New York City is more than a place. It’s a mood. It’s a state of being.

Or so it has seemed to me, from the first time I visited during a high school chorus field trip (imagine a few dozen teenagers belting “Seasons of Love” atop the Empire State Building, in the rain), to my most recent stop just last month. It’s a place where things happen, and I can’t help but be caught up in that energy.

Perhaps that is why I never stay long in New York. Seventy-two hours is about my max. Then my need for solitude – or at least, the absence of a crowd – becomes so acute as to become a craving. Walking in Central Park or across the Brooklyn Bridge sometimes helps. The exercise and being out-of-doors typically buys me a little time. I can drift among strangers, cloaked in anonymity, and lose myself in my thoughts.  

I did no such pensive walking on my last visit. It occurred in January, and the itinerary was decidedly indoorsy. ’d come to New York on a mission to see Keanu Reeves in Waiting for Godot. He was headlining a production at the Hudson Theater along with Alex Winter, and the opportunity to watch the stars of the Bill and Ted franchise in real, live, serious theater was one I couldn’t pass up.

I’ve been absolutely fascinated by Waiting for Godot for years. Decades, even. Admittedly, I’d never seen the show – I’d never even read the play – but I was well aware of its cachet as a touchstone for the theater of the absurd. The very first days of 2026 seemed as good a time as any to ante up.

And so Peter and I found ourselves queued up on sidewalks still covered with paper confetti from New Year’s Eve, waiting among the closing weekend crowds. Then we were in our seats, the house lights dimmed, and the curtain rose.

I realized my mistake immediately. In our haste to leave the hotel, I’d forgotten my glasses on the bedside table. I could see the stage, I could see the set, and I could make out the actors’ movements. But I could not see their faces. At least, I saw them only in a somewhat blurred, Impressionistic painting kind of way.

I squinted my way through the performance. By paying close attention to gestures and tone of voice, I followed what was going on. Not that there’s much of a plot in Waiting for Godot; that’s part of the point.

The irony of it struck me. Here I was, finally witnessing a piece of theater that had lived on my bucket list for years – in NYC, of all places. On closing weekend. With a celebrity cast. And I could not see the actors.

I like to think Samuel Beckett would have laughed. I did. Both at the situation, with all the ridiculous little tragedy folded into it, and at the play itself. Yes, it’s dark. It’s stark. Sometimes the language cascades into hopelessness, and the audience has no choice but to go right along with it.

And yet I could not say it was a sad play. Of all the emotions I witnessed on stage that night, fear was not among them. That fact whistled itself through my consciousness like a signal beacon. And with it, a whisper of hope.

I knew what it was to live with fear. And I knew what it was to live without it. I nodded, as if Samuel Beckett sat right beside me. I looked at the stage, smiling. I laughed again.

Contrary to its title, this post is actually about being in the woods. Not in the woods in the sense of being lost, or of going deep into the backcountry, hatchet and compass in hand. As wilderness visits go, this one proved rather tame: I slept indoors every night on a comfortable mattress, I ate meals prepared in restaurants, and my time spent in the woods consisted of daily afternoon hikes on well-marked trails.

Even so, it was a far cry from my every day. The woods sounded different, smelled different, felt different. I deliberately walked slowly. Back in the city, I spent too much of my life moving quickly. Here I allowed myself to sink into the stillness. I looked around me. I paused enough to notice things. I tried to pay attention to what was small.

For example, the lichens, ranging from the palest grey-green to a color nearly as deep as emerald. The bright yellow of fern leaves. The way the sunlight hit the trunk of a hemlock, illuminating a sliver of the forest in transient brilliance.

I found myself surrounded by living things, yet it created the opposite sensation of feeling crowded. The trees afforded quiet company. We shared space, but nothing more. There was something soothing in their remoteness, a peace in being among creatures who asked me for nothing.

When I did encounter other hikers, I went out of my way to avoid them. Perhaps a part of me felt safer alone with the trees than I did in proximity to homo sapiens. Trees hold no ideologies.

The woods were quiet. At times, they felt almost unnaturally devoid of noise. If I listened, I could discern traffic or human voices in the distance. I heard an occasional call of a blue jay, or sometimes a chipmunk rustling among the leaves. Once I caught the sound of a crow’s feathers stirring the air as it flew overhead. 

