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fernweh
Lilymoor House and Gardens sat on the cliffs over Odette, Maine, like a haunting.
“Oh, she’sbeautiful,” Harriett whispered as we rounded the twisting drive up to the historic property. She leaned out my Jeep window and took a photo with her disposable camera. “Look at her, Soph!”
“I’mdriving!” I reminded her with a laugh. I’d look in a minute when I wasn’t trying to keep us on the road. My knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel too tightly up the curving drive.
But then, at the roundabout in front of the house, I did take a glance.
After close to five hundred miles, a flat tire, and some dodgy gas station food, we’d finally made it.
The road trip had started as an idea our freshman year at Duke, when I lamented in a study group about a documentary I once saw about a beautiful garden on a cliff. Another girl—a brunette who always wore her hair in pigtails and her cat eyeliner sharp—perked up at the mention of it.
“Wait, the one that used to air on PBS?” she had asked. We hadn’t talked in class, so I didn’t even know her name. “The documentary with the cute old couple who have tended the garden for, like,forty years? They’re in Maine?”
I gasped. “You know Lilymoor?”
“Do I know it? Ilovethat place! I want to write about it one day.”
As it turned out, she’d taped that same documentary on VHS and watched it so many times the tape wore out. She sighed about all its gardens, its regal house, its owners—the Becks. Lilymoor felt fictional. It might as well have been, with the stories people whispered about it. That the gardens were magical, that sometimes you could hear the voice of your truest love. Obviously, it was just the sound of the wind coming up the cliffs—loads of people, from travel guides to paranormal hunters, had debunked it over the years. Still, Lilymoor sounded like a fairy tale, and maybe that was why Harrie loved it so much.
I told myself I just liked the flowers.
After study group, I admitted to her, “I’ve wanted to visit so badly ever since I first saw it on TV. Like, more than normal. It’s like homesickness but . . . away.” I frowned, thinking on it. “Far-sickness, I guess, for somewhere I’ve never been. I can’t explain it. It sounds silly, I know.”
“I don’t think so,” she replied with a thoughtful look. “There’s a word for far-sickness. It’s German—fernweh, I think.”
“Fernweh,” I repeated, chewing on the word. It tasted bittersweet in my mouth.
“We should go,” she said, though it sounded more like achallenge as she looked me dead in the eyes. “We should make a plan.”
“What, really?”
“Really really.”
And that was that.
Her name was Harriett Fisher, and she collected untranslatable words in a little journal, like other people collected bottle caps or baseball cards. She was an English major who wanted to write novels, though she wasn’t yet sure what kind. I was a biology major who, frankly, just wanted to play in the dirt.
We couldn’t be more different, but there is this feeling when you meet someone special. Like finding a lost puzzle piece and clicking it into place—there’s a certainty to it. AYes, you are my person. The person you’re going to grow old beside. The person you want in your commune when the world goes to hell. The person who inherits the solemn duty of deleting your internet history when you die.
Thatperson.
I knew it would be Harrie the moment I met her.
So, for our graduation present to ourselves, we planned a road trip up the East Coast, hitting a few national parks, museums, and a haunted bed-and-breakfast or two, and ending in the place that had brought us together: Lilymoor House and Gardens in Odette, Maine.
Lilymoor sat on the cliffs edge facing the sea, like it had been waiting all this time for us. It was a gentle house the color of bleached driftwood, with rounded architecture and a myriad of wide windows and sparrows clustered in the eaves. It looked otherworldly, some bygone ship captain’s house rightout of a storybook, from its sweeping front porch to its lovely moss-colored front door to the additions cobbled together with dredged bits of half-built ships—portholes and sea-crusted hulls, colorful buoys hanging from the doorway and from the rooftop like memories left out to warm in the sun. One side of the house was sheathed in brown shingles; the other was built up into an A-frame roof. The manor was mismatched, like two warring pairs of socks.
It was perfect.
The house and gardens attracted people from all around the world. Like the Jardins de Quatre-Vents in Quebec, it was privately owned and curated, and like the Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, it offered a kaleidoscope of flowers rarely grown so far north.
The road curled up to the front steps and then looped around a beautiful marbled fountain in a roundabout, where we’d eased to a stop so Harrie could snap another photo, before I parked us in the small parking lot, and we got out.
Admittedly, I was a little slow to unbuckle my seat belt, a little slower to open my Jeep door. This was the last stop on our road trip, but I didn’t want it to end yet.
