If This Road

A quiet walk through what is shifting,

and what we might leave behind

For whoever is still doing the thing in front of them

when the argument is over.

The people who did the fixing

were the people who kept doing the thing in front of them

when everyone else had got distracted.

— my grandmother, who I did not listen to until I was forty-five

I just wanted to be sure of you.

— A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

A note before the book begins

This is a walk. Forty short pieces. No chapters. No parts. No sections.

If you read one piece a night, you will finish in about a month. If you read it all in an afternoon, it will take you an afternoon. Either is fine.

The voice you are about to read is not mine. The narrator of this book is an invented woman, somewhere in middle age, walking through the things the book describes. I chose her voice — not my own — because the book is about loneliness, fading communities, and what is thinning in the lives of ordinary people. A man who has spent twenty-five years in technology was the wrong voice to carry that walk. She was the right one.

The narrator is invented. The people she describes — the shopkeeper, the grandmother, the sister, the niece, the man at the bus stop, the woman running the school in the barn, the man fixing toasters — are also invented. They are there to carry the walk in human shape. What the walk describes is not invented. Only its faces.

At the end, you will have walked through something heavy. You will also, I hope, have found something small and specific worth doing on the other side.

If that is the kind of walk you want, keep reading.