But one evening in March, I sent Nick an email. My hands were trembling as I typed. It was subject lined “things you may or may not remember,” and this is what it said:

“My friend Charlotte is getting married in New Orleans on May 13, and I will be going. May 13 also happens to be the day I met you, six years ago on Royal Street with a lump on my head the size of a lime. (Life is WEIRD, right?) I’d like to see you. Is that possible?”

I hadn’t seen Nick since he came to New York City in the spring of 2007. The morning he left, we woke early and watched an episode of “The Wire,” and then he walked me to the subway in my Brooklyn neighborhood. As I descended the steps he remained at the top, peering down and smiling. He did this whenever we parted, a habit that unnerved and delighted me at once. I’d wave him away while I stood in the security line at the airport – you can go now, I’m OK – but he would just stand there. Not going anywhere, he seemed to be saying, although that was clearly a lie. A few weeks after the New York trip, he called one Friday night and ended our relationship.

“You deserve someone who can be there for you,” he said.

I responded in the most articulate way I could muster under the circumstances. “Oh, fuck off.”

—–

The story of how I met Nick is one I have told many times. I have told it at parties, and in essays (even in this publication), and so I might as well tell you now.

It begins six years ago, when I was in New Orleans for a different wedding. I was walking along a quiet stretch of the French Quarter with two friends around 1 a.m. when a kid yanked my purse and, when I didn’t let go, clocked me above the left eyebrow with a pistol. Nick was the detective on the case.

“That’s so romantic,” people sometimes say, although I can assure you it was not. It was violent and horrible, and flirting was the furthest thing from both our minds that night as I rattled off a description of the kid while holding an ice pack to the side of my head. (OK, it was not the furthest thing from my mind. I did look for a wedding ring. He had one.)

It never occurred to me that anything would come of that case. This was a year after Katrina. Bodies were still being found in abandoned attics. But eight months later, I received a photo lineup in the mail, and I was surprised to discover that even after so much time had passed, I knew exactly who the kid was, knew it in my bones. Four months after that I was flown to New Orleans to testify at a pre-motion trial. I mean, life is WEIRD, right?

When I came back to New York, I was seized by a feeling that I should send a present to the recently separated detective who sat with me after the trial while I tried to shake off a grief I could not articulate. (I sent him the first season of “The Wire.”) That gift sparked a correspondence that lasted for six months. A few weeks after the kid pleaded guilty and got 15 years, I returned to New Orleans to see Nick.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” I told him once, sitting on his puffy leather couch in the nondescript one-bedroom where he’d moved after the split from his wife. “That kid gets a prison sentence, and we get each other.”

“That’s cute,” he said, threading his fingers through my hair.

“That I care about that kid?”

“That you think life is fair.”

Around the time we began corresponding, Nick moved to the homicide department. It was grueling, thankless work. Little romance in that, either, though I romanticized it anyway, besotted as I was by true crime and mafioso grandeur and David Simon. At the time, I wrote a blog about pop culture for a sex site. Of course I wanted to hear about guns and blood spatter. Nick, meanwhile, was happy to hear about pop culture and sex. We were the perfect escapes for each other, and we had both been searching for open hatches.

When people write about falling in love, I tend to cringe for them, because love requires a delusion that is deeply personal and impossible to explain to the world. So I’ll just say that I have doubted every relationship I’ve ever had, until that one. I was absolutely certain that Nick and I were meant to be together, and I was right. I just failed to specify how long.

When Nick broke up with me, I was devastated. Stunned. Nothing he said that night made sense to me, because it ran so contrary to the 500 conversations we’d had about how the other one was stitched into our DNA.

“The way I felt about you changed,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

If a duck calls you up one night, and tells you he’s an elephant, what do you say? How do you respond?

I responded the best way I knew how. “Oh, fuck off.”

In the five years that have elapsed since that conversation, we have spoken only a handful of times. We have tried to be friends – he missed me, I knew that – but then our conversations would lead me down the same sorrowful path, crying in my Stella Artois, and I’d grow incensed when he didn’t return an email or call me back.

