Two years after my father died, we made maple syrup once more. We did it to prove, as my mother said then, that we could do it without him. When the season ended, we pulled down the buckets and rolled up the tubing and stored it all inside the sugarhouse to accumulate dust and mouse nests while we finished middle school, went through high school and college, and began our lives as adults. Soon after that night ice-fishing under a full moon, I found the sugaring map my mother last revised when I was fourteen years old. Then I walked out to the sugarhouse and rolled back the door and started stringing tubing down the hills on both sides of the valley. Sap runs mostly in March. As that month approached, my sisters came up every weekend. Mandy drove from Boston. Emily and Bob drove from Baltimore—eight hours north on a Friday night and eight hours south on a Sunday. The sap was running and we were boiling the weekend of my thirtieth birthday.

Bob and Emily had bought a house in Baltimore, and now they were engaged. They wanted their wedding at the farm. Every summer every field in that valley starts growing into woods. Saplings sprout among the grass, and the trees that crowd the edges of the fields jostle and push toward the center. Beating back all that growth is constant work, and the forest was getting the better of the property at that time. Even the lawn around the house seemed smaller. In the spring, my mother and I spent several months cutting brush and felling trees. Once Bernie drove by because I hadn’t been showing up at his garage. There were piles of brush almost everywhere he looked, butt ends all pointing in the same direction because we had hired someone with a wood chipper to come the next day. “All this work for your little sister’s wedding?” he asked. He shook his head. “You guys must really love each other.”

They were married in July by our father’s brother Sam, standing on the bridge our father had built. The guests sat in the field, and I walked Emily down the aisle from the barn.

At the end of that summer, Suzanne and I walked through the woods with Hercules. We followed an abandoned road that once ran from Boston to Albany, past foundations of forgotten farmhouses. Stone walls flanked the road, and beyond them fields that had long since succumbed to forest. The old mountain road emerged from the woods and turned to grass in the sun for about thirty yards before it disappeared underwater, like the paved road on the other side of the lake. We had a picnic in a meadow there—the last of a hay field that had been growing over since they dammed up the river and flooded the village—perhaps two hundred feet across open water from where Bernie and I had drilled holes in the ice. Hercules watched our sandwiches move back and forth to our mouths. He had this way of leaning against me like he was about to tip over and slide down.

Before walking back, we set the camera on a timer and took a picture of ourselves.

When I left New York, I only meant to be gone one summer—four months—and I left almost everything I owned behind. I had built floor-to-ceiling shelves for all my books, and they were still there in my apartment, along with my furniture. When I decided to stay at the farm for the winter, I extended my subtenant’s lease. And now, as my second summer came to an end, I had to decide whether to return. I wouldn’t make progress on the book if I started working in restaurants again. But if I didn’t go back now, would I ever? Should I just drive down and empty my apartment? Then I would leave behind a particular dream of success—a magazine-spread kind of lifestyle dream that involved lunches with agents and editors and a larger apartment with dramatic views through walls of windows.

On the Monday at the end of Labor Day weekend, after I had gone to bed, the rotary phone near the front door rang. It was my subtenant. Our building had burned down. No, maybe it hadn’t burned down. They wouldn’t let him near it, but he could still see a lot of smoke from where he stood at a payphone. He was carrying his cat. I waited on the porch for him to call me back, listening to peepers around the field and bullfrogs in the pond and an owl in a tree across the valley. Almost two hours later the phone rang again. The fire was out. The building still stood. But it had taken on so much water that it was now structurally unsound. A firefighter told him absolutely no one would be allowed inside. A police sergeant said they might let occupants retrieve belongings in the morning. I decided to drive down that night.

In addition to gas, Bernie sold used cars. He had sold me an old pickup truck that he gleefully called “white wreck.” Someone had riveted sheet metal over the rust holes in the body, and he loved pointing at these patches. “Airplane alloy,” he would grin, “for speed. It makes white wreck more aerodynamic.” At a little after six the next morning, I turned off of 10th Avenue in Manhattan, passed under the elevated train tracks, and parked my white truck across the street from my building.

All the windows were broken. The entire frame of the front door had been yanked out and propped against the wall. A pile of rubble at least three feet high spilled out the hole that had held it. Standing on the rubble was a cop. He asked for identification that showed I lived at that address. I gave him a driver’s license that didn’t show I lived at that address. He shrugged and let me pass.

