As Naomi backed out of the driveway for the last time, she barely heard the gravel crunching under the wheels of her truck. The sound had for so many years signaled the arrival of guests, the official start of a new day as she headed off to work, or the thing that triggered the incessant barking of her hound dog when the sound was accompanied by the invading whir of the mail truck.
Today, the crunching signaled the final departure of Naomi, her eight-year-old Eli, and their bevy of animals. And while her home for the last two decades and the only home Eli had ever known gave its goodbye gesture, Naomi didn’t even consider giving one in return by looking back one last time. There was nothing to look back at, in her mind her home had been burned down many months ago.
To say that Naomi was shocked when her husband left would not be wholly accurate. Yes, there was shock involved when she finally understood that her husband’s declaration of wanting more out of life truly meant that he wanted less of her and Eli. But Naomi had experienced a life-time of disappearing acts and always half-expected her husband to join the mysterious crew. Naomi’s own father had been known for “taking long walks” and not coming back for days, until one day the only existence of him in her life was the overheard rumors and whispers exchanged between her friend’s parents and her teachers. In the shadow of grief and heartbreak, Naomi’s mother had cocooned – ruled by anxiety and fear, refusing to pursue any further happiness or joy from life. Naomi would grow up with no memory of her mother’s smile or laughter.
One of Naomi’s aunts stepped in to help her through some of her childhood and adolescent milestones, but as soon as Naomi graduated high school it seemed as though her aunt clocked out from her duties. She stopped returning Naomi’s calls and letters, except for one time Naomi received a note in the mail from her aunt that said “I love you, I just can’t anymore and can’t tell you why, besides, you don’t need me anymore”.
It wasn’t lost on Naomi, especially in retrospect, that what added to her affection for her husband was the familiarity his somewhat always distant love provided her. He felt like home from his first “maybe I’ll call you sometime”.
However, Naomi did think her husband loved her enough to stay and believed that he loved Eli enough to keep their family together. Naomi loved him very much, and loved the life they had built together over the past decade. It was a messy life, but it was their life. And as real as Naomi’s love for her husband and their life was, so was the knowledge of the strong possibility that their love story could end with “I love you, I just can’t anymore...”, just like all of the others. So, to go back to the concept of shock, you would need to be completely not expecting something to be shocked by it. Naomi was always expecting something. Just not everything.
The actions of Naomi’s husband during their marriage are soaked in cliché and wreak of betrayal. The deplorable actions of weak and careless husbands have taken up enough space on our planet that we do not need to piece them apart here. And while it’s a challenge to tell the story of redemption without detailing the crimes done to the redeemed, I will do my best so I can spare you the grisly details. After all, this is a happy and only sometimes sad story of two people who survived – not a story about the person who almost killed them.
Her Inner Divining Rod
Naomi had always been smart with money but blinded by her love for wayward animals. While she managed their household finances like she was running a small business that she planned to expand, the “expansion money” was often depleted by removing this or that lodged or growing thing from some furry or feathered creature whom she loved with all of her heart – or more important and cause for urgent care – a creature whom Eli loved with all of their heart. All of this adding up to Naomi having to choose between funding lawyers to fight for half of the assets acquired during her marriage, or leave her home with just enough money to start a new life for Eli, Wyatt, Emmy Lou, Abe, June Carter Cat, Birch, Ginger the fish, Audrey and Katherine Peckburn, Edna Garret, Luna Lovegood, Miss Tennessee, Sophia Petrillo and Blanche Deveraux (may Rose Nyland and Dorothy Zbornak rest in peace). One kid, three dogs, one cat, one rabbit, one fish, seven chickens and one free falling middle-aged woman who couldn’t help but smile a little (even if it was almost undetectable) as she loaded up the last of her crew because she knew in her heart that they were all headed toward the good life – one way or the other.
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Naomi’s grandpa was a Water Witch. While the art is more traditionally could Dowsing and the artist is called a Dowser, once Naomi heard someone call her grandpa a Water Witch, she couldn’t hear it any other way. Born and raised in Eastern Tennessee, in the heart of Appalachia, her grandfather was known for picking up two sticks, any two sticks, forming a Divining Rod and using it to guide him to water. Not many people believed in the power of Dowsing and Divining Rods, but those who did literally bet the farm on it. And to those people, Naomi’s grandpa was a hero.
