The scent of cinnamon roses

I bought my first home at 26, romantic, wide-eyed, and ridiculously ecstatic. My husband and I had looked for months for a place to plant our upstate New York roots in the rapidly gentrifying farmlands around Nashua, N.H., a city that was considered one of the best places to live in the country and one we couldn't wait to leave.

We found our love cottage (yes, that is actually what we called it) in Lyndeborough, a gateway from the suburban Nashua sprawl to the Monadnock Region of southwestern New Hampshire. The property had everything we'd coveted: an apple orchard and ten acres for my husband to putter around in and an unspoiled antique cape with a beehive oven and wainscoting that I adored.

What we didn't know when we bought the house could fill a notebook, of course. There was a spring stream that gushed through the basement, resident porcupines that munched on our barn sills, mice that considered themselves part of the family, and a rutted, one-lane dirt road that sharpened my driving skills each mud season.

Not all of the surprises were unhappy ones. Having bought the house in November and moved in January, we had no idea that our 1830s cape with its three-story shingled barn built into a sloping hillside, was home to riotous perennials. They started cropping up in April like small soldiers, straight and proud. I had no idea what they were at first. I couldn't tell the difference between lilies of the valley and daylilies, bearded iris and Siberian iris, rose geranium and flowering sedum. They all announced themselves like old friends that first spring, happily taking whatever our land had to offer, while reaching straight up to the sun.

Our rich soil on Mountain Road grew nearly any plant or tree: raspberries, rhubarb, asparagus, cherries, grapes, peaches, and, of course, apples. The orchard consisted primarily of McIntosh trees with a smattering of Cortland and Baldwin trees, and a Northern Spy, whose pear-tinged flavor was my favorite.

I was most captivated by the flowers, those hardy New England perennials and their changing palette of colors. Over time, I learned how to work with them. I transplanted them to shade or sun, and paired their tones and textures, penciling them in against stone walls, white clapboards, and weathered shingles.

We had flowers everywhere. There was a flower bed behind the breezeway filled with tiger lilies, black-eyed susans, and daylilies in lemon and burnt orange. There was a front garden that pivoted on purple, pinks, and whites with phlox, irises, rose campion, and daises. The snowy hydrangea and lilac bushes occupied large swaths all their own.

But it was the flower patch out back, behind the house, which was my favorite. Turns out that our outdated (yet grandfathered) septic runoff fed a cloud of wild roses in varying shades of pink. Those flowers were so fragrant that when I threw open my kitchen windows, their scent did more than waft in, it settled in our bones.

Those brambly roses grew with the abandon of an unschooled toddler. I liked their princess colors, but it was their spicy-sweet fragrance that I loved best. The creamy rose scent seemed laced with cinnamon. I couldn't wait until they blossomed each year, starting at the end of June. 

When the first blossoms popped, I'd gather all my vases on our picnic table and fill them with the thorny goods, bringing their silky fragrance into every room of the house. I didn't care that the blossoms lasted only a day or two. I'd throw the old ones out, gather new ones, and make the season linger as long as I could. There were ten days or maybe two weeks of delicious rose blooms.

Today, I live thirty minutes and a lifetime away from Lyndeborough. I find myself in another sweet cottage, this time on my own. This spring, my yard was filled with lavender wisteria, scarlet and white peonies, ice blue Siberian iris. In this last week of June, I was surprised by four curving strands of wild roses within sniffing distance of my screen porch. For the past few days, I've gathered burgeoning rose blooms and filled small vases: one for the kitchen, one for the dining room, one for my bedroom.

I notice now when the petals curl up and start their hasty decay, their fragrance deepens with a final intense push. I pick the rumpled petals off all the surfaces they touch: tabletops and dressers and floors. I hate to throw them away. Instead, I collect them in handfuls and toss them out the back door like wedding rice. They remain tissue soft and stained with cotton candy colors when they hit my stone patio. Sometimes I wait and watch a breeze take them on a bouncy trip across the lawn. Most times, it's enough to send them gently into the summer air and walk away.

Hello, my American idol

Author Richard Russo made me believe I had worthy stories to tell. His novels set in small, rusted-out towns are loosely based on his hometown of Gloversville, N.Y., a Thruway stop about 50 miles west of Albany. His settings are the kinds of places that outsiders think are saturated with unkempt children, drug dealers, and middle-aged people with unattained dreams. 

Russo knows differently. He has an innate understanding of his characters and their yearning to be seen. He knows that the small-town lives of teachers, police officers, and diner owners are as complicated, rich, and dramatic as anyone's. He champions these societal underdogs who are routinely overlooked by the urban-suburban majority. Actually, he seems to love them. 

Russo's work never fails to resonate with everything I know about my tiny hometown in New York's North Country and the people I grew up with. He realizes that a mere hundred miles north of Manhattan, a different world starts to emerge. His perspective on upstate characters has always been empowering to me; it's the world I know best too. Growing up in New York State, I knew it looked more like the Rust Belt than Central Park. Russo's New York State (and mine) stretches from Buffalo to the Thousand Islands and is defined by the Erie Canal, Adirondack Park, Watkins Glen, Syracuse Orange basketball, and all of Lake Ontario. It pivots on home-baked mac-and-cheese, dairy farms on rolling hills, middle-class union jobs that aren't ever coming back, and a fair amount of alcoholism.