Most of these moments were mine alone, but I wasn’t always in solitude. One morning Peter and I sat on a large boulder next to the Clarion River. An angler walked along the opposite bank, speaking noisily with his companion, and we exchanged annoyed glances at the sound. Why did people with no sensitivity to nature insist on visiting it? Or perhaps the situation was simpler: humans are merely poor judges of the sound of our own voices.

I looked upstream. A bald eagle perched in one of the trees. As I watched, it lifted off from its branch and flew nearly directly overhead. I followed it with my eyes, breathless. I’d seen bald eagles in their natural habitats before, but never this close.

The situation I’d been lamenting only a moment before instantly transformed. I suddenly felt lucky to be exactly where I was. Sitting on a naked boulder, feeling the stone’s coldness leach through my clothes and its unyielding surface supporting me. But that didn’t matter: I was in the presence wild things. And I was glad, very glad, not to be “out of the woods.” 

I am sitting in the main branch of the Erie County Library. I can’t remember the last time I sat in a library, in person, with a stack of notebooks and my laptop computer. It feels wonderful. The quiet is exquisite. But this room is not silent – there is the distant hum of a machine, the rustling of papers at the reference desk, the tap of my keyboard.

Earlier I chatted with friendly, elderly German at the gift shop. We started talking about a German comedy show (Last Man Laughing), then humor in general, then spoofs on 1970s variety shows. From there the conversation moved to HEMA, world politics, WWII. We discussed the lack of pens for sale in the gift shop (he loans me one). I ask about the German word for cheesy. He thinks for a moment, then answers “kitschy.” Yes, English uses kitschy too – or more accurately, absorbed it from the German.

You might say I’m on vacation, of sorts. It is the first week of May, the coldest I can remember in decades. There is rain. Temperatures are nominally above freezing. Wind and gray skies. Snow flurries.

But I want to go outside, and so I do. A short, frigid run from the lakeshore cabin where I’m staying to the main street of my hometown. Past the tiny beach, with the sign indicating that no lifeguard is on duty. Past the old cemetery with 19^th-century graves and their old-fashioned names carved into the stone. One of the markers, I remember, bears the words, “Killed at Gettysburg.” I run past the trees with new leaves, over a scattering of pink dogwood blossoms lying on the damp sidewalk. I dodge puddles on the pavement.

In times of transition, I return here. To my roots, as much as I have any. I return to incubate myself in the familiar.

On another afternoon I walk along Lake Erie, the wind blowing my hair in crazed directions, the waves roaring as if I am at the ocean. No one else is on the beach, aside from a single pedestrian with a dog, off in the distance. I turn away, walk so that I can face the breakwaters and tide, look at the water hissing out over the sand as it is drawn again into the lake. I am in solitude, I am alive, and the moment is mine alone.

I think of how rooms of books light something in me. Smells of spring light something in me: the rain, the leaves, the soil, the blossoms. Being next to water and tides lights something in me. Despite the cold, I run May-mad.

A day’s agenda might look something like this:

Coffee, early.

Back to bed.

Journal.

Go outside.

Eat. Watch a loon swim. Allow myself to be surprised. Allow myself to be unproductive.

I read an article on social media and banking risk, then another on the US Constitution and presidential pardons. I browse Pinterest. I am both exhilarated and quiet.

In the sense of linear trajectory, I’ve come to a stop. I’m in between jobs, having been let go after the end of a lengthy contract. And for Americans, being out of a job is synonymous with being without purpose. Without value.

But I cannot believe that this interval of time, these days, are wasted. I am simply paying attention to other things.

From my cabin I have an excellent view of wildlife. Herons, a pair of eagles, loons, geese, goldfinches. A muskrat that popped from the lake early one morning to chew vegetation along the water’s edge. I smile at all of them, glad to be back among wild things, glad even, in a way, for the wild weather: it makes the roof, the heat, the warm bed all the more precious.

If there is a lesson anywhere, it is this: I am learning how to live in the in-between spaces. I fall to pieces. I fall into peaces. Slowly, I let myself fall into place.

For years, Paris has lived on my bucket list. Decades, actually – ever since my first high school French class, when the very first French sentence I spoke was Paris est la capital de la France. Uttering those words felt very foreign. Very exciting. Very adventurous. And at last, two university degrees, nine job changes, a marriage, and three relocations later, I was going to go to Paris.

