On Friday evening I packed up a picnic of cold tuna macaroni salad and watermelon and boarded an evening train bound for Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley. We arrived in the dark and drank cold glasses of vinho verde before falling asleep. But in the morning, we awoke to a a town filled with red brick buildings and ringed by green mountains in the distance. We ate breakfast outside in the sprawling garden of a restaurant where they roast their own coffee beans and sell peanut butter chocolate chip cookies the size of your head. From there, we visited the kind of huge, creaky used bookstore that can only exist off rural highways, and here we get to the first point I want to make: of course I had to buy the book you see here the moment I saw it, even if it hadn’t cost $1.50. Please note the sentence at the top of the cover.
I got a little carried away at this book store, snatching up an M.F.K. Fisher book I didn’t have, a Joan Didion novel I’ve long wanted to read, and a cookbook that caused a staggering library fine the last time it was in my hot little hands. Sebastian found me a heavy anthology of personal essays. As the shopkeeper rang me up, he paused at that one. “Is this one free or $1?” As I might have mentioned, I love used bookstores.
We returned to home base for rosé and cold celery stalks smeared with pimento cheese. Everyone retreated into their books for a quiet hour or two. Later, we drove a few miles on empty back roads lined with coneflowers to reach a swimming pool tucked next to river. Here, a surly teenager served ice cold canned sodas and greasy hamburgers.
How delightfully far it all felt from New York! On the Sunday drive back to the train station, my damp swimsuit tucked back inside my suitcase, we got to talking about quality of life. How that can mean walking five minutes to your office and having the things you love––swimming holes, bookstores, bibimbap, and really, really good iced coffee––easily accessible. New York has everything anyone could ever want. But to get to those things, we have to travel; even my best friend lives over an hour away by subway.
Some day, perhaps, I’ll settle in that kind of perfect place where indie craft fairs and ethnic food are enveloped by a wide natural world teeming with trails for hiking and clear lakes for swimming. (Any leads on places that match this description, by the way?) Until then, my new goal is to focus on the living the charmed life at hand. That means sprucing up the apartment I actually live in (instead of dreaming about moving), climbing in bed with an old novel, its brittle, brown pages and that wonderful old book smell, lulled to sleep with the story of what happens when a group of Bohemians face up to love.