The stairs were still wet. Soot coated the walls. There were ax marks on every apartment and holes where the locks had been. I reached my landing. I looked to my left. No door on that apartment. No floor, no ceiling, no walls. I could see sky through the charred beams. To the right, my door still swung on its hinges. I pushed it open. The floor was still there. And so was the linoleum and the refrigerator and a poster hanging beside it. There was a table my mother had bought me. There were my books undamaged on the wall.

By ten o’clock, I was driving out of New York with all my possessions in the back of my truck. Suzanne had come to help me. It has been decided for you, I told myself. Commit to a second year at the farm. Commit to your writing. Instead of fantasizing about success, you will measure yourself only against what you actually accomplish. The truck had a bench seat, and Suzanne was sitting next to me. I drove with one arm around her. Now, I thought, now you have nothing but the book.

I was learning to navigate my creative process. The bad days distressed me still, and the good days never quite made up for them, but most days held less drama. I had more stamina for failure. I had faith—a still fragile faith—that every problem had a solution, even if it took days or weeks or months. Writing felt more like a job now and less like a psychiatric crisis. The goals I set for myself were much more specific. A shape had started to emerge for the story, and I was proud of it. It felt like the book I meant to write.

More and more of the scenes in my heap of yellow papers involved one person, a woman. She once imagined a pure and perfect future for herself but is now leading an ordinary, middle-class life. A lawyer who wishes she never became a lawyer, everything she values about herself disappears at work. Yet she can’t describe exactly what she has lost. There has to be some purity somewhere, she believes. There has to be something left that she recognizes about herself. And for her purity becomes saying no.

Convinced that every decision she has made is too much of a compromise, Elissa stops bending or yielding for anyone. At work, she does exactly what she thinks is right. She disdains office politics, and her career suffers a series of disastrous setbacks. At home, she pursues her ideal of love with the same fierce, scorched-earth integrity. Desiring something she has never seen and believing she will recognize it when she does, she poses questions that no one can answer. She is a seeker, but she doesn’t seek long enough or deeply enough to see the value of what lies at her feet.

There was a lot more work—years of work left to do on the book. I hadn’t written it yet. I had only found it. But what I had found was a book about finding fulfillment by changing our sense of who we are and who we meant to be.

Suzanne was applying to social work programs. She lived with her sister Carol in Manhattan and they decided to move back to Boston, where their parents had an empty apartment on the first floor of their two family. I drove the truck down to help them. They reserved a U-Haul trailer, but when we went to pick it up all the enclosed trailers had been rented and we ended up with an open trailer about the size of a medieval oxcart. Their belongings almost didn’t fit. We had lamp stands and chair legs sticking out in all directions. A toilet plunger flew out on the highway. It started to rain, and we stopped and bought sheets of clear plastic, which immediately ripped to shreds in the wind. When we pulled into her parent’s driveway, we looked like refugees. “At least it’s dark,” her mother said. “And the neighbors can’t see this.” I helped them unpack and drove back to the farm the next day.

Back at the farm, sitting in that chair alone in my room, I started asking myself, Why does it have to be a choice? Why is it one thing instead of the other? To be so absolute seemed so adolescent. And on New Year’s Eve, as Suzanne and I lay in my bed listening to midnight arrive on the radio, we started talking about getting married. We had been together for three years. She wasn’t sure we had known each other long enough.

We sugared again that second winter. The first year, we did it almost exactly as I remembered my father doing it. The tank he had used to store all the sap was a file cabinet with the doors pulled off and lined with black plastic. We used that. By the second year, I started revising his system. Nothing was ever straight and tight when he sugared, and I was too much like my mother and her family to stand that, but we all tried to keep his warm, casual spirit—what mattered most was that we were doing all this together. Bob and Emily still made the trip every weekend from Baltimore. Because I organized most of the work, my sisters called me the “sugar czar,” but it was our decision together to revive this tradition. It made us feel like family in a way we hadn’t since before he died.

In June I packed my truck, opened the door so Hercules could jump in, and moved to Boston myself. Suzanne’s mother would never have forgiven us if we lived together before our wedding. Emily and Bob moved there at the same time so the three of us rented an apartment. They agreed to a place just a few blocks away from Suzanne.