September 29, 2026

I didn’t plan to stop in Stowe. It was just the halfway point between here and there, a place to stretch my legs. But the town was alive in a way nothing else in Vermont has been. The trees were on fire with color, and the streets were full of people who’d come just to look at them. Leaf peeping season, a local told me, and I smiled at how beautiful that sounded, a whole town gathered to watch the world change.

I found a tiny café on Main Street, crowded and warm, and ordered clam chowder and a turkey sandwich. I took a seat at the bar. The stool beside me was the only empty one in the room.

And then she came.
“Is anyone sitting here?”
No, I said. And that was all it took.

Her name was Vera. Seventy-eight years old, cheeks still flushed from yoga, forty years in these mountains. She and her husband came here from New York chasing snow and water. Winters skiing down the slopes, summers on the lake. A teacher and an engineer who retired early to live inside their dream. They never had children. They wanted them, she said, but it wasn’t written in the stars. In two weeks they’ll pack up a lifetime and move to Florida to spend whatever years are left somewhere warm.

I have been carrying a heaviness lately. The news, the stories, the endless reminders of what men keep doing to women. I set out on this journey quietly hoping I’d find women along the way, women who could pour something into me, or let me pour into them. I didn’t know it would happen so soon, over soup, on a Tuesday.

When I told her I was traveling alone for four weeks, her face completely lit up. She couldn’t believe it. A woman, alone, with a rental car and a whole month and nothing to answer to. “You’re so lucky,” she said, and I heard everything underneath it. In her time, women didn’t get to do this. When I told her about South America, three months and six countries on my own, she asked me to say it again. Then again. Three times before she could let it be true.

We talked about the universe. About manifestation, a word her girlfriends keep using that she doesn’t quite understand but wants to know more about. I told her I think it’s a way to hold something sacred without a church, without needing to name it God. I told her I’ve always believed the universe has my back, that I put my hopes out into the world and the world keeps answering. That’s how I always find the courage to go and how I always feel protected along the way.

Her eyes filled with tears.

Tomorrow she has her first meditation session. She already warned the teacher she’ll probably cry. I told her, Vera, let yourself. Let it all come out. The forty years, the mountain, the lake, the leaving. That’s what tears are for.

Two women, almost four generations apart, strangers an hour before, sharing the softest parts of ourselves at a café counter. She showed me what I’ve been given. I showed her what she’s still allowed to begin. I don’t think either of us will forget it.

We wished each other well, for the road and for the new chapter, and I walked back out into all that color feeling fed in a way no man has ever fed me. Held by a woman I’ll probably never see again, and changed anyway.