I dated other men. Kind men, whom I quite liked. But in that eye-rolling way that is native to sensitive types, and writers, and alcoholics, and hoarders of memory and other people’s affection – of which I am batting a thousand – I held on to Nick, to the idea of Nick, to the hope represented by Nick through five years of recession woes, drinking problems and personal catastrophe. I did crazy things, which I can only admit now because I don’t do them anymore: I slept in his police shirt. I got insanely drunk one Sunday afternoon and called a dozen friends, begging them to convince me not to call him. Oh, the drama. Oh, the sturm und drang. Self-pity that could rattle the cupboards.

While I bled openly in public, he remained behind a fortress of stoicism. He is as much a cop as I am a drama queen. I don’t mean to say he is callous, because Nick is a tender person. His favorite movie is “Casablanca.” I have found this to be true of other cops, who manage to wall off some soft patch of sentiment behind the barbed wire fence. One night we were at the bar when I saw him talking with great passion to another detective. I figured they were discussing a case. Turns out, they were talking about their love for “The Notebook.”

But the few conversations Nick and I did have were a tangle of “do not cross” tape. I asked him things like, “How are you?”

He said things like, “Great.”

I said things like, “Great?” with a bit of eager anticipation, hoping he might sketch out a more detailed portrait.

Instead, he would say, “Yup.”

There was one thing Nick told me during the breakup that did make sense, and which I held on to with both fists. He said, “I met you at the wrong time.”

I’d be walking along the Hudson River one Saturday afternoon and those words would float up into my head. Well, what would be the right time? And when I moved from New York back to Dallas, a 90-minute flight between us, those words returned. Could the right time be now?

I scoured the landscape for signs that we were supposed to be together, or that he still thought about me. A New Orleans fleur-de-lys insignia at the restaurant where I was dining: What could that mean? A book about an NOPD murder crossing my desk: Why that, why now?

It was ridiculous, it was pathetic – let’s all agree as a group – but I could not stop clinging to the notion that the universe would bend itself so that our lives would entwine once more.

And then came Charlotte’s wedding.

I sent Nick an email late at night, when I suspected he’d still be at his desk, and by the time I woke the next morning, he had sent his response. Yes, he’d be happy to see me again. Lunch, drinks, whatever. It was exactly the answer I anticipated, which brought tremendous relief. But what came next blindsided me.

“If she’s free, can I invite my wife?”

So much can happen in five years. When I took those long walks along the Hudson, I used to wonder if Nick had remarried. I made up so many stories about him, and that was certainly one of them. What she might look like. Who she might be. I also wondered if he’d gotten back together with his first wife, the on-again, off-again high school sweetheart he married at the age of 22, three years after they had a baby together. Divorces take a year in New Orleans, and our relationship tracked exactly with that time period. He broke up with me the same week his divorce was final.

Even now I don’t know if the email he sent refers to his first wife, or his second wife, or his third wife or his 40th, because I could not muster the nerve to ask. The fact that I find it easier to write an essay on this subject is one of a thousand strange quirks that makes me who I am. The fact that he will not tell me any of that stuff until I ask directly is one of his.

In the days that followed his email, though, something shifted inside me. It calved like a glacier. It burst like the prick of a safety pin held up to the swirly rainbow curve of the world’s largest bubble. I would have told you this was impossible. I swear to God I thought I would spend the rest of my days clinging to that stupid blue police shirt, a modern-day Miss Havisham, but now I felt different about him, much as he had once felt different about me. I did not hate him. In fact, I adored him. But I did not want to see him again. The longing was gone.

I emailed Nick a week later. The subject line read, “on second thought.” I told him I thought it was a bad idea that we see each other. I told him I had been mistaken.

