A fulfilling farmhouse

I hadn’t slept alone for nearly six months. Huddled beneath five quilts in the drafty upstairs of a West Virginia farmhouse, I listened to the boys through the iron grate in the floor. About 10 of them down there were shuffling and settling into bed, asking slumber party questions like, “Floor or couch?” and, “Where are my clothes?”

At times like these, when mundane hubbub fills a room, my husband Jonathan takes out his guitar and plays softly behind the noise, spreading his quiet warmth like honey on bread. He did so this time, and I fell asleep to the music floating through the floor. I woke minutes later as the company uncorked the evening’s ghost stories. It is not every day I get to eavesdrop on my husband and his friends as they fall asleep, but I have reached life’s inevitable turning point and am old enough now to value slumber over intrigue. So I wrapped my blankets firmly around my head and drifted off again.

The farmhouse we stayed in for the Fall Literature retreat had no situational beauty but rather peered onto the edge of a highway like a curious criminal. In the morning the cars sliced by outside, carrying the sound of thunder. But the house’s interior made my bones stir with the pure goodness of being back in the country air. The walls in my room, built of alternating wood and plaster layers, made me feel as though I woke up in the center of a layer cake. White light fingered its way through pale curtains, shining on two pompous deer that stuck their sausage-fat necks out of the adjacent wall. Oh yes. West Virginia and I were kin.

Jonathan and I have a long-running debate about whether writers should be friends with each other and whether they should devote weekends to lounging about in cabins discussing books and criticism. I tend to think they should not, lest they exhaust themselves with dry pedantic chatter about all the isms of the world and wind up with nothing to say about their living, breathing neighbors. But Jonathan, a true idea man and a genuine creative, can navigate the labyrinth of any abstract maze and come out swinging—ready to write, ready to put flesh and blood on his ideas.

That morning the members of our party were everywhere in the house talking about books—except in the living room where they were actually reading books. But spending a wilderness weekend with academics will let you see past their nonconcrete projections into their mortality. For instance, one goes about all morning in his pajamas—a phenomenon you would never have witnessed in the 8 a.m. session of Greek 4. Another makes a killer omelet. A third can build a fire.

So during the weekend retreat both man and wife were pacified. For he had something to think about, and I had things to look at: tin cups hanging from pegs, a huge hearth, an eagle statuette—and, of course, all the people, who are always more than they seem.