My husband and I touched down at Charles de Gaul airport on a sunny September morning. Despite our jetlag, with the help of Google and my high school French we navigated the local train service and then the subway, suitcases in tow, to emerge triumphantly from the Tour-Maubourg metro station in the 7th arrondisement. My first sight of Paris was a beautiful building facade, its windows shining in the midday sun. To my left was a bubbling fountain, and beyond that, a small shaded park. And in that moment, instantly and totally, I was in love.

Before we go further, to avoid disappointment if the following aren’t mentioned, let me disclose what I didn’t do:

• Tour the Louvre
• Shop the Champs-Elysees
• Visit the Moulin Rouge (or anywhere else in Montmartre)
• Wear a beret

Hardly anyone wears a beret in Paris. And of those who did, I suspect they were mainly tourists.

Having lived in Washington DC, a city that attracts its own fair share of visitors, I know that sightseeing often creates photo opportunities but not a true sense of place. I did concede to taking an open-top Big Bus tour, and happily grabbed shots of Notre Dame, the Paris Opera, and various monuments. But I also insisted that we hop off to walk in the Tuileries Gardens, and to visit the art and booksellers with their stalls along the Left Bank of the Seine. And we did join the crowds who flock to Versailles.

From its golden gates to the sprawling palace with its famed Hall of Mirrors to acres of artificial lakes, fountains, and formal gardens, Versailles is built to astound. And it does. But not even that power and splendor could prevent Louis XVI, and his Austrian-born wife Marie Antoinette, from meeting the blade of the guillotine. 

I could not see Versailles without thinking of the bloodshed of French Revolution. I could not look at Notre Dame without remembering the terrible acts of religious violence that have marked Paris. Even the Eiffel Tower is not immune – today its lights sparkle in the Paris night, but during the German occupation of Paris in World War II, daring residents cut the elevator cables so that Adolf Hitler would be unable to get to the top of the monument unless he climbed it. (So far as we know, he never did.) 

For Paris is a city that shows the magnificence of humanity, but also our cruelty. I did not want to be a careless visitor, one who saw only Paris’ beauty and forgot what suffering had occurred among its boulevards and parks.

So what did I do in Paris? I walked. I ate in bistros and cafes – lots of them. My husband and I strolled along the banks of the Seine at night and watched as the city lights reflected in its dark waters. We sought out the spot where medieval pilgrims left Paris to begin the long journey to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. I indulged in all sorts of carbs: crepes, croissants, wine. I visited a bookstore and purchased the Paris Snob Guide, 1967 edition. 

I even spoke a little French. It was uncanny to be able to understand much more of a a language than I could express. I listened to waiters or department store staff or radio DJs, and I had a sense of the conversation. But I didn’t have the spoken fluency to be able to answer. Sometimes the Parisians defaulted to English. Sometimes there was pantomime. Sometimes we had a hybrid conversation that switched between languages. My best French moment was probably a request to the concierge for a new hairdryer. We did it entirely in French, even the bit where he explained to me that the room key needed to be inserted in the slot for the light switch. And I responded, in French, that yes, we did that, and no, the hairdryer didn’t work and hadn’t worked since we checked in. He kindly found me another one. 

And I watched Parisians. The daring motorcyclists and scooter riders zipping through traffic. A dad and his toddler son at the cafe opposite ours one evening. The man calmly smoked with the baby in his stroller beside the table. When the child grew restless, dad lifted him out and set him on a chair, and continued with his cigarette. The businessman in a park who, having finished his lunch, took off his suit jacket and laid it on the grass. He then lay back and rested for the remainder of his lunch hour. At its conclusion, he picked up his jacket, shook it off, and returned to work.

One of my favorite things about travel is the chance to see people in other parts of the world living their lives. And, perhaps, to step into an alternate version of my own.

The version where I wake to new foods, new sounds, new things to see. 

And perhaps, just perhaps, I stepped closer not only to the person I aspire to be, but to a more authentic version of myself. The self that watches. The self that writes. On the morning of our last day there, I was up early. I opened the windows so that I could sit on the bed and gaze out at the cathedral opposite. It holds the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. Six stories below, Parisians moved toward the city center on their morning commute. I opened my journal, picked up a pen, and knew that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. 

Next Month: American Abroad, Part 2, with adventures on the French Riviera.