I laughed, but I could relate. Even after four long years, I have days when I’m grateful for the lattes, for the orchards working overtime. We all have stories we want to run from; but upstate, after a while, there’s really nowhere left to hide.

For me, leaving New York City was a slow, brutal burn, like the sun setting between buildings on the city’s West Side. I was a singer-songwriter for over 10 years, dubbed a rising star and “One to Watch” in fancy magazines. Then, suddenly, no one was watching. I felt I was a comet that didn’t quite live up to expectations. The birth of my twin sons, West and Lou, quickly, passionately, filled this emptiness. Then Lou was diagnosed with cancer as a one-year-old. Up nights at the hospital I’d call out, “Excuse me, excuse me!” into the void. The endless waiting — for Lou to get better, for something to interrupt the stillness — was hell on Earth. I longed to turn the page, to a place that had yet to let me down. I dreamed of the sun setting behind mountains, where it was supposed to.

When we first moved upstate, I was shell-shocked from Lou’s illness, and navigating a sea change from musician to writer. I was also enmeshed in our family’s medical reality, reading every book on Buddhism and “letting go” I could get my hands on. I’d ponder “No mud, no lotus,” while I scrambled eggs for dinner, editing pages, remembering to give Lou his medicine. I was covered in mud, but where was this lotus?

Sometimes I distracted myself in these orchard/brewery/pop-up shops that kept sprouting up like mushrooms in the rain. And certainly, there was joy to be found there. But it was in nature, unobstructed, that I finally began to rewrite my story. Nature is never a distraction. She commands your attention, lovingly asking you to reconsider yourself in her care.

That said, after cancer, and then the long pandemic days, I, too, needed a break from the stillness and the mud. Newly vaccinated, I took the train back to my natural habitat. I leapt from the F to the 6 trains, up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, down to the Odeon — the landscapes I knew best. “Excuse me, excuse me!” I demanded lattes, drinks, and dinners with friends. But on my last night, it took forever to get back to my sister’s apartment in Brooklyn. I’d soaked through my sundress, exhausted from bulldozing through my former life. The trains were all rerouted, and apparently so was I.

On the ride back upstate, I was lulled by the river. I wondered, Where does the river begin, where does it end? I panicked, like when my kids ask, “How does a plane fly?” and for a second I’m not quite sure. A quick Google search confirmed that while the Hudson River’s source was up north, the river has a two-way tide. Like me, sometimes it can’t make up its mind.

Lately, I drop everything for the sunset. When I was little, I never understood why the grown-ups made such a big deal about the setting sun. I think of the writer Colette, her mother Sido in “Break the Day” declining an invitation to visit because she couldn’t miss the blooming of her beloved pink cactus. This is how I feel about the day’s end. I drag my chair up to the highest point on our rented half-acre of land. As the sun morphs into a blossom all its own, I think of the latte lady, of my ever-changing self. How if I ran into her at one of the orchard/brewery/pop-up shops, I’d take her by the hand. I’d show her the crooked trees, the place where the apples fall into the shadows, onto the mud. Where an orchard is just what it is. It doesn’t need to be anything else.

I watch the sun set pink like Sido’s cactus, or the promised lotus. As it fades from lilac to silver, into night, for a second I panic; it’s all such a mess. And then everything, just everything, is still.