It was just too ridiculous at that point, to do anything else!Īnd from there, I picked myself up, and brushed myself off, and said, okay, there’s only one way to go from here. Just sat on the side of the road as the deer bounded, uninjured and carefree, out of sight, and laughed. (And no, I didn’t come to that realization that day-there were a few days of wallowing in pity first, particularly the day after the fire, when I hit a deer and smashed up my car, which I was practically living in!) I had lost almost everything before that point, and as I poked through the wet ashes and soot the next day, I realized that I had now been stripped all the way to the bone. And finally there was the fire-it seemed my darkest night wasn’t quite finished with me after all. The youngest of my five daughters had left home that same year, and while that’s not a tragedy at all, it felt like one to me.

My mother died that year, after a 14 month battle with pancreatic cancer. This was the culmination of my Dark Night of the soul, which had seemed to hit me all at once in 2006-2007. It was 99% gutted, and I lost my two dogs, Sally, an 11-year-old great Dane, and Wrinkles, my 14-year-old, blind bulldog. Just a little over a year later, the house, which I had named, SERENITY, burned. I moved in here after my divorce in 2006. My house is a big, century old farmhouse.

The nearest neighboring place is a 700 acre dairy farm. I look out my window to see rolling, green, thickly forested hills, wildflower laden meadows and wide open blue, blue skies. The nearest “big” cities are Syracuse and Binghamton and they are an hour away, in different directions, and not really all that big by most standards, though they both seem humongous to me. All of these are at least in the same rural county in the southern hills of New York State Cortland County. I live in the teeny, tiny town of Taylor, NY, (Alliteration Alert!) though my mailing address is Cincinnatus, my telephone exchange is Truxton and I pay taxes and vote in Cuyler.

The Gingerbread Man by Maggie Shayne