I had been mistaken about so many things. I’m not just talking about Nick now. I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: That it is absolutely going to be this way, or it is absolutely going to be that way. It is fated. It is doomed. It is destined. It is done. I have believed so many lies about myself, for so many years, and closed the lid to lie down inside those coffins. I thought I could never stop drinking, but I did. And I thought I could never be happy in the city where I grew up, but I am. And I thought I would go to my grave crying for the cop in New Orleans who didn’t love me back, but I don’t feel that way anymore. In fact, I feel kind of grateful. I’d be a horrible cop’s wife. Are you kidding me?

We don’t know how our stories end, and the greatest plot twists are the ones we never saw coming. There is a line that I love. “God is a first-rate novelist.” It’s from Richard Price’s introduction to David Simon’s book, “Homicide.”

So I went to New Orleans, six years to the day after I’d been pistol-whipped, but that date has a new significance to me. Charlotte’s wedding was so lovely. It was full of personality, and color, and the peculiar language shared by two people as their lives interweave. After the ceremony, we paraded through the French Quarter behind a brass band in a Second Line procession. As we passed crowds watching us on Chartres, I kept wondering if I might catch a glimpse of Nick. I did not. But somebody did run into Leonardo DiCaprio. (Life is WEIRD, you guys.)

The next afternoon I took one last stroll through the Quarter before heading out of town. I snapped a picture of the sign on Royal Street, the same street where I had been mugged, the street where I first told Nick I was in love with him. That street is a knot of complicated meaning to me.

I couldn’t help laughing at the big ONE WAY sign hanging right below it. I know it doesn’t mean anything. But I took it as a message from the universe that it was time to move on.

I notice in your conversation with the veteran from Vietnam [from the Studs Terkel book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith"] he tells you right at the beginning that your interview gave him stuff he would think about for a long time. And it got me wondering about what that interview was like. How does Studs Terkel sit down with someone and get them spilling their inner selves about life and death? What’s the secret?

Well, it’s not a secret. I think it’s listening. I’ve changed his name, but I know his mother very well, she’s been in several books and I’ve changed her name several times. He is a sweet little boy who went to Vietnam and came back crazy, you know. He brought a psychiatrist for part [of the interview]. And he says, you’re sitting as close to me as anyone I’ve ever allowed to sit since I returned.

It’s opening up, listening to people talk — even to silence. For example, African-Americans very often — oh you’ll find this — chuckle, laugh at a certain moment in recording humiliation. Now why would that be? I have a friend, Big Bill Broonzy the great blues singer. And Big Bill and many elderly black men of a certain age were jacks of all trades. They were the grandsons of slaves and they could be masons and carpenters and electricians. Big Bill was a welder, and a very good one. And he taught this young white kid how to weld. The day the kid learned how to weld correctly is when they fired Bill. And he chuckles. Now why did he chuckle? It’s a safety valve.

There’s a blues lyric: Laugh and it keeps them crying. Or today you might say, Laugh and it keeps them raging. I once asked Martin Luther King about this — this matter of laughter in moments of adversity. He said, “We need that. Without that we’d be lost.” And so listening, how come the laugh? Or listening to a silence sometimes. Mostly that person has to believe you’re interested in his or her life. It amounts to that really.

See, we live — and you know this probably better than anyone — in a world where newspapers, televisions and radio have conversations with celebrities and politicians and “important” people. And yet all your life you’ve gone back to — and I’ll use the word even though I don’t like it very much — “ordinary” people, to give their stories some value. Do you suppose people get it now? The type of stories, the type of oral history you’re trying to put in the books — does have that value?

I hope so. Remember, since 9/11 we’ve heard talk about the ordinary heroes and heroines, firefighters, paramedics and ordinary people coming through. My north star, my guide, is a poem by Bertolt Brecht. I’ll offer brief passages from it. We think of Brecht and “Threepenny Opera” — well, he was a poet.

In this poem he says, “Who built the seven gates of Thebes? Who lugged those hunks of rock one place to the other?” When we get this in school — Caesar conquered Gaul, you know — was there not even a cook in the army? And when the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch? I was told in school, Sir Francis Drake conquered the Spanish Armada in 1588. And I thought, he did it by himself? So Brecht says, “When the Armada sank, we read that King Philip of Spain wept. Were there no other tears?” Is the last line of the poem.