Like Russo's characters, I grew up feeling somewhat marginalized by a city skyline I couldn't even see. New York City loomed over the state like a Goliath, dampening the identity of the rest of us, the uncounted. The thing was, I loved everything I could see: the part-time fishing guides/snowplow drivers, the plumbers and carpenters who shot game for their meals, the blinding lake-effect snows, the taskmaster school teachers, the endless stream of soldiers at Fort Drum. I even loved the scary two-lane, arched suspension bridge in Alexandria Bay that swayed in the wind on our occasional trips to Canada. 

When I heard Russo would be in Concord, N.H., giving a book talk to promote his latest novel, Everybody's Fool, I jumped at the chance to see him in person. I wanted to meet the man who nearly singlehandedly made me see my small-town life as filled with dramatic possibilities. Russo's work influenced me in the same way that seeing Dr. Zhivago on the big screen changed my life at nine, when I realized that poets and revolutionaries and passionate lovers could thrive in the iciest, least habitable of places. Like the place I called home.

The Empire Falls or North Baths of Russo-land were where I lived too, with people who looked an awful lot like Sully or Miles Roby or Miss Beryl. Their smarts were hard earned, not studied. These characters did not angle to get their children into the best colleges, much less the best preschools. They fixed their own furniture, canned vegetables, and repaired clothes. They bought a lot of items at Wal-Mart. They sometimes struggled to fit into a modern world of instant texts and broken things that were never made to last. They were frequently angry and bewildered while doing their damn best to survive.

These are my characters too, and Russo's writing made me love them more. Which is why when it was my turn in the book line to say hello to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, I decided to share with him how much his work had meant to my writing life. Turns out, he'd never heard of my small hometown outside of Watertown. In fact, he quickly admitted that he didn't know anything about the Watertown area at all. 

"It doesn't matter," I said a little shocked, thinking naively that he would be as intimately aware of my main characters as I was of his. "My people are your people." 

As he signed my books and brought our short encounter to a close, I hesitated. I'd come to tell him something more. So I blurted it out, probably inarticulately, saying something like: "You made me believe that I had stories to tell about the people I knew. Thank you so much for that."

"That is high praise," he replied. A generous, gregarious man, he probably pulls those chestnuts out for every well-meaning, would-be novelist who is desperate to tell him a story that makes him smile. Still, I'd said what I'd come to say. It felt good.

So Russo may not have known exactly where my inciting incidents take place. But I know, now, that is of little importance. The communion of place is not tied to a physical location. His plain truths and wrenchingly poignant story lines are the same ones that feed my imagination. I've always recognized myself in his characters. And I'm indebted to him for helping me find mine.

Lost and found in Bohemia

Prague is a good place for heartache. It drips with gray skies and horizontal mouth lines that refuse to tip into grins. Its windy, 50-degree days chill bones in early spring. People walk faster to stay warm, click-clacking on cobblestones that, when wet, send bodies off-kilter, sliding.

My daughter and I did not fall.

She, nursing a freshly minted romantic wound, spent time in the Czech Republic trying to re-imagine the life before her. It was as unintelligible for her as the consonant-heavy Czech language was for me. We both gave up, gave in, and kept walking.

On Easter weekend we strolled by mounds of brightly painted eggs in the colors of passion. We couldn’t turn away from the intricate designs in deep, natural hues: apricot orange, dusky turquoise, bloody purple. We walked until our calves hurt, up hills near Prague Castle, downhill to Hemingway’s cocktail bar, through Old Town Square to watch the apostles dance in the astronomical clock.

The Czech folk stories, the ones they tell at touristy spots, are surprisingly dismal to buoyant American ears. On the Charles Bridge, I’d been eager to touch the statue of Saint John of Nepomuk for the good luck it bestows, only to discover later that his statue marks the place where he was thrown off the bridge and drowned. Dozens of images showcase an unsmiling Franz Kafka, the Prague literary son, whose sullen expression is as haunting as it is mesmerizing.

Despite the drab weather and feeling of stoic despair, there is exquisite, medieval beauty everywhere. There are towers and turrets, steeples and domes, tilted cemetery stones in the Jewish quarter, fortressed walls at Karlstejn castle outside the city, and statues. I’ve never seen so many life-size statues in one area: in squares, on bridges, at the top of buildings. People preserved in stone.

Yet sweetened colors persist throughout Prague like a muted rainbow. Building exteriors are saturated in pistachio, pea, grapefruit and salmon, and often embellished with one-off, ornate balconies, on this floor or that. Scaled to our human frames, we could touch beauty on any Prague street. We’d turn a corner, expecting the neighborhood to change into a more common city scene. Instead, another fairy-tale street would unspool with seemingly infinite charm, luring us to just keep walking.

My daughter was enveloped, comforted, swollen by Prague. The landscape seeped into her pores, clogging them with understanding. She floated her heartache long enough to sing “Let It Go” a cappella at a karaoke bar, an Irish pub filled with ex-pats. We fit in this room of misfits. I sang back to her “You Can’t Hurry Love.” There may have been tears.

Prague didn’t mind. It likes tears. It seems to have known them for centuries. Expecting nothing less, hoping for nothing more.

We can’t wait to return.