I walked to Pia and wrapped both my arms around her, squeezing hard, and we held each other silently for a long time, exhaling.
Finally, we walked up the porch stairs to the front door and turned the key. It was just as I remembered the house when we last saw it, but even better now: clean and scrubbed of any evidence of previous lives lived there. We hugged again quickly and then ran from room to room to reacquaint ourselves. After so many years of small urban apartments, it felt obscene to be in possession of so many rooms dedicated to subtly different activities. The kitchen was bright and airy with shiny outdated appliances and plenty of counter space. A stream of blinding light in the living room drew a straight line to the ancient woodstove—the most substantial machine I had ever been responsible for. And the two upstairs bedrooms oozed charm with their countless gables and unfamiliar angles. It was gluttonous to us then, but we hungrily ate it all up.
There wasn’t much to do without furniture, so we eventually walked to the back porch and sat side by side.
“We have to do something that we’ll never forget to mark the beginning of our new life here. What should we do?”
For once, it came to me first. “Let’s go skinny-dipping in the creek.”
“Yes, I love it.”
We stepped off the porch and began peeling clothing off. The enormous trees around us were lush with leaves by then and we were hidden from the rest of the world on every side.
I’m not a prude, but I’ve never been the sort of person who’s entirely comfortable with nudity in nonsexual, broad-daylight situations. All that pink flesh rubbing and bouncing is a little too much reality for me. But Pia was just the opposite. She was entirely comfortable with her own nudity—which wasn’t much of a feat, since she looked fantastic naked—and she also appreciated the naked form on others, marveling at the beauty of human imperfections. She once told me that she saw God’s artistry in the way time drags and molds our bodies into new shapes. It was as if she didn’t understand shame at all. What a gift that must be.
I was happy to ignore the embarrassed voice inside me as we stripped down and ran toward the creek at the far end of our backyard. Pia let out a celebratory holler and we stepped into the cool woods to look for just the right spot for our swim.
It wasn’t swimming, exactly—the creek was only a foot deep in most places—but there was one perfect little basin lined with rough sand where the incoming current pooled and swirled before moving farther down the rocky path. We stepped carefully along mossy rocks and into the pool, startled by how cold the water was. It was almost numbing, but we didn’t care. We were hot and happy and so insanely in love at that moment.
“It’s incredible to think that almost two hundred years ago, another family was living in this house and probably washing their clothes here in this creek,” Pia said as she squatted in a little shivering ball in the water. She had created a romanticized historical narrative of our new location in the weeks before, and I couldn’t resist teasing her about it.
“Ah, yes. The Green Mountain Boys probably washed their uniforms in this creek.” I smiled and blew bubbles into the dark water.
Pia moved in and wrapped her legs around my lower half. We kissed and laughed in high, frigid octaves, working hard to stay in the icy bath.
When finally it got to be too much, we stepped out of the creek and walked up the bank toward our home. The humid air of our new backyard was a relief as we roamed aimlessly around waiting for the air to dry our bodies. I picked a young green blackberry from its bush and tasted its tart flesh. Pia lay flat on her back in a cluster of red clovers. Our red clovers.
I went to her and lay down on my side, one hand resting on her bare stomach. The new, verdant smells of late spring were all around us, competing for our attention. Wet moss, honeysuckle, stinky trilliums. It was hotter than it should have been in June, but we didn’t mind. In those early days, we still thought hundred-degree June temperatures were just flukes, delicious details in our sweet homecoming story.
Pia rolled onto her stomach and kissed me while my hand wandered toward her smooth bottom. I began to inch closer toward her when we heard the sound of a nearby car door slam. We both froze.
A tall twentysomething man appeared in the yard and immediately spun around when he discovered us.
“Put some clothes on, Adam and Eve. Your shit’s here.”
We erupted into laughter and scrambled to find our clothes while the movers waited safely at the front of the house. We pulled everything on and tugged it all back into place and then broke down once more, this time in a fit of laughter that had us choking and snorting on our knees. It was a perfectly memorable start.
* * *
At six o’clock that evening, Pia and I were sitting in folding chairs in the basement of the Elks Club in downtown Isole. There was no signage outside or handouts at the door or anything else that would have signaled that something formal was occurring. I wondered how Pia knew about the meeting. The chairs were arranged in a circle that filled up quickly around us and stragglers had to drag new chairs over to form an outer ring. There were seven men and four women, most of them decades older than us. A bearded fiftysomething man wearing a faded denim vest greeted Pia warmly, as if they had met before, then he walked to a chair at the center that seemed designated for him.
“Thanks for coming everyone,” the bearded man said. He rolled up his sleeves and pulled a military dog tag out from beneath his shirt. “My name is Crow. Glad everyone found the place okay. I’m not big on email—because of the surveillance—so we will continue to rely on word-of-mouth for these meetings. Please do your part to let people know about them.”
Several people nodded. An elderly woman I recognized from the local ski shop adjusted the position of her chair across the room. Then she patted the hand of a young man to her left who could barely keep his puffy eyes open and I felt a pang of jealousy at his freedom to be so unabashedly stoned.
“We have a lot of ground to cover over the next few weeks,” Crow continued, “so we’re going to dive right in tonight with a focus on energy. Later we’ll get to water safety, food supply, communication technology and, finally, personal protection.”
In the corner of my eye, I saw Pia glance at me. This meeting didn’t feel as though it was going to be about what she had led me to believe it was about. But what was it?
A middle-aged man in neat khakis and a plaid shirt cleared his throat. “Crow, what’s your advice on solar? It’s easier to set up than wind, but it’s too unreliable if you’re planning on unplugging from the grid.”
“Good question.” Crow nodded. “The key here is to maintain a hybrid system. Ideally that would mean wind, solar and hydro. But you have to tailor that plan to the available natural resources on your land. I know you’ve got very little wind in your woods, Ron, but you do have that creek, so maybe look into hydro to supplement solar.”
An obese woman to my right took frantic notes whenever Crow spoke. I leaned to my other side.
“What is this?” I whispered to Pia.
She pretended not to hear my question and instead jumped into the conversation that Crow and Ron were having. “What about gasifiers? I’ve been reading about that as a viable option,” she said.
What did Pia know about gasifiers? The lady to my other side craned to see who had asked the question.
“Such a good point, Pia,” Crow said a little too enthusiastically. “Wood gas is a great option. It can be loud and a bit dirty—and I can’t speak to its legality around here—but if all hell breaks loose, that’s going to be the least of your problems.”
A round of nods ensued. The stoned guy smirked in