A Week in the Woods

July 4, 2026. Saturday.

It hasn’t been an easy week, or month, or two months. In the middle of May I fell in a parking lot and sprained my left ankle. The ankle recovered, but the gait changes as well as my impatience to get back to a normal level of activity resulted in hip and lower back pain; it’s better but not gone. And there’s been other stuff in our lives: nothing life-threatening, but stressful and annoying. It was a good time to try to get away for a week, but I wasn’t in the best mood.

During the drive up here from Montreal today, as the highway left the last suburban outskirts of Laval and began to enter more forested terrain, I struggled to keep the old grief about my family’s lake house from surfacing. Stubbornly, I heard my inner voice protesting that I didn’t want to go to A.’s chalet, I wanted to go to my own house which, of course, I no longer have. I didn’t want to learn and adjust to yet another place where I had no roots, where people spoke a different language and where, as an anglo, I worried I wouldn’t feel welcome. The beginnings of the boreal forest didn’t seem beautiful, but rather dark and closed-in. “It’s a lot like the Adirondacks,” J. said. “much more like that than Vermont.” “That’s obvious,” I said, rather unkindly, and we fell silent again. “Stop this resistance,” I told myself. Easier said than done.

But within an hour of arriving, I began to feel myself loosening up. The house, set in the woods but with a view down to the lake, is lovely, with a good kitchen and a grill outside; the piano turned out to be a Steinway, slightly out of tune but with a beautiful tone and touch; the gardens are full of flowers and have been painstakingly planned and managed; and the lake -- the lake is absolutely silent. We had brought most of the food we’d need for the week. We ate lunch on the screened porch, and I played some Mozart and Mendelssohn to get a feel for the piano.

This afternoon I went down on the dock by myself and drew for a while. Someone came by in a paddleboat, with a fishing rod, and caught a fish which he threw back. There were a couple of kayaks, and two young kids on paddleboards. Hardly the sound of a voice, just the wind and the water rippling faster, then slower; faster, slower. A bullfrog. Two loon calls, far away. A deerfly buzzing near my ear, and a large dragonfly alighting on the dock before whirring off again. Some Canada geese in the distance.

I made pasta sauce for dinner and we ate, and then went down to the water together, admiring the daylilies and roses as we descended the winding stone steps. I made two more drawings while Jonathan sat, with his eyes closed some of the time, listening to the silence.

I should just sit here for the entire week, he said. One airplane went over, followed by an osprey. We stayed about an hour, until the sun went down behind the pines.

July 5, 2026. Sunday.

Today I swam in the afternoon. The water is cool and pleasant for the first foot and a half, but below that it’s quite chilly so I tried to stay near the surface. And it’s disconcerting not to be able to see anything below me, because of the murky quality of the water. Underwater, sunlight casts strange beams into the darkness, and otherwise there is simply nothing but a sort of brownish color. I guess it is tannic acid, or maybe from the minerals in the rocks underneath. It didn’t do anything odd to my skin and there’s no odor. My niece says that their lake in the Poconos is like this too. Somehow it doesn’t feel inviting, but my body felt good moving in the water, much better than a month ago when I was trying to swim after hurting myself, and I quickly got used to it.

Today’s drawing was of more rocks and foliage on the shoreline.

I boiled some sugar and water and filled the hummingbird feeder after noticing that birds kept coming to check if there was food. Within ten minutes they were drinking from it. There’s at least one male and one female, but I think more. We’ll enjoy watching them from the porch while we eat.

Before lunch I played for at least an hour, maybe more. Mendelssohn, Mozart. And we drove to Entrelacs, about ten minutes away, to buy a few things for tomorrow’s lunch with visiting friends. There’s a good store, a small family-run operation. On the side of the store, by the parking, is a very large black-and-white photograph of the village from the early 20th century — a church, a few houses, the river — simple, poor, rural Quebec. In the middle ground, on the left, a small single figure of a man in work clothes. He has stopped and turned to stare at the photographer.

I took a short walk up and down the dirt road, which is very hilly, but my right thigh muscles were tight and sore so I didn’t stay out long. Lupin, daisies, bedstraw and vetch are in bloom along the road, and also some pale yellow foxglove of which I picked a couple of stems.

In the evening we watched the Mexico vs England World Cup match, cheering for Mexico, but they lost in a tight game where they had seemed to dominate offensively, but couldn’t convert their good play into goals.

July 6, 2026. Monday.

Jonathan made a spinach and grilled zucchini lasagna for lunch with our guests; I made a salad and some smoked salmon hors d’oeuvres. They arrived about 12:30 and we had a good visit; they’re gardeners and appreciated the one here, and then we sat on the screened porch for the rest of the time, talking and eating, S. in a flowered shirt and G. in her signature white linen, the hummingbirds buzzing in and out of our view.

I must have played even longer today, and my back isn’t complaining. I got a couple of Bach books from A.’s cabinet downstairs — the Two-Part Inventions and the Short Preludes and Fugues, which I worked on for a while. Then played some Gershwin. This piano sounded especially good with the Gershwin. And I did half an hour of flute exercises and then worked on the Khachaturian waltz I’m supposed to perform with a friend at the Armenian Cultural Center in October.

After our guests left, J. took a nap and I did two more drawings, this time of the jar of wildflowers I had picked today for the table. I’m not sure where these drawings are going but I want to stick with them for a while longer; maybe there will be a breakthrough into something different. They are so limited -- the same small size, the pen line, the monochrome, the flimsy absorbent notebook paper that takes a wash imperfectly. I’m still drawing with the Sailor Shikiori ink, in my mother’s old Schaeffer fountain pen with the very fine gold nib. After finishing the drawing, I soften some of the lines with a wet brush. Sometimes I take a few drops of full-strength ink and make a wash with water. Well, maybe there’s something that will emerge. The second drawing today, of the foxgloves against darker, larger leaves, has a kind of depth in the background that I like even though I didn’t like the way I had drawn the flowers.

Time is going slower out here. I noticed it more today, and especially this afternoon and evening. I’m relaxing; the pressure to fill my days and get a lot done seems to have fallen away. I’m surprised how much I have needed this. The silence helps, and maybe also being in someone else’s house, but it’s also the fact that we aren’t running around at all, the way we usually are when traveling in foreign cities. I want to think about this more and understand the differences, and why I am reacting the positive way that I am.

—to be continued

Leave a comment