Free Out of the Woods by Lynn Darling

that I had done nothing at all. Instead I knitted—I was making a red throw for Zoë’s room in college—and while I knitted, I thought about what I would write when the throw was finished. On the computer, I played endless games of Boggle and Word Whomp, a word-scrambling game in which animated gophers poked their heads out of holes. When you failed to find the big seven-letter word in the allotted three minutes, they shook their heads in disappointment, but when you got it right, they would do backflips and ecstatically munch the turnip awarded as your prize. I loved making them happy.
    The word games were the closest I got to writing. Some of the words I unscrambled would hook me with their inherent beauty or the chime of some subconscious resonance. Sometimes I would write them down— gaunt, goblin, bramble, languor, dwindle . I played for hours, until my fingers hurt. Then I would go on the Internet and research addiction to computer games, looking for symptoms of how badly I was hooked, until at last the rooms began to darken and the day was down for the count.
    I don’t know how long this state of suspended animation would have lasted if the ceiling in the mudroom hadn’t caved in. One morning I woke to find fluffy balls of acid pink insulation drifting through Castle Dismal. I wasn’t worried about them so much as I was alarmed at the idea of armies of mice pouring through the breached ceiling to complete their final conquest of the house. I called Larry Davis, the contractor who had done some earlier work on the place, and we agreed that it might be time to look toward some of the other repairs that had long been in the offing—a roof over the garage to keep the snow off, an enclosure for the solar battery, a new shed for the woodpile, a set of stairs down from the door that currently led nowhere, a rerouting of the electrical wiring that was housed in a giant column in the middle of the kitchen, making it impossible to see from one end to another. A crew would arrive on Monday.
    I told myself that it was a terrible imposition—the noise and the dust and the bulky presence of strangers would keep me from writing, and I did a pretty good job of pretending to resent that fact. But of course it wasn’t true. I was sick with lack of work, with not even knowing where my winter clothes were. I had two days to make room for the men and their equipment. The mudroom had to be cleared of its maze of boxes, and by the time they arrived, I had finally made a dent in setting up a kitchen, and filling a bedroom closet, and clearing a tentative space for books and papers.
    There were four of them: Mike, young and handsome, a high school football star who had turned to drugs after an injury sidelined his dreams, only to sober up at eighteen when his girlfriend gave birth to their son. Calvin, his stepfather, small and strong and wiry, in his sixties, pared down by the race life had run him, but observant, weathered, a stealth wisdom playing in his eyes. Hank, gap-toothed, bashful, taking refuge in hammer and nail and the sense they made out of everything. Jimmy, round-faced, potbellied, a little lazy, hiding it, or so he thought, behind an easygoing temperament.
    We were elaborately polite to one another for a day or two, making wide berths in the course of our passing, until one afternoon I sneezed—I make china rattle when I sneeze—and Mike, who was on the roof, sang out, “God bless you!” and I shouted a thank-you and we all laughed. Then it was easy and the house rang with the noise they made, and vibrated with their energy and the authority they brought to bear on the obdurate house, pounding, sawing, and thwacking it into submission, chasing away the wretched silence. They worked hard, those men, and their energy shamed me into trying a little harder.
    While they worked, I would settle down to read, but instead I listened to the talk about lives so different from mine.