Up went Lisa’s scrunched shoulders. The weary eyed girl made fists with her hands and squeezed hard. Stressed out, burned out by life’s overload, she reached for her car keys and stormed out of the house. “Bills, bills, and more bills,” she muttered to herself. Her worries about school loans, car loans, and rent due, churned relentlessly inside her very aching head. “How am I ever gonna make it?” she constantly thought.

Lisa pulled open the car door and shifted her unhappy self into the vehicle. Not a new means of transport, but a secondhand type, one she recently bought from a friend. She revved up its engine, just enough to crank out some of her angst and hit the road without stopping to consider the consequences of after school traffic, moms picking up kids, school buses dropping off kids and teachers spinning their wheels away from kids.

Lisa drove into the afternoon kid blitz on a day belonging to the month of November, a month which here on the Island for the past maybe more or less twenty-five thousand years foretold the coming of old man winter through unruly wind and deposits of unexpected snow falling from grey cloudy skies. Now-a-days, November teases us with unexpected warmth and climate change flowers. Roses not only color the eleventh month but also perfume its thirty-day progress towards the year’s cold weather season. Too bad Lisa didn’t stop and take what would have been to her advantage, a whiff of those sweet-scented November roses before she got into the car, although after a mile or two of driving she did eventually stop, but not to smell roses but because she had to stop.

Clunk, clunk! Oh boy! The girl’s tire’s gone flat!

Lisa heard it, felt it and eased down on the brakes. Slowly she guided the car to the road’s grassy shoulder and parked without first remembering that she forgot to put the spare in the trunk. Then she remembered. Without second thought she reached for her smartphone. When she needed it most…not there. In her rush to get away, she left her link to the world way behind.

When Lisa got out of the car, she realized that she had stopped by a trail that cut through a pine forest which she often explored as a child. She knew the old foot path well, and when she set out on it, she would not only reach a gas station on the other side of the forest, but also, unbeknownst to her, the other side of her world.

Lisa pushed through the trail’s overgrowth. The girl shoved aside blackberry canes blocking her way. Their sharp spiky thorns scratched her arms. She stumbled on uneven ground and almost sprained an ankle. Yet, she kept at it. “As if being stressed out, burned out and work overloaded isn’t enough, I’m bleeding and my new denim jacket is torn,” she wailed. With each step she took, her doomscrolling beefed up. “If I ever get out without getting attacked by a rabid fox or stung by a killer bee or bitten by a Lone Star tick, it will be a miracle, for sure.”

Lisa rolled her eyes towards the sky expecting to see it covered with storm clouds. Instead, a flock of blue jays winged their way across the clear blue heavens and towards a stand of Pitch Pines. She heard a scratching sound at her feet and when she looked down saw a squirrel peek out from behind a moss-covered log. In search of acorns the animal scrambled past her. With her eyes steadied on the bushy tailed creature, her attention began a slow shift towards the present and away from her problems. She caught sight of a spider reconstructing its web. She watched for a moment wondering how the spider knew how to do what it did. She also wondered if she would ever be able to do what she had to do. As she continued along, the path widened and her battle with thorny branches gave way to the free feel of ambulation on short, sun-drenched dried grass. A soft breeze ruffled her hair. She swept aside the tawny colored ringlets that fell across her brow. She dabbed her eyes when she saw that the trail lead up to a small open space area that she and her childhood playmates once called a field.

Lisa hadn’t been to the field since her elementary school days. She remembered having fun there with her friends, chasing grasshoppers and gathering flowers to press for Mother’s Day gifts, or weave into daisy chains which they wore like crowns on their carefree heads. As these memories surfaced something inside seemed to yield. What had twisted her into knots slowly relaxed its grip. The worldly helter-skelter that had engulfed Lisa lifted enough to bring the elasticity of hope to her step. She felt the restorative power of nature and the potential for joy experienced alone or with others. With that kept in mind Lisa could catch her breath in a hectic, chaotic fast-paced day and age, even when she didn’t have all the answers, even with having so many newly acquired adult responsibilities such as big bills to pay. Grounded as such, by the time Thanksgiving Day arrived late November she would feel gratitude for even a stupid flat tire.

Diane Lundegaard is a native Long Islander, environmental educator and freelance writer.