Reed Magazine 2025

     She’d first seen the flier for the local ham radio club while out on a walk in her new neighborhood. Though whether that hillside could be considered a neighborhood, Sadie wasn’t sure. In her mind, a neighborhood, like where they’d lived before, had sidewalks and cafés and a name. This was a long dirt road flanked by ponderosa pines, residents few and far between, the nearest cappuccino a thirty minute drive and, as she learned on her first visit to that small town’s fluorescent-lit diner, hardly worth the trip.

     But it wasn’t the region’s culinary offerings she’d fallen in love with; it was the old farm house, the majestic view, the vision of her two boys catching frogs down by the creek instead of dodging traffic, inhaling fumes, crossing the street to avoid another fentanyl victim splayed out on a neighbor’s stoop. The moms at their daycare back in the city all had one of two reactions to her news of relocating: either envy for the bucolic peacefulness Sadie described for them or else nervous questions like: do you know anyone out there? Or: have you researched the county’s voting demographics? Or just: do you have any clue what life is like in so remote a place?

     Sadie brushed off their questions then, but now, six months later as she pushed a stroller down that uneven road to the lonely sound of a woodpecker, they returned to her. The view hadn’t yet lost its romance. The house was still everything she’d dreamed. And her eldest son, no longer hiding inside all day staring at screens, had come running onto their back porch just days before to show her a frog cupped in his little trembling hands.

     It was blending in with the locals that hadn’t gone quite as smoothly.