There’s a stranger in a red t-shirt on the bridge at the crossroads.  He doesn’t avoid eye contact like a normal person.  He stares into the car, locking eyes with me.  I notice the backpack on the ground in front of him.  

“Pull over,” I tell Bob.  I roll down the window.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Can you tell me where the nearest Stewarts is?”

I look around to see if he has a car anywhere.  “You walking?  You got a long way to go.”

“Or any gas station?  It’s gonna rain soon and I need to get under a roof.”

“Walk 200 yards down the road to our cafe on the left,” I tell him.  “You comin’ off the Long Path?”

“Yeah.  I started up in Lake Placid on the Northville Lake Placid trail.  Been working my way down.   But there’s gonna be a big storm,” he says.  “I’m meeting a friend to get under a roof for tonight.”

Bob will be just about lost to me for the afternoon.

We arrive at the cafe and unload our things.  We’re supposed to inventory spices, laminate croissants, make sausage patties, prepare the cake for the weekend, dice potatoes for the home fries and the French fries, set up the doughs for the sticky buns and the pita breads.  I start pulling ingredients and lining them up on the counter.  Bob paces back and forth between the front windows and the back kitchen.  He’s distracted.  Excited, even.  There’s a through-hiker coming.

I feel his anticipation with every step.  With one stop on the bridge at the crossroads, he became thirty years younger.  

We’re headed up to the Northville Lake Placid trail, a stretch of the Appalachian trail, ourselves this year.  We’re taking our kids in for a  week in the back country.  For nearly thirty years now, I’ve had my heart set on finding my way back to the Cold River, to visit an old family friend who used to be a ranger up there, who introduced me to a part of myself that I didn’t know existed.  The last time I went in was to scatter his ashes with his son and my brother.  It’s time to go back and say hello, and introduce him to my family.  With all other travel virtually impossible right now, this seemed like the year to make it happen.  My brother and his wife and daughter are even coming home to help cover the farm so we can make the trip before it’s too cold.  

I see a flash of red out the cafe window.  “He’s here,” I tell Bob.  “Mind your social distancing!”  I find I have to preventatively scold to lock the six foot rule in his head.  And then my husband vacates the kitchen completely.  He’s out front with the through-hiker, learning trail conditions, telling his own stories.

Some of the cafe work will be done today.  Some will be forgotten as Bob travels back in his own memories, to a time when he had no thoughts of a wife, a child, a family farm, three dogs, two cats and a cafe.  In this moment, he’s re-living a period in his life when his biggest worry was the condition of the Appalachian trail, when he could spend an entire summer maintaining his corridor, when he didn’t need to coordinate with eight family members before vanishing into the wilderness.  

I don’t try to call him back.  We’ll fail on today’s to-do list, I’m certain.  I move forward with what I can, and leave him to his through-hiker.  He scares up a bottle of soda from I-don’t-know-where.  He brings the young man a glass, grabs a seltzer for himself, and they push an outdoor table under the eaves of the cafe and sit out the rain together.  I keep chipping away at the cooking, but I’m taking my own pleasure in the moment.  I will remember this.

In five months of the pandemic, I realize I’m losing my memories.  For many folks who survive this, I think the pandemic will be rife with unique memories of the upheaval in our lives.  Some will be traumatic, others will be poignant. We’ve had a few of those. But then there are just the days of new normal, stripped of novelty:  day in and day out of feeding chickens, prepping in the cafe, eating supper with the kids.  We put variation in the week by way of Saturdays at the cafe, cleaning the house on Sundays, then eating dinner with Mom and Dad.  But week after week, while it is never boring, and it is always rich, the routine is often the same.  I rely on these essays to give myself something to latch on to, to create meaning of the passing time.  Otherwise my most vivid memory for the past week might be cleaning the bathroom sink.

Bob comes in and tries to get me to go out to visit.  “His name’s Jeff,” he tells me.  “You should really go talk to him!”

I know why he wants me to go talk to him.  I’m the talker.  I hate crowds, but I love people.  I love to draw out their stories, glean their wisdom.  Bob likes to recount a time he watched me jump into a taxi cab with a driver who barely spoke English, then leave him after collecting stories of his life  as a filmmaker before fleeing Egypt, after getting a tour of the block where John Lennon was shot, convincing him that he really needs to start taking up his camera again.  We shared warm embraces, a few tears, and love.  All in one 20 minute cab ride.  My husband adores this about me.  He thrives in the listening, on bearing witness to the experience.  These are the events that drive him to erupt from the containment of his WASP-y fortress, pull me into his arms and lock his lips upon my own, loving me for my chronically open heart, loving me for the experience I’ve found for us both, for the gift of a memory. 

But I can’t do that right now.  I’m making a different memory.  I’m making a memory of watching my husband.

I want to blame Covid for stripping me of new memories of this man.  We are together day in and day out, walking the woods, sipping coffee, sharing breakfast, sharing lunch, sharing dinner, sharing our bed, sharing our worries, sharing labors.  But as I see the illumination in his face talking with the stranger, I reflect how each day blends into the next, marked only by the length of his increasingly unruly hair, or the stretch of my braid down my back.  There’s a sweet harmony at play in our co-existence, for certain.  I cannot think of a finer companion for these strange times.  And our moments together are pleasurable.  But our life feels like a Monet right now  — beautiful and vivid, but really only understood by standing back and taking in the whole of it.  The details feel as though they’re getting lost.  

We no longer have non-family farm help, and so no one strays far from Sap Bush Hollow.  There are no travels to break our routine, no spontaneous trips to coffee shops, no afternoon dalliances with margaritas in a Mexican cafe, no community theater adventures where I watch him transform into different characters, no forays into bookstores to lose ourselves and the contents of our wallets to new titles.  These are the new memories lost.   The cafe on Saturday is our social highlight, but it repeats every week, creating a muzzy confusion about which week which story unfolded.  

But can I really blame all this blurring  on the pandemic?  Or is this largely married farm life?  We bear contented witness to the passage of seasons, and to the aging of our bodies, but otherwise fail to account for the time, fail to reward ourselves with unique memories.

I don’t want this to happen.  I want every memory I can glean of my life with this man.  And in this moment where I see him become a former version of himself with the through-hiker, in my lust for fresh memories, perhaps I am something of a voyeur.  Bob was a different man back then.  Still soulful and funny and kind, but also beautifully adrift.  And I am just as in love with that man as I am with the grouch who will come back to hose off dishes before slamming them into the Hobart, who will come downstairs this morning and grind the coffee and pour hot water into our travel mugs to preheat them before we carry our drinks into the woods, who will slip out onto the screen porch beneath where I sleep at night and quietly play his guitar as the rain patters down on the leaves surrounding the house.  

There.  Deep in the circular repetitiveness of this pandemic, before we’ve even loaded our own packs and vanished into the wilderness to play with the kids along the Cold River, I’ve just given myself a whole handful of memories.  They’re here for me to taste again and again, all from a single moment where we got to give a through-hiker shelter from the rain.