Deep in the woods, it can suddenly turn very dark

Last week in the Port City Chronicle, Gretchen Reingren, a 44-year-old, divorced, criminal defense attorney, had a sobering discussion with her unemployed brother Ethan about his job search.

“With a lot of these jobs,” he said, “anyone experienced enough to do the job knows better than to take it.”

“But what would be the harm of going for an interview?” she asked.

“I tried to go to an interview the other day,” he said. “But I was a little early by about three hours so I went to the library instead.”

Then when Gretchen got frustrated with him, he laid it on the line.

“Have you ever had a job you really hated?”

“Sure,” she said. “I had a job I hated so much I cried in front of my boss. It’s the only really unprofessional thing I’ve ever done at work.”

“That’s different from me,” Ethan said. “I’ve actually never done anything really professional at work.”

Which explained why he never got too excited about the classified ads she cut out for him.

Now this week Gretchen struggles with her own anxieties about the future. And so we bring you this week’s episode:

Why You Should Never Hide Your Gripes Under a Bushel

“Why didn’t you bring my toothbrush?” I asked Grace as I unpacked her toothbrush and our other toiletries at the cabin we’d rented in the White Mountains to go snowshoeing for the weekend.

“Because that’s not in my job description,” she said. “That’s not what I was hired on for.”

So I was put in my place on that score. I just hoped that along with my careful packing of all her cold weather gear, I’d remembered enough of my own that I wouldn’t lose too many limbs to frostbite.

“What do you think of this place?” I asked somewhat nervously, looking around at the bare wooden walls of our tiny cabin.

I wondered if she’d fully grasped our plans, considering that the large quantity of makeup she’d brought seemed better suited to a weekend in Las Vegas or even a stint with the circus.

“Nice,” she said. “But let me ask you this: Is there a Four Seasons around here where I could stay?”

Then she dragged in several large duffel bags filled with everything from tank tops to cashmere sweaters.

“You’re not running away, are you?” I asked.

Meanwhile she continued quietly assembling a small library of books on top of the bureau. It seemed a bad sign that she was using her hiking boots as book ends.

“You know I always read a lot on vacation, Mom,” she said. “If you remember, I read four books in Italy last summer, including ‘A Room with a View’ and ‘A Passage to India.’”

Apparently we went to Italy so Grace could get a little reading done.

But the next morning, despite the fierce cold, she dutifully strapped on her snowshoes and took off ahead of me down the trail.

“I forgot how hard it is to walk on these tennis rackets,” she said, as we labored down the path through several feet of fresh snow.

“But you like it anyway, right?” I asked. She’d always loved being out in the mountains, and I was hoping that wouldn’t change as she got older.

Instead of answering, she suddenly stopped and pointed with her pole to a snowshoe rabbit hiding under a fir tree just off the path.

“It’s amazing they can make it through the winter,” she said. “Assuming they do, that is. A lot must die.”

“Sure, I guess the older ones do,” I said, trying to protect her.

But I didn’t get away with it.

“I don’t think anything in nature dies of old age, Mom,” she said. “I’m pretty sure everything is eventually murdered.”

Which was probably about right, but I changed the topic anyway for her benefit.

“What are your friends doing this weekend?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I told Eddie I don’t want to see him anymore since I know he’s been hooking up with someone else.”

So I assumed her current guy, a college freshman, was history.

“But I told him to call me when I get back because I’ll probably feel differently by then.”

Which was a lesson for me in how to live in the present without dragging around a lot of baggage.

“I had a dream about him last night,” she said. “He apologized for everything he did and said I was the funniest, smartest, and cutest girl he’d ever met.”

This is why we have dreams, both night and day.

“But thank goodness I never slept with him because he would not be a good father. He definitely wouldn’t remember to attend our kid’s piano recitals.”

Suddenly the woods seemed a whole lot deeper and darker as I realized the dangers that lurked in our path, and I’m not talking about bobcats or coyotes.

“‘Where’s Daddy?’ our kid would ask, and I’d have to say, ‘I don’t know, dear, probably drunk down at the dorms watching sports.’”

Then I was torn between trying to protect her by encouraging her skepticism about intimacy on the one hand and reminding her that it’s just a part of nature on the other. Of course, nature could be ruggedly cold and harsh, both in its human form and outdoors, as we were experiencing.

And after all, she’s only 17, which is really 11 in disguise.

“I feel like people usually have kids for the wrong reasons,” she said. “Like they’re a total failure themselves but this is their opportunity to boss someone else around.”

I waited with bated breath to learn whether those people were me.

“I could never bring Eddie over to Daddy’s,” she said. “I didn’t want him to have to listen to Daddy praising his genes.”

So apparently I was something short of a total failure in Grace’s eyes, since Eddie had been to our house several times. And I was pretty sure I’d never bragged to him about Grace.

“Anyway, we never got that close,” she said. “The main thing he wanted from me was to hook up. Not that I really minded. I told him if it became a problem I’d let him know. I don’t hide my gripes under a bushel.”

I had to agree with that, having heard plenty of her gripes over the years.

“True,” I said.

She turned around and tapped me on the leg with one of her poles as punishment.

“You have nothing to complain about.”

“Except my knees,” I said. “Which for some reason are aching even though we’ve just started. Why do you suppose my knees would already hurt?”

“I don’t know, Mom,” she said. “As you know, I flunked out of medical school.”

So apparently unlike hers, my gripes did belong under a bushel.

“But this is still so much fun,” I said, watching the snow flying up from the back of her snowshoes as she tramped along through the drifts.

“This is definitely one of our favorite places.”

“And mine, too,” she said, smiling back at me.

Meaning I don’t necessarily speak for her anymore.

“I just wish we could spend more time doing this kind of thing,” I said. “Being out in nature, in the mountains or at least in the woods.”

What I really meant was I wished I could have her all to myself more often, just the two of us walking together and talking for hours, without the usual distractions of her boyfriend, her friends, and her other activities. But of course I knew that in fact as time went by I’d have even less time with her and in a short while she’d leave home for college.

“Weren’t we actually thinking about getting land someplace?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Is that why you got me an atlas for Christmas?”

She tapped me on the leg again with her pole.

“Right, because I figured you were probably considering some land in the Sahara Desert or maybe in Greenland.”

But I was oblivious, with Grace’s words “we were thinking about getting land someplace” ringing in my ears. It was so nice to know there was still a “we” despite all the changes with her growing up and making her own way in the world. Because, like a snowshoe rabbit turning white in the winter, Grace was just changing skins and she would always be my child and friend no matter what other trails she went down.

 (Heidi Wendel is a former editor of the Columbia Law Review and has written for The New York Times, among others.)