And so, to me, history’s about those who shed those other tears, those who made the wheels go round. Those who don’t make a footnote in the history books, who’ve been there from year one. And who are never remembered. And so, high time. What I do is old stuff. Oral history was here long before the fountain pen, long before the quill. Before Gutenberg. The storytellers. When Alex Haley wrote “Roots,” first thing he did is go back to the country of his forebears, Gambia, to meet the griot, who were storytellers. So it’s an old, old tradition. I simply have an additional mechanical thing called a tape recorder. Which I goof up an awful lot, by the way.

People, by the way, can be natural storytellers. Some have more insight than others. But there’s always somebody in the community that represents the others.

In doing “Working,” for example, I describe the life of a waitress, the day in the life of a waitress. A middle-aged woman. Why is she a waitress? She gets varicose veins, that’s an occupational illness of waitresses. How many aspirin does she take? What about her daughter or son or sick husband, or the one who left cause they gotta work on tips and cash?

One day I’m stopped at Michigan Boulevard Bridge by a guy who’d read the book. He pins me against the bridge and he says, “You know what? Ever since reading about that [waitress in the book], I’m not gonna talk the way I ever did before to a waitress.” I’m thinking, well, that’s pretty good. That means I’ve touched somebody, and that guy’s 40 years younger than I am. So after I check out, he’s still around.

In other words, I’ve touched him, so a bit of me is in him. And in that sense, there’s immortality.  I do believe in a crazy form of immortality. So, I’m an atheist, yes. At the same time, I’m covering a few bets here and there.

My parents had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends, but the night they were supposed to go out, my mother stood my father up. She’d gone to Long Island that day with a friend to pick strawberries, and by the time she came home, the last thing she felt like doing was going on a blind date with some older businessman from Atlanta.

My mother was funny and quick-witted, and she was almost always up for an adventure. She was also uncommonly pretty, with green eyes, blond hair, a symmetrical face and an easy smile. When she went to sleep that night in June of 1975 in her little one-bedroom apartment on 28th Street, she had no idea that her life was about to change.

My father, at 55 years old, was just entering his prime. In spite of (or perhaps because of) two divorces and three grown children, he was happier than he’d ever been.

He flew first-class wherever he went. He stayed at the Watergate Hotel when he was in D.C. and the Plaza when he was in New York. He winked at stewardesses and drank tumblers of scotch on the rocks. He wore hats and suits and left big tips at fancy restaurants.

He wasn’t used to being stood up, so the next morning he rang my mother’s buzzer at 9 a.m. “Who dares call on anyone before noon on a Sunday in New York?” my mother later wrote about that first encounter in a letter to my father, detailing their courtship. “It had to be you, as they say, and I opened the door with wet hair asking if you wanted a Bloody Mary, which you did, thank God.”

I always try to imagine this moment between them. My mother in the doorway with her wet hair, my father on the threshold in his blue leisure suit, the moment of them not knowing each other and then knowing each other eclipsed in one short breath.

They went to dinner and later flew to my father’s place in Atlanta, making daiquiris with the strawberries my mother had picked on Long Island the day before. They swam in the pool and smoked Camels and talked into the night, their legs dangling into the water, lit from below by the pool light.

They were married three months later on Cape Cod. My father whisked my mother away from New York and set her up in a big house in a nice neighborhood in Atlanta. He paid off all her debts, bought her a cream-colored convertible and opened a credit card in her name in every department store. I was born two years after that.

For the next decade — before my father unexpectedly went bankrupt following the stock market crash of 1987, and before my parents were both diagnosed with cancer within months of each other — we lived a blissful and privileged existence. My mother had quickly charmed her way into Atlanta’s upper social echelon, and it wasn’t uncommon for our dining room table to be inhabited by local political figures and foreign dignitaries.

