Free Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach

still-fluid water. No other sound that I could hear, no protesting sea birds, nothing but the cold shell of the earth forbidding all movement, and the deafening silence of being even more alone, in the frozen cove, than I had been in the warm house.
    In those cold days, I noticed that I found it hard to recall the names of persons I had met up here for the first time. I tried to fix names to faces I dimly remembered, and occupations or home towns to names. But they had all faded quickly. I now understood the truth about the elderly: the persons of one’s younger days adhere to one’s memory permanently, but newcomers rarely find a foothold. I could hold onto fictional characters, observations of the world around me, ideas, conjectures, and questions about the quality of my life alone. But recent acquaintances? Not one of them could be retrieved from my failing memory to populate my solitude.
    There was one exception. Four years ago, when I first came to live in Sargentville, I learned that the novelist and editor Helen Yglesias lived eight miles away in Brooklin. I left a message on her answering machine saying I would like to meet her. She called back. We arranged to meet here for tea.
    At once we formed a strong connection, composed of the many parallels in our lives. We were almost the same age and had both grown up in New York, albeit in separate boroughs, she in the Bronx, I in Manhattan. We shared memories of that remarkable city, especially Greenwich Village. In almost the same years we edited the literary sections of magazines. Late in our lives we began to write fiction. By the time we met we had published about the same number of books, written criticism for the same periodicals and newspapers, taught at the same writers’ workshop, and resided at the same writers’ colonies. We both had successful grown children and young grandchildren; we were both divorced.
    Curiously, we had never encountered each other before. She had come to Maine long before I had. But fortunately for me, we were here now, and again fortunately, an unusual occurrence for me, late in life, we had become friends.
    Helen became a tie to the literary world from which, what with age and distance, I had become somewhat disassociated. She knew more people in publishing and kept her connections to them by spending part of each winter in New York. Recently she had lost her best friend, the poet Eve Merriam, to death from cancer and was still mourning her absence. More recently, she had hoped to fill her loneliness up here by having an older sister come to live with her. But it had not worked out. Her sister had gone back to live in Florida, having found Maine too isolated, too cold, too lacking in the amenities of city and in friends of her own age. Shortly after she returned to Miami, she became ill, and Helen went down to care for her.
    Helen and I stayed in touch with each other by mail. She wrote about the artificiality of my experiment, pointing out that, since I knew it would have a certain end, I could not understand what the prospect of unbroken loneliness was. She said she was now more occupied than ever, having learned that another, elder sister, who also lived in Florida, was ill. She was planning to go to see her.
    She said she longed for some solitude. Her plight reminded me of Edith Wharton writing about Lily Barth in The House of Mirth : “She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.”
    T WO AND ONE-HALF weeks into what I began to think of as the winter of my content, I felt the strange stirrings of material. Writers are entirely egocentric. To them, few things in their lives have meaning or importance unless they give promise of serving some creative purpose. They waste nothing they hear or feel or see or are told; nothing is lost on them, as Henry James observed.
    So I began to record, on odd pieces of paper, backs of envelopes, and torn memo-pad sheets, what I was learning about being