Nobody lives on my street. Not even me.

I’m referring to my street in Vermont, a dirt road flattened annually by the town roller as “Mud Season” ends. A road faithfully plowed and sanded during the winter. A road that runs a mile off a state highway and offers up to the forest only four houses, all of them empty.

I suppose animals live there. It is true wilderness, though, and they are mostly itinerant. Like the bear my old roommate saw asleep in the driveway one sunny day. Or the three moose that knocked down my six-foot fence as they leapt over it. Or the wild turkey, gobble-gobbling right outside my front door one morning when I opened it. Or the pheasant that stroll through the yard at times. Or the tiny, orange tree salamanders that look like they should be in a jungle somewhere, not on a mountain in Vermont.

Those seem like random visitors, such as myself.

There was an active beaver dam down the hill when I moved here, but a few years ago they gave up that place and built another one upstream.

I suppose the mice live here full time. I encourage them to leave, but they persist, lavishing chocolate jimmies on my countertops. Last time I was here, against my animal-loving heart, I left De-con out to thin their ranks. It breaks my heart, but they’re squatters. Literally. The jimmies are evidence. All houses in Vermont have mice, at least in winter.

The first house sits closest to the road. The people who owned it (the “Goldens”, I believe the name was) moved to Florida two years ago. It’s for sale. The locals think it’s overpriced. ($285K, but with 10 acres of land and abutting National Forest.) It will probably be bought by “outtastaters” like myself, who will either come up sometimes, as I do, or try to live here full time without going stark raving mad, as I did. (That’s meant to read, “as I tried to live here, not “as I went stark raving mad.” Even though I have now cleared it up, I like the ambiguity and am leaving the sentence as it is.)

Past the Golden’s old house, there’s a little bridge. If you go over that and down about 100 yards or so, you come to Elsie’s house. Elsie’s house look like Disney built it to be the perfect Grandmother’s House. She used to sit on her screened in porch amidst her plants, watching the birds come to her numerous birdfeeders. She was rosy-cheeked and bespectacled, like one of those dried-apple dolls they sell in Ye Olde Vermonte Tourist Shoppes. I liked her so much.

She died last spring, two weeks after her 100th birthday. She lived alone until the very end.

Last time I saw Elsie, she asked me if I was going to sell my house, now that I’m living in New Jersey most of the time. I said no.

I said, “Elsie, I intend to own that house til I’m about your age, at least.” She nodded approvingly.

“What about you?” I asked. “You selling anytime soon?” She knew I was teasing.

She said, “Cupcake, when I leave here, I’m going feet first in a pine box.”

She was almost right. She went feet first, but on a gurney. She’d broken her hip, just a few days after her 100th birthday. Shortly afterwards, it was lights out for Elsie. (When you’re that age and you break something, it spirals downwards fast.)

Her family plans to keep the house. There was a truck in the driveway when I drove in yesterday—somebody doing work. I should have stopped and asked what was up. (You can do that in Vermont, and it’s called “Being Neighborly.” In New Jersey, it would be called, “Being Up In Somebody Else’s Business” or “Being An Asshole.” )

Then there’s Eden’s house. It really belongs to her family, but I think of it as Eden’s house because she’s my age and the only one in that family that I know. They live in a brownstone on the Upper East Side (read as: not poor), and their house is big, renovated with bells and whistles like Jacuzzi and granite countertops, they have tennis courts and a swimming hole (which I would like to sneak into some hot summer night, if I ever came up here with someone to sneak into it with) and acres and acres of sprawling scenery, so gorgeous that you want to put whipped cream on it and eat it up with a spoon. When there’s snow, you wouldn’t even need the whipped cream.

And then the woods start. That’s where the Beaver Pond was, in the little brook that marks where the cleared land and the forest meet. If you go up the hill about half a mile, you come to my house. After my house, the road is what they call “Class 4”, meaning “drive at your own risk.” It goes all the way over the mountain to another town, but I’ve never gone over it. I think it’s about 15 miles as the crow flies.

But where the maintained road ends, there’s a big black gate. And behind the big black gate is my driveway, which leads to my house. My sanctuary. My home.

It’s a quirky house, built in three sections over three decades. The builder was Elsie’s brother-in-law, who everyone called Uncle Tom. First it was just a hunting cabin. But he kept building and finally moved up here full time for a while. I don’t remember why he sold it to the Nace family, but he did. They lived here for 15 years or so. And then they sold it to me.

I plan to keep it forever. I don’t think I could live in New Jersey and spend all that time in Manhattan if I didn’t know that I had somewhere to go where I can decompress. As I am writing this, I think there probably isn’t another living person for at least a mile in any direction. Just me, Momo, Boss, and the mice. (They’re still here, and they’re retaliating against me by trying to poison Momo and Boss. I keep finding blue De-Con pellets around the house, in the middle of the floor, and on the sofa cushions.)
I have to figure out who can deliver firewood, and motivate myself to shovel a path down the stone walkway to my car. But everywhere I go, I am surrounded by beauty, silence and solitude, and as always, I walk around here with my heart in my mouth, reveling at the gift I’ve been given by having this refuge.

Nobody lives on this street. Not even me. But I think those of us who are not here, think of it constantly, the longing for running through us like the mice through our houses. I know Eden does. She told me. And Elsie’s granddaughter, Leslie, who begged the family not to sell the house when Elsie died. And Amy, a girl who visits my house to write sometimes. And me. And last time I was here, I was driving to town at sunset, and I could swear I saw Elsie sitting on her porch. She’d passed away several months before. But I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I waved.

I would leave either, given the choice.