Last summer, I took my daughter to my grandmother’s old house in northern Vermont. The drive took over four hours. My daughter is ten. She had only been back twice before, and both times she said it was boring because there was no WiFi. On the first day we arrived, she sat on the couch holding her phone up, searching for a signal everywhere. Finally she tossed the phone aside and said something that made me laugh and sigh at the same time: “Mom, is this the end of the world?” I just smiled and didn’t answer. My grandmother’s house was very old, but it was clean. At night, it was so quiet it was almost scary. No car sounds. No people sounds. Just the rustle of wind through the leaves and the distant call of an owl. My daughter tossed and turned and couldn’t sleep. She said it was too quiet.
The next morning, I took her to the small town. The town was tiny — just one main street, a general store, a post office, and a small ice cream shop. Outside the general store, there were a few baskets of fresh corn and tomatoes. No one was watching the stand. Next to the baskets was a metal box with a note that said, “Take what you need. Put your money here.” My daughter stared at it for a long time and asked me, “Won’t people steal from it?” I said, “Probably not.” On the way back, we took a detour to the lake and sat there for a while. The water was so clear that you could see the rocks and small fish at the bottom. My daughter took off her shoes and put her feet in. She said the water was really cold. Neither of us said anything. We just sat there. That night, we went outside to look at the stars. The grass behind the house had grown up to our calves. We walked through the dew. In the city, the night sky is gray. Here, the night sky was deep blue, with so many stars that it looked like someone had knocked over a jar of glitter. My daughter grew quiet. We just stood there, not saying anything.
Over the next few days, she stopped complaining about having no WiFi. She learned to feed the three stray cats. She also learned to swing on the old swing in the backyard. One afternoon, she ran into the kitchen holding a firefly in her hands, her eyes bright, saying she had never seen a live one before. On the morning we left, she sat in the car and looked outside for a long time. Then she turned to me and said, “Mom, can we come back next year?” I said yes. She smiled, leaned back in her seat, and quietly watched the fields and woods slowly move backward outside the window.
On the drive back to the city, she fell asleep. In the rearview mirror, I could see her face. She was a little tanned. Her hair was messy. But she looked much more relaxed than when we had come. I thought about what she said on the first night — about this being the end of the world. Maybe she was right. But the end of the world didn’t seem so bad after all. Just a lake. Stars. Fireflies. And a child willing to stand with you in the grass and look at the sky.
