I couldn’t tell if it was compliment, a warning, or a piece of advice.

August 30

The group was given two hours after breakfast to relax before our first gathering mid-morning. It was to focus on what Phillip, who we now understood was the retreat’s facilitator, though its organizer remained unknown, called “The Spirit’s Path.” I expected it to be as vague as it sounded. Taking the time to stroll and reflect, I found Claire on the flat stretch of lawn behind the lodge. Proving my first impression of her, she had a yoga mat unrolled and had bent herself into some pose I couldn’t have named, though I recognized the concentration of someone counting silently. I hadn’t sought her out exactly. I told myself I was walking around to pass the time while the others had all gone to the cabins.

“You’re staring,” she said, without opening her eyes. I thought I’d been silent, but she knew I was there.

I apologized and she laughed, unfolding out of the pose with an ease that made me feel every one of my forty-two years.

“Sit,” she said. “You don’t have to twist yourself into anything.”

The grass was still damp, though the sky was clear, and I remember noting that nothing at this retreat ever seemed to fully dry—not the grass, not the towels, not the low fog that sat over the tree line in the morning like it was reluctant to leave.

Claire talked easily, the way some people speak about themselves without ever telling you anything. She had come from a city, she said, though she wouldn’t say which. New York most likely, given where we were, but it could also be Philadelphia, or Chicago for all I knew. She said she’d been doing retreats, seeking, whatever word suited the three days, for longer than she remembered. Perhaps her parents too her on them when she was a child.

“You get a feel for which ones are meaningful,” she said, “and which ones are just a weekend away with strangers.”

“Then perhaps we’ll meet a few spirits,” I replied, meaning it in jest. “Perhaps,” he replied. “Or they will meet us.”

August 25

I followed Harlan across the grass, the dew making my shoes wet, and I remember thinking that this was the most urgent I’d seen anyone move since we’d arrived. A man in pursuit of coffee. It should have been comic. In hindsight, it was the last ordinary thing I witnessed that morning, and I did not appreciate it as such.

The lodge door was unlocked. Nothing at this retreat was ever locked, I would come to notice, as if someone wanted entry to every door without knocking. Harlan pushed through it with the single-mindedness of a man crossing a desert. I trailed him into a kitchen larger than I’d remembered it from the night before, all exposed beam and cast iron, and watched him open three cabinets before finding what he wanted: a tin of grounds, unlabeled, and a percolator that looked older than either of us.

“You know how to work this?” he asked, holding it up.

I didn’t, but I said I did, because it seemed important to him, Men like Harlan, retired, I’d guess, from something that required the tie I imagined he word, do not do well being told no one knows something. That he didn’t know himself was beside the point. We got it going between us, water and grounds and a burner that took four matches to light, and stood there in a silence that did not invite interruption.

“Sleep well?” I finally asked.

“I don’t sleep,” he said. “Not really. Not in years.”

If it were true, it meant he’d been awake through the night and early morning, and my interaction with Larry had not gone unnoticed.

“You get used to needing less of it,” he added.

I asked what cause it. Age, or worry, or some old injury—and he looked at me as if deciding how much of an answer it merited.

“Habit,” he said. “You keep a certain kind of watch long enough, your body stops asking permission to stay up. It just does.”

A watch over what, I wanted to ask, but the percolator interrupted us with its first ugly gurgle, and Harlan turned to it with relief—for the coffee or the escape from my curiosity wasn’t clear.

We talked while it brewed, about nothing that mattered: his knees, the weather, the precise wording of the advertisement we’d all answered. He seemed like a man who relied on precision to help him order his world.

“What did you do?” I asked. “Before this.”

“Before this,” he repeated, testing the phrase. “I kept things in order. Records. Accounts. The sort of work no one thanks you for until it’s done wrong.”

It was, I noted, very similar to the kind of answer Larry had given me an hour earlier about his own trusts and estates. Perhaps I was at a retreat for actuaries. I didn’t think much of the similarity at the time.

The coffee, when it finally came, was bitter and over-boiled. Harlan drank it black and without complaint, standing at the window with his back to me, looking out at the tree line.

“You’ll want to pace yourself here,” he said, not turning around. “Whatever you came looking for.”

“I didn’t come looking for anything.”

“We all did,” he said. “It’s a spiritual retreat.”

“Then perhaps we’ll meet a few spirits,” I replied, meaning it in jest.

“Perhaps. Or they will meet us.”

There was a chill to the way he said it, and a certainty. I didn’t question it at the time, it being more a sense than anything else. I have learned in the writing of this journal that the things I let go are the things I should have held closest.

By that time the others were awake. They began to wander into the lodge, filling what had been silences in our conversation with morning chatter.

I noticed a dryness to my hands, small cracks in the knuckles I attributed to the dry air. I didn’t have lotion with me, and made a mental note to ask the women if any of them brought some. What was a minor irritation that morning would prove to be something much more.

– Anonymous