I remained her only child, but motherhood only seemed to enhance my mother’s glamour and sophistication. It added a dimension to her personality and worldview that had, perhaps, been the only thing missing all along. But I wonder what the other carpool moms thought of my mother when she zoomed into the after-school pickup line in her Alfa Romeo, with her blond hair pulled back in a Chanel scarf.

I was 18 when she died of cancer, and I had become the very opposite of my graceful, glowing mother. My teenage years had been rocked by a roller coaster of parental illness, hospitals and private despair. In response, I had become an angst-ridden poet. I wore combat boots, dyed my hair crimson and sported a nose ring. My mother had always embraced these tiny, public displays of rebellion, but the moment she was gone I felt foolish.

I’ll never forget walking down the aisle of a church on the day of her funeral with a shaved head and my first, barely dry tattoo concealed under my shoulder, feeling as though I had utterly failed my beautiful mother in every way possible.

Since she died, I have struggled to forge my own identity in her absence. At times, I have wanted nothing more than to emulate everything about who she was — something I know I could never really achieve. While I may be outgoing and capable of hosting a memorable dinner party, I have inherited my father’s looks and practicalities, not to mention having retained a deep-seated and dark sense of self-reflection following so much loss.

For many years, I was unsure if I wanted children at all. When I finally decided that I did (within days of meeting my husband), I knew that I wanted to be a younger mother than mine was. My daughter was born a few weeks after my 31st birthday — almost a decade before my mother herself bore me — and now, as I approach my 34th birthday, I am due with my second.

Every inch of motherhood, for me, has been stitched with the essence of her. Throughout my 20s, I made valiant and sometimes senseless attempts to bring my mother into my life again. I lived in the places where she once lived. I learned how to cook and throw dinner parties. And more often, I simply took myself to the very brink of life in hopes that if I tottered just enough, she might appear to pull me back from the edge.

But it was truly in motherhood that I found her again, even though our experiences couldn’t be more different. My husband and I live in a tiny rental house in Los Angeles and both work as writers, struggling to pay our child’s preschool dues. I can often be found at the playground, even if I am one of the few mothers actually wearing mascara and earrings. As I write this, my body is swollen with another child, something she never ventured to do.

Despite those differences, motherhood has brought her back into my life, and it has given me an opportunity to embrace my own path as a woman and mother. I hear her in my voice when I comfort my daughter by crawling into bed with her at 3 a.m. when she has woken from a nightmare, when I stop to marvel at a snail traveling through the grass, and especially during dinner parties when I catch myself offering my 3-year-old bits of brie or Marcona almonds.

In adulthood, it has occurred to me that all of us are living reactions to our parents. Whether they loved us or not, whether they were present or absent, whether they kept us safe or recklessly abandoned us to harm’s way, we move forward into life walking paths they etched out decades earlier. It also often occurs to me how grateful I am to the woman who loved me fiercely enough to remain true to who she was, even in the complicated throes of motherhood.

Over the next five years, I got that seat. I spent Hanukkahs, Passovers, even Purims in Judy’s plant- and music-filled home in Amherst, Mass., my picture hanging on her fridge alongside her children and grandchildren. To her, I was a done deal. I was family. To David, not so much.

After thousands of dollars spent on couples therapy, David still couldn’t make up his mind about me. He kept saying he “wanted to want to marry me.”

“What did I do wrong?” Judy asked me one day, in a stolen, private moment, not understanding why David was unable to commit to me.

I wished I understood. I wanted to blame his ambivalence on something specific. Yet the truth was he didn’t love me enough to make me his wife, and her love wasn’t enough to change his mind or heart.

When David and I broke up, Judy sent me a handwritten note in the mail telling me she was so very sorry and that she wished me everything I wanted for myself. And with one last “Love, Judy,” my picture was no longer hanging on her refrigerator. I no longer had a place at her table. I was no longer part of her family.

