Donlon Road

Our friends T. and A. live on Donlon Road in Fly Creek, a road less traveled. They’ve been there for a long time, long enough to add onto the old farmhouse they found there when they were young, long enough to create an amazing garden.  T. set out from there to her work as a primary care doc in Cooperstown for many years.  A. set out for Hartwick College in Oneonta where he taught philosophy.  Their boys set out for school in Cooperstown. They moved to Donlon from Hawaii, for T’s work. Donlon became home, a short road between County Rt 26 and Ainslie Road with a smattering of homes well separated.  Donlon crosses Fly Creek just south and east of their house.  They are in the middle of nowhere, with a small tributary of Fly Creek in their backyard, with forest on three sides of the house and a cleared pasture across the road.

Some houses make me fall in love with their owners. I have been in love with T. and A. since our first dinner there in 2018.  So when T. got a serious diagnosis a few weeks ago and was clearly going to be housebound for some time, my first thought, like everyone who knows her, was how can I help. T. and A. were immediately overwhelmed with food and offers of food and offers to run errands.  And I knew from Joe’s illness how exhausting it can be to manage all that kindness.  But I thought, I can email her every day.  An email is unintrusive, easy to ignore on a bad day, easy to enjoy on a good one.  It doesn’t clutter up the house or need to be frozen or recycled.  And so, if you’re wondering why I haven’t posted on the blog for so long, it isn’t because I haven’t been writing, it’s because I’ve been writing every day.

I know this active and vibrant woman is missing her busy world, so I send her news of Village life.  I know this nature lover missed her beloved garden when she was too weak to go out, so I sent her news of the natural world.  I know that there are times when memory is your best companion, so I sent her memories of my own that I thought might trigger hers.  When she is doing well enough, she sometimes writes back.  And right now she’s doing better than anyone had reason to hope she would in the first devastating weeks.

This exercise of friendship, like many such acts, has probably been more important to me than to my friend. The daily writing has been great exercise, but more importantly, starting every day focused on a friend has been a great spiritual discipline.  I’ve long focused on gratitude for all the amazing gifts in my life, but this ritual at the start of every day has sent me into my days with a full heart.  In a way, writing daily has helped me focus on my life now, on all that is good and interesting in it. In another way, it’s allowed me to reprocess the grief and helplessness I felt during Joe’s illness.

Joe and I started our romance on email, and after we were together I continued keeping a journal which I shared with him.  In the early days, as we were building trust, I sometimes felt safer writing something than saying it face to face.  And then at the end, when he was ill, the shared journal gave me a way to say things that were hard to say out loud – how scared I was, how sad I felt, how frustrated and helpless.  I’ve reread some of my journal from the last year of Joe’s life since I got the news of T’s illness.  The memory of that time has never left me, it sits right beside the awareness of how good and rich my life is again.  But I was glad to read back through what I wrote at the time, to see what I’ve suppressed, and sometimes what I’ve exaggerated.

One of these days I’ll go through my emails to T. and see if there is anything to share.  But for now, it’s lovely to have this private dialogue, this good start for my heart every morning. I can’t reach out to Donlon Road to hold hands, but that’s just what the writing feels like.