Monday morning the main office secretary asks what’s going on in the woods out my way. “Oh, they want to open the trails to mountain bikes,” I say, tossing mail I never asked for in the bin. “Not those,” she pursues. “The Ponds.” A body found strangled and abandoned in her car among the birches that borers and leaf miners have left alone.

I don’t know, and shuck the inquiry. I don’t watch TV, mostly ignore the top half of front page’s bait. Murders and gossip aren’t news to me, though they’re hard to escape.

Next day, on the radio, between segments on Afghanistan and holiday breads, the local spot tells how the husband’s now suspect, a professor of business and media psychology. An uncontrolled holiday argument, I assume.

It makes one reflect on the fragility of our natures, one’s unassuming neighbors, what’s ticking inside. Then quickly return to troubles of our own: rude drivers, the question of the perfect present for my wife, my own piles of papers to be graded. Every year this season grows less and less forgivable. “Let’s stop giving and getting,” I silently wish. “Let’s do something meaningful, help a family in need, write poems for each other, plant a tree.”

On Thursday, not a word, all is still on the matter.

Today, driving home, for the first time I hear the murdered wife’s name. I knew her, a photographer, an adjunct at the same college as he, but known better as wilderness defender, fighting fiercely to save the same woods where her mate delivered his final irony.

I stop at the Christmas Fair where the alternative groups sell Peruvian caps, handmade soaps, Tibetan scarves. Declaring self-reliance, fair trade, peace. The table where she would have sat selling gel prints of the Ponds in all seasons now inhabited by a sculptor who has risen from the waiting-list, peddling his coffee-can characters.

Categories: The Grind, Uncategorized
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