My mother, who by this time had moved to a house in Connecticut, came to live with me for a week. She yanked David’s nightstand and lamp from the wall and pushed my bed up against the window, so I wouldn’t be reminded of where he used to sleep. We repainted my living room, ordered in sushi, and she held me as I cried. Then my father invited me down to Florida. He took me out to expensive steak dinners and let me sleep late. We spent hours watching “Planet Earth” until I couldn’t think about anything other than stalactites and snow leopards. I was grateful to both of them for being there for me, but it didn’t erase a nagging aloneness I felt deep inside, the pain I still harbored over their divorce, over our broken family. I was 35 and mad at myself for still being hung up on a long gone childhood home. It was time for me to create my own home, start my own family. I just didn’t know how to do it.

All I knew is that I didn’t want to spend another five years with another mixed-message guy, only to get a “Dear John letter” from another almost mother-in-law. But like a crackhead who can’t shake her habit no matter how hard she tries, I was a goner the second I stepped foot into Susan’s kitchen.

Paper turkeys and streamers were strewn everywhere. Her house smelled of chocolate babka and apple cider. I could call this place home, I thought, sitting down, not wanting to get up.

It was only my sixth date with Jason. But it seemed longer since we’d spent four years of high school together and had been Facebook friends for the past year. I knew I shouldn’t get too excited, but the fact that he had invited me home for Thanksgiving and that I was meeting his mom so early on made me feel special, like he was really considering me as someone he could spend his life with. When he invited me back for Hanukkah a few weeks later, and my picture was hanging on the fridge, I knew I was in.

Susan and I spent hours in her kitchen frying latkes, bonding over how we both give too much and have short necks. She even confided in me that she had never seen Jason so happy. This was the real deal.

Jason and I didn’t end up making it past New Year’s.

Instead of a note, Susan picked up the phone. “It’s not you,” she said. “You’re wonderful, perfect, beautiful.” She was a poet, and explained to me that a poem isn’t possible if the writer isn’t open to the words in the ether. “I’m sorry Jason isn’t open to the poem.”

I dropped my head into my hands as soon as we hung up and burst into tears. I couldn’t believe I had let this happen. I had once again mistaken a mother’s love for the love of her son. I clearly had a problem and could not be trusted around mothers.

I should have been happy when Ethan didn’t introduce me to his mother immediately. He told me he wanted me to himself for a while before bringing me home to meet the family. But after six months of dating, I found myself fiending. When would I get to sit at Rena’s table? When would I see myself hanging on her fridge?

Rena, Ethan and I made plans to meet up for breakfast around the corner from me on the Upper West Side. I wore my favorite navy blue sweater and made sure to blow-dry my hair. I wanted to look pretty for her.

As we sat in a booth eating overcooked eggs, Rena told me about the Holocaust museum where she worked. I told her about the eighth grade girls I counseled on Fridays. Ethan made jokes.

Then the subject of our future came up.

Rena looked at me directly, and said,  “I’m waiting to love you.”

I almost choked on my toast.

Judy and Susan flew to mind. There had been no waiting with them. Just full on, “Let’s do this!” Then I thought back to something David had said at the end of our relationship that I never understood. “I feel like we’re more brother-sister than lovers.”

Sitting speechless in this poorly lit diner, something clicked.

David was right. By slipping into daughter role with his mother, I had become one of the kids. And while that felt good, to be part of a cohesive family, to feel like I fit in, I wanted to be a wife, not a daughter-in-law or sister.

Rena somehow knew this, that her love and approval couldn’t influence her son — and that if we had a shot, she should stay out of it.

I wanted to hug her and thank her for doing the thing I couldn’t do all these years: Wait, see and then fall.

Last May, Ethan and I exchanged vows under a brightly colored Chuppah that Rena had spent hours sewing together for us. But it wasn’t her love that got me there. It was Ethan’s.

As I stared into my soon-to-be husband’s warm blue eyes, smiling so wide my cheeks hurt, surrounded by a patchwork of friends and family, I no longer felt like a displaced kid looking for a seat at someone else’s table. I felt like a woman being claimed by a man.

