia most of all for the sweet days he and I spent together. He was in poor health, and we knew he didn’t have much time left. I have a self-timed picture on my bookshelf at home of Fred and me in that house in Berkeley Springs, on the couch together, my laptop computer on the coffee table in front of us.

Our other dog, Jake, was put down two months later after biting two people. Very sad story -- and not only for the two people with bite marks in them. But a story for another time.

A month after Jake died, we got Patsy and Charlie, who live with us still –- one week with me, one week with my ex. Or two weeks with my ex this month, as I sit in my little studio typing away in the quiet of a more-or-less-rural Virginia night.

***

I’ll go back to the residence in a little while. That building is like a Swiss youth hostel: clean, with small, functional bedrooms and a '70s Euro-modern aesthetic, but also a little threadbare in spots, as if it can't quite keep ahead of all the people coming through.

I share a bathroom (toilet and shower; there's a sink in my room) with a woman I met at dinner tonight. She warned me, "I tend to use the bathroom in the middle of the night." I said not to worry, I do too. I hope our bladders are on different schedules, though.

The first day –- when you’re the new kid and trying to remember twenty names –- is the hardest. I know this feeling will pass, but I find myself missing the people I met here five years ago. There's actually one of them here, but she so did not remember me, which wasn't a big deal since I don't remember much about her other than her face and name.

Later in the evening, as a number of us gathered around several laptop computers to look at the Web site of a German photographer here, another writer said to me, "What have you written?"

I said, "You mean, like, that you would have heard of?"

She said yes.

I said, "Nothing?"

More commonly, you hear "What are you writing?" Almost everyone puts it that way, in that particular tense. It's just assumed you have something in progress, which I guess is a fair enough assumption.

But I don’t, really. I'm just flying, looking out for a branch to grab onto. So far I'm just enjoying the trees going by.