November summary

And now it is November, two years after that strange cut-off time in the rented room. I still live on that block, but for two years I have had a bright airy place of my own with a view over an abandoned garden and then rooftops – and those wonderful wooden water towers– the view leading almost to the Battery. Two years, the first being an attempt to put everything back together – plans and schemes and this blonde woman in from Rome who went with me to the Bahamas, and everything was wrong. And those events that made it impossible for me not to see what that family came from was all about, even though there were the exciting parts I the family story – socialism and the writing of well reviewed novels. And then there had been an unleashing of everything I has kept in while unaware I was keeping most of it inside me. And then the plunge into the past, the plunge into the stories.

And now it was November and I was back in the north country again, for the fourth time in a year, this place I usually had though I thought I did not need to see again, back this time on a rescue mission, which almost ended before it started when I got caught in a full whiteout, snow that suddenly began while I was driving through Franconia Notch, one of those storms that in family lore could come up any time and kill you, like projected attacks by Mama bears, or rusty nails that could give you blood poisoning, or an out of nowhere lightening bolt – back here in Sugar Hill where all the summer people had lightening rods on their houses. Staying now with my old friend Mickie in a White Wings where I had spent the first three summers of my life before being moved to White Pines.