Ethan made me his wife. And now, at almost 40, I am hoping he can make me a mother too. Our fridge is waiting.

Staying on in a summer community is like being in a department store after closing, or the zoo after dark. I wanted the place to empty out. I wanted to turn at the flashing light without waiting for the endless line of cars piling in from Boston. And yet the weekend after Labor Day, when I showed up at the flea market ready to bag the bargains that await the locals, I discovered there was no flea market after Labor Day. In high summer I bitterly complained about the busy, noisy beach where it was impossible to read undisturbed. But when I took a late September swim, it was eerie to find myself alone there. I felt like a ghost, condemned to wander the places where I was happiest.

The lake was quiet now, and we recognized the few year-round sails we saw in the distance. Taking our canoe down the Saco River, where in summer there are flotillas of canoes and beer rafts, we were now the only ones there. Arriving at Crescent Beach in Maine, where the parking lot is usually full of camp buses hugging the shade, we counted only 10 cars. By November, we were the only ones left on the lake, kayaking with hot tea in our thermoses, floating among the feathers left behind by the migrating Canadian geese. It was hard to shake the feeling that there was someplace we were supposed to be.

Without the academic calendar organizing our lives, there was a sense of unreality about where we were and what season we were in. Our life had the logic of dreams: “It was the New Hampshire house, but it wasn’t the New Hampshire house.” Brown leaves fell on the front porch, giving it an abandoned, haunted house feel – an effect heightened by our black cat, who sat on the porch railing watching the chipmunks. The weather further confounded us with a late October snowstorm (the headline in the local paper read “SNOWLIAGE!”). Watching the snow melt and the dirt roads growing muddy, it felt more like spring than autumn.

While new second homes are outfitted with every appliance, in this Cheever-y summerhouse it was considered a virtue to do without — to do without showers, dishwashers and dug wells. The water from the cistern had a bitter taste, and a washcloth left in the sink overnight would mysteriously turn blue. Whether it was the dubious water or the Dr. Bronner’s biodegradable soap, my hair was never entirely clean. Our clothing smelled like wood smoke and the cuffs of our jeans were perpetually muddy. When we went to town we were like Peruvian miners returning to daylight, blinking hard at civilization. The previously magical path to the lake became woodsy and damp and a late day swim now seemed medically ill advised. The milky sunset was moving earlier and earlier, but when we complained about the shortening days and the dark mornings, a year-rounder friend replied briskly: “What difference does it make if you don’t have to get up for work?”

The travails of a year off and the exigencies of an 18th-century summerhouse are a privileged set of problems to explore. But a sabbatical demands a kind of self-directed work that’s very different from an articulated class schedule and a proscribed roster of tutorials and department meetings. It requires a daily discipline, especially in the face of a beautiful New England fall. I careened from feeling stupid for staying indoors while the lakes and mountains beckoned, to feeling irritated that I hadn’t committed to a hard and fast writing schedule. Normally I worked on projects for someone; this year I was simply writing. There was no guarantee that anything I wrote would be produced or published and I was forced to confront the daily uncertainties of the freelancer.

I became obsessed with other writers’ schedules. I read an interview with Haruki Murakami in the New York Times Magazine in which I learned that he lived a “monkishly regimented life.” He ran or swam long distances, went to bed at 9 p.m. and woke up “without an alarm” at 4 a.m. to sit down to five to six hours of “concentrated writing.” It was implied that “concentrated writing” did not include answering emails or reading reviews and I remembered how Jonathan Franzen had famously put glue in his Internet port in order to avoid temptation.

As a professor one is perpetually needed, putting out logistical fires for the students on a daily basis, expected to respond immediately to their angsty, hormonal emails. Now when my BlackBerry blinked, it was only an email advertising a geographically irrelevant college lecture or the arrival of the new Athleta catalog. While we all fantasize about uninterrupted days, in practice there was something about the open calendar that inspired existential dread. Now when I had no students, and my two sons were both away at school, I missed the various human obstacles that used to stand between me and my writing. In the Nick Hornby book “About a Boy,” the wealthy, unemployed protagonist divides his days into 30-minute “units” to keep himself sane. How many times have you heard about the lottery winner whose life falls apart once he gives up his day job?