From the time she was a little girl Naomi had tried to copy her grandpa’s movements, from the way he would pick out the sticks to the way he would slowly move across the field, but she didn’t seem to possess the power to find water. However, she did believe she had an inner Divining Rod – one that helped her make big and small decisions in her life, and point her in the right direction. Naomi felt a strong inner pull in the opposite direction if she was ever going the wrong way, literally and figuratively. She had an incredible sense of direction and never sent an email she regretted. Naomi’s internal “stop” and “go” buttons guided her well, and she had honed the ability to read them. As proven in the first few paragraphs of this story, Naomi’s inner Divining Rod did not always work with matters of the heart. When it came to where she needed to be she possessed witchy powers, however, who she decided to be around was solely dictated by her crippling case of Broken Bird Syndrome. She suffered from a delusion of seeing her version of the best in others, a version that many times could only exist in her world of make believe. But again, this is a story of redemption, so back to our survivor.
Her Inner Divining Rod was how Naomi chose the town they were moving to. Non-believers may say when you need your checkboxes to include LGBTGIAP+ kid-friendly, lots of animals friendly, on-site chicken coop, and affordable to a single mother with no current income flow, your choices may be narrowed down so slim that no witchy work is needed. However, I would suggest that those non-believers have limited knowledge of the great expanse that is Northern New England, A.K.A Canada Said No to This Chunk Land, U.S.A., which is brimming with perfect little towns and kind people.
On a clear summer evening, when the sun still hung high in the sky and the squash blossoms were in full bloom, Naomi made a list of towns based the results of a “LGBTQIAP+ friendly small New England towns”. She clicked on “images” and went through the first two pages, landing on town that “felt right”. She made a list of about ten towns, gathered Eli and they sat outside as the sun set, listening to the frogs, summoning their Divining Rods and picked the town of Toad Hollow, Vermont. The images of a country store, winter parades, a bookstore and Pride Flags hanging from ancient porches felt instantly like home. They smiled as the chirping frogs in their current woods seemed to call louder, Eli was convinced they were signaling their Vermont cousins that new friends were coming soon.
Eli
Eli had skipped the “goo goo gah gah” stage and began speaking in parables and metaphors before they were two years old. Right before Eli’s third birthday they told Naomi that “our world is like a planet who only knows about red crayons and blue crayons. And I’m a purple crayon”, adding, “I’m not a boy or a girl, is there a word for that?”.
During a rocky time in their family, when Eli was around 6, they told their dad that his love was like “a cashier who doesn’t give you your correct change, I gave you $100, but you didn’t give me my change.” Naomi understood that feeling so deeply and had hoped that this would awaken a love that had been asleep in Eli’s dad.
After Eli’s dad left, they told Naomi that they felt like their dad was an artist and they were the paint tube. The artists squeezed the paint out of the tube, started painting with it, then stopped – leaving the paint to dry and crack, never painting it into the beautiful story it could have been.
Naomi always tried her best to keep up with Eli but often felt like she was punching above her motherhood weight. Eli’s big words and bigger heart were her kryptonite which goes far to explain why their small house in the rural suburbs of Connecticut, and now her old cab-over pick-up truck were filled with “unadoptable dogs”, the last chickens in the metal tubs at Tractor Supply once “Chicken Days” started to wind down, and one astonishingly long-living fish – originally found caught in a filter at the local pet store chain. Not to mention a very angry semi-feral cat who took about as long to herd into their travel carrier as it took to pack up their whole lives, and one small fluffy rabbit that was by far the biggest trouble-maker of them all.
The thing that kept Naomi’s heart from melting into a pile of goo every time Eli spoke was, even at just eight years old, Eli was kind of an asshole. The good kind of asshole – the kind of asshole you need your kid to be so you can have faith that they’ll survive in this fucked up world. The kind of asshole you need your kid to be so you can stop yourself from giving them every possible thing they want.
Naomi’s heart, like Eli's, was as big as a mountain, and so was her temper. While she mostly ran cool as can be, she had a fire in her heart that set her off like a boiling tea kettle. When she would lose it – over messes or life stress or Eli’s constant negotiating with her, Eli took to calling her Judith Winters, as in “Ok, Judith Winters, we see you, you’re mad.” As Eli got a little older (all of...maybe seven years old?), they could see Naomi’s water start to boil before her whistle blew. To that they would say “Watch it Judith Winters, you don’t want to hurt yourself”. One time, after the competing urges to throttle Eli and break out into fits of laughter subsided, Naomi Googled “Judith Winters”, just in case she was missing some inside joke. The results produced a number of obituaries as well as more than a handful of “seasoned” real estate agents. Eli had just given Naomi’s temper their version of a crazy old lady name. (I apologize to all people with the lovely name of Judith Winters...I told you Eli was kind of an asshole.)
