Not one to suffer hospitality gladly, I was nonetheless grateful and pleased by Gronigen’s invitation of tea and warmth. The chill in my body ran deep and the clammy cold sweat on my chest was forming icicles.
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.