Writing full-time, my wardrobe was reduced to pajamas, jeans and the same red plaid flannel shirt. I’d put sneakers on to take a walk and then return to the same shearling-lined Merrell clogs. Once I discovered how little clothing I needed when I wasn’t teaching, the siren song of the nearby outlets was stilled.

In late October we moved into a winterized house that we’d planned to rent out, but our young tenants were blind-sided by medical bills, caught without health insurance after a complicated ectopic pregnancy, and moved out unexpectedly. Unsure how soon we’d be able find another renter, we decided to move into the unfurnished house ourselves.

When the snow finally flew, our world was enveloped in silence, compounded by the extra insulation of a new house. The only sounds I heard were the wood furnace kicking in or the occasional flying squirrel in the walls. This sepulchral quality was the aural equivalent of our empty nest, and the newfound quiet made it remarkably easy to concentrate. My husband painted in the heated basement while I worked long hours in the living room by the wood stove. When I looked out the window at a snowcapped Mount Washington, my heart swooned like a teenage girl spotting her crush at a party.

I often remind my playwriting students to ask the Passover question: What makes this day different from all other days? Talking to our children on the phone I struggled to answer that question myself. A writing routine requires, well, routine. When life is uneventful — when you don’t get dressed, go to work or see other people — there are suddenly many hours in the day for writing.

As the pages stacked up, I began to see how this sabbatical thing worked, and the twinges of guilt and embarrassment I’d felt about a year off went away.  Teaching not only takes up the time that might otherwise go to writing, but the short-term ego gratification can supplant the need to write. Posterity can come to seem less important than the student in your office insisting that your class is “awesome.”

I subscribed to a website called I Done This that emailed me at 6 every evening asking me to account for my day. Replying with the list of tasks I’d accomplished opened up the larger question of what counted.  Did grocery shopping count? Laundry? Taking a walk?

I also wanted to use the year to check off a private bucket list that included reading Dickens, learning Spanish and returning to figure skating.  Middle-aged fear had supplanted my pre-pubescent skills so I took lessons at the local ice rink to recoup what I’d lost. Children were now being taught to skate by pushing milk crates around the ice so I skated among the jangling, periodic clatter of the falling stacks. I knew that Murakami or Franzen would never take time away from their writing to learn how to do a Lutz but I also knew that being a student, being bad at something, is the best way to remind yourself how to be a teacher, both because it’s humbling and because it reminds you that teaching involves breaking something down into manageable steps. How do you go from the security of skating on two feet to lifting one foot up and crossing it over the other while moving? Like writing, like everything, it’s harder than it looks.

A sabbatical too is harder than it looks. A sabbatical reminds you that humans are like working dogs. We like tasks; we like to be where we’re supposed to be at a certain time. A sabbatical also makes you confront the fact that you are replaceable. (A tone-deaf junior colleague emailed me early on to tell me what a great job my replacement was doing.) And a sabbatical forces you to articulate your definition of time well spent. If there were nothing standing between you and your writing, what would you write? And what else would you want to do? Is happiness grounded in geography? Is life about checking off bucket lists?

By the time April rolled around we knew that back in Ohio our colleagues were in the home stretch. We became nostalgic for those hooky-playing autumn days when we were floating around in kayaks with the year off stretching ahead of us. A sabbatical wasn’t quite as sweet once everyone had the summer off. Though I’m only halfway through “Bleak House,” I can still point to a respectable stack of pages written. I’m speaking some present-tense Spanish and skating with the 13-year-old divas in the center of the rink. Come August, I will have to repeatedly answer the question “How was your sabbatical?”

This essay is the long answer. The short answer will be: “It was great.”