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And even though Naomi didn’t look back at their home as she pulled out of the driveway on the day they left Eli’s childhood home, Eli did. They couldn’t even begin to imagine what living somewhere else would be like. In the few short moments it took to wind down the gravel driveway, Eli thought of their garden, of the Monarch Butterflies that visited September. They thought of their Christmas tree in the window and the cookie crumbles that were always left on the fireplace mantle on Christmas morning. Eli could almost smell the fried chicken their mom would make every Sunday – a leftover tradition from her southern upbringing. They saw their swing-set sitting still by the chicken coop, and wondered if it was sad that they were leaving. They hoped it wasn’t. They thought of their dad, and hoped he could find them, that he would want to find them. Eli wondered if everything they had ever known was fading away because of them, because they were a purple crayon.
As they pulled out onto the street and up the road Naomi didn’t know whether she should speed up or slow down as they passed Eli’s best friend’s house who lived just up the hill. Eli couldn’t decide what they hoped Naomi would do. Their hearts collectively burst as they saw the family was gathering in their front yard holding signs that said “We Love You!” and “Goodbye Eli and Naomi!”. They waved back and drove as slowly as the tears streaming down their cheeks, Naomi fighting back the wave of pain that had been threatening to crash and drown her all of these months. The act of love and solidarity was almost such an unbearable contrast to their loneliness and broken hearts that Naomi and Eli almost cracked. Then, with perfect timing, as if the animal angels were guiding their whole lives and wanted to signal they were also guiding their journey, the truck cab filled up with a gaseous smell that can only be created by either a fourteen-year-old dog or their ninety-pound garbage eating hound companion. Tears were joined with over-acted gasps for air and followed by belly laughs as they trudged up the hill, on their way to the rural highway that would take them up north to the adventure of their lifetime.
The Road to Toad Hollow
Toad Hollow, Vermont was a little over a five-hour drive from their home in Connecticut. Maybe a little less if Naomi would have taken the highways, but the backroads up north were a family tradition she wasn’t willing to let go of.
Landmarks along the way brought back memories in the cruel way you can’t imagine happening until it happens to you – the way your happiest moments become your most painful memories. Every summer since Naomi and her husband had been together, they would travel to Vermont, first from the apartment they shared in Brooklyn, then from the little house they rented outside of Boston, and every July after they moved to Connecticut, always taking the same back roads once they entered Vermont, just south of Brattleboro. They only skipped the summer Naomi was very pregnant with Eli, vowing to go together as a family of three the next year.
For seven summers after they traveled the backroads, hiked mountain trails, sat on benches outside of general stores, and dreamed of living on a farm in Vermont someday.
During those visits, Naomi and Eli often found themselves on adventures together while her husband took long work calls, or had to go back to the place they rented to deal with work issues. Naomi had built a life with her husband and in many ways – a mortgage, a family – had bet her life on him, so when he was missing from their adventures, she felt lonely for him, like a piece of herself was missing. But if she was being truly honest with herself, those times with her and Eli were some of the best times of the trips.
Even though Naomi didn’t fully know at that time that her presence, her heart and soul and spirit were an inconvenience to her husband, she did know the feeling of being freed from that. Freed from no longer being a burden and being able to take as long as she wanted with Eli to commune with farm goats of Vermont. Or slowly walk the main street back and forth, forth and back with their bags filled with candles, toys, snacks, and handmade Christmas presents that they would always promise to store away for the next few months but couldn’t bear the wait and gave away the second they saw their intended gift target.
As Naomi drove further north she blinked away the memories, good and bad. Her and her husband sang along to August and Everything After at the top of their lungs all the way up VT-106. Her sitting alone at the restaurant table the night they got engaged while he took a series of work calls. The horse farm where they stopped and him saying that he couldn’t wait for her to have a farm of her own someday, a love that sparked in his eyes just often enough to make Naomi believe in him. The swimming hole where they stayed all day, collecting rocks, splashing with a three-year-old Eli and napping, all three of them on the same blanket.
And as Naomi and Eli now drove past the signs for Grafton she remembered the two of them standing on the front porch of their rented house, waving goodbye to her husband as he drove away two-days into their week-long stay for an unplanned and mandatory meeting. The newly familiar creep of stoniness started to incase her heart and she thought about how actively she worked to believe his lies and how he repaid her trust by constantly upping the ante with harder to swallow stories and see-through excuses. She grounded herself by looking in the rearview mirror at the backseat of her truck. Eli was asleep with the rabbit cage on their lap and their feet resting on the cat carrier. Emmy Lou and Abe were finally calm, dozing in and out of doggy dreams. Wyatt, her ride or die for the past 14 years was curled as comfortably as an old dog could be on the passenger seat of an old truck, and the road noise was louder than any possible chicken noise from the cab of the truck, which Naomi took as a good sign. She wouldn’t be able to change the past and it would maybe always hurt a little bit, even and especially the good times. But she may be able to make a new life and new good memories that would last. She straightened her back, stretched her neck, exhaled and drove ahead, exiting off of VT-106 and turning onto a new route north.
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