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The storm was brief but fierce.  Just the way she liked them.  It was her favorite part of the long summer months.  The cats hated the thunder; one took refuge in the basement while the other retreated under the bed.   Carla had a few minutes without them underfoot or on her lap.  She sat on the wicker sofa on the porch and watched the ferocity of the storm unfurl.  The trees thrashed and swayed as if trying to keep to the beat of a wild, frantic dance.  It always amazed her how much they could bend without breaking.  At the height of the storm rain sprayed lightly through the screens.  It was a welcome break from the humidity.  When the Red-winged Blackbird announced his presence on the cherry tree she knew the storm was almost over.  It was much too quick.  She wanted more time to dwell on the dreariness of her existence.

Her recent move from Boston to Concord had not worked out as she hoped.  Concord may have been fine for Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott but she found it boring.  At first she welcomed the privacy of her little bungalow, set way back off a quiet road on the outskirts of town.  But all too soon she found it isolating.  She missed the aliveness of being in the city.  She did not miss the constant noise nor the twenty-seven steps up to her third floor apartment but she missed the people – the office workers on their lunch breaks, the nervous job applicant being interviewed in the coffee shop, the flirtatious coeds at the bar.  There was a variety of people all striving for something more … love, a job, a promotion.  She fit in with them.  In Concord she felt like an uninvited guest at a private party.

How could she find meaning in her empty life?  Unless she lived to be one hundred her life was more than half over.  She had no children to fill her life or to at least distract her from her own.  She had left a demanding job with a Cambridge software company to work as an assistant to an entrepreneur thinking it would be less stressful.  The entrepreneur, however, turned out to be a self-absorbed, unreasonable tightwad who was never satisfied.  Plus there was little opportunity to meet people or establish positive relationships.  What a mess she had made of her life.

Maybe she would write that novel she always felt was inside her but she did not know where or how to begin.  She had no real passions.  Something she always felt was her greatest flaw.

The storm had stopped completely.  It amazed her how quickly the birds reappeared at the feeders but she was grateful for their company.

She sat a while longer and then the cats came out from their hiding places, restless and hungry.  She fed them and half heartedly started straightening up the house, hoping the phone would ring to break her sense of isolation though there was no one in particular she wanted to talk to.

In the late afternoon Carla motivated herself to take a walk.  Walking in the country was so different than walking in the city.  There were no sidewalks and Carla already had poison ivy from walking too close to the overgrown weeds on the edge of the road.  But then there were no horns blowing and no trash barrels to walk around or homeless people to avoid making eye contact with.  There was a peacefulness here that was missing in the clamor of city life.

As she walked the quiet Concord roads, past Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne were buried on Author’s Ridge, she thought of the relationships that once filled her life.  She had had her share of boyfriends and lovers.   They came and went but even when the more serious relationships ended she bounced back.  It was the termination of her friendships with other women that left the biggest gaps in her life and in her heart.   She missed the companionship and soul-to-soul talks with her female friends.  Most of them had moved on to other lives by now – to dynamic careers or new states or husbands and children.   True friends are harder to replace than lovers.  The hole they leave is bigger and more difficult to fill.  That is why she felt so melancholy lately, lack of a friend, not lack of a lover.

She got back to her house as it was getting dark.  The cats were sleeping in their usual spots, the sweet little gray female curled in a tight knot on the rocking chair and the big comical gray tiger overflowing in the tiny kitty bed he had long outgrown but refused to give up.  They both looked up to give little gurgles of welcome.  How grateful she was for them, her new companions.  She could not have pets in the city.  She could not have bird feeders in the city.  Perhaps there was more promise here than she had been allowing herself to see.

She sat down at the computer and began typing but this time, not a casual Email to a causal friend, but rather Carla began typing a story about her life.  The life she was living that had room for so much more.  She wanted to try to fill the emptiness with words, her words, her story, her hurts, her dreams.  She would embrace who she was and where she was.  She had stories to tell and she would tell them even if no one listened.

Just as the birds resumed their lives after the storm, she too had to begin anew.  She held onto things and people too long.   She had to let go of some of the things, places and even people she had once loved.  It was a beginning.  It was an end.