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In early October the year before, not long after her mother-in-law died, she asked her husband if he’d used the leaf blower on the trail through the woods behind the house.
“No, why?”
“The whole path? There’s hardly any leaves on it.”
He came to see for himself. The children were running and whooping along beside him, using sticks like swords.
The forest floor was thick with leaves and pine needles. But the trail was neat and tidy. It snaked brown and soft through the forest, like something often used and carefully tended.
“There were leaves before, weren’t there? I can’t remember when we last took the path,” her husband said.
“It’s been awhile. It’s strange. Do you think someone back there cleared it?”
She gestured down the two hundred feet of path in the direction of the house-studded blacktop of a cul-de-sac that began where the trail ended, about ten feet beyond their property line.
Their house had originally been the seat of a three-hundred-acre farm. Subdivided in the 1980s, most of the land was sold by a previous owner to a developer who carved it into a neighborhood of massive midnineties McMansions on enormous lots.
She found it jarring to pass their antique house and acres of rolling pastures, to walk through the graveyard, to take the path throughthe forest of hundred-year-old trees, to be peacefully immersed in a bygone, pristine New England—then burst out into the separate world of this cul-de-sac.
She’d squint at deep black asphalt as though it were a mirage. Out of it rose a bristling vista of demilune windows, columned porches, doorways and side doors, three-car garages, peak of roof behind peak of roof behind peak of roof. There were shiny security cameras, topiaries in urns, black mulch, swimming pools, stone on wood on vinyl on plaster, black and brassno trespassingsigns. She’d find herself blinking away the illusion that the top-heaviness of these houses would cause them to capsize like poorly steered ships in their neon-green oceans of lawn.
Had someone in one of those immense homes been bothered by the unkempt path? It connected to the trim little sidewalk around the cul-de-sac that went on to intersect the town’s bike path, so it was reasonable to think someone might have been irritated by its naturalness, by the way it didn’t quite fit in. Had they swept it clean? Tried to sculpt it away from its primitive, wild state to mirror their precisely edged flower beds?
“I don’t think they’d come on our property,” her husband said. “I think it was just the wind.”
“Maybe it’s ghosts.” Her daughter grinned.
She smiled at her daughter, wiggled spooky fingers. “Yeah! Walking the path from the graveyard.”
“What, with rakes? Brooms?” her husband asked, making their daughter giggle.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts!” Her son sounded confident, but then he yanked at her hand, looked up big eyed. “Right, Mama?”
“That’s right. No such thing as ghosts. I was just teasing.”
“I wouldn’t mind ghosts who did yard work,” her husband said, and she’d bumped her shoulder affectionately against his big arm.
“What a weird thing,” he muttered quietly.
About a month later, she found her husband looking down the path while the kids dug out their slide, their swings, from an early snow.
“What is it?”
“It’s not much snow compared to everywhere else. It’s strange.”
Sure enough, the trail was visible even through the accumulated snow. A depression marked its dimensions, as if someone had shoveled just before the snow stopped falling, keeping it soft but distinctly shallow.
“The trees maybe catch most of the snow?”
They’d looked up together at the web of branches arching over the path.
“But the snow is deeper everywhere else. Even in the thickest part of the forest.”
“The branches must catch some, though? Or, it could be the wind. Maybe the snow in the woods looks deeper because it drifts, blown from the path.”
“Yeah. Maybe the path acts like a kind of wind tunnel? Snow gets swept out. That could explain why there were no leaves, too.”
They’d both stared, hands on hips, the kids playing behind them in the newly fallen snow on the other side of the graveyard.
