New Kid on the Block

On Saturday, as they were driving up to their little red house from Brooklynland, a piece of Beaver's tooth came off. Just like that. A little one. She nudged the ridged space with her Beaver tongue the entire drive long. It felt like an invader. Like someone sitting next to you on the subway with their Ipod far too loud. Had this really happened? She could do nothing but accept it. Just like that- on a sunny Saturday morning. And chip- chip- she was getting old.

Sometimes Beaver can't help but stand back and stare at the direction her life is taking as if it were a stranger filling up her doorway. A handsome stranger, and a mysterious one at that, but a stranger all the same. After the long journey from her home in Franche, she thought things would be different. In her heart of hearts, she thought that her book would be out and gently feted in small, well-wishing circles of farm animals and deer. She thought there would be parties and punch bowls and fetching, peep-toe shoes. She thought there would be inspiration and steady light that said: Come this way. Come now.
She thought her days would be filled with that perfect concoction of frivoltry and ambition that constitutes the life of a young artist in New York.

This isn't the way things worked out for La Beav. Her book sits unnoticed somewhere, a surplus object like a booster seat in a restaurant, and she can't help but feel that things aren't going correctly. It's like that part in a book or a movie that starts heading off-kilter, leaving you to wonder- where is the story I first started out with? Where is the ending that I thought was pre-written?

In exactly one month, Beaver and Sir Domo will be moving to the most rural town in the Berkshires with no job offers, no Internet, no friends and no postal delivery. Gone are the girlish ponderings of a Beaver in Manhattan, trying to make it through the well-pawed streets of the city. Enter the immediacy of finding the proper gift for ones neighbors in a town of 664. Beaver can't bake. Is stone-cut Irish oatmeal too humdrum? Or is simplicity the way to make a sound impression?

Adventures, challenges, life lessons to be learned- certainly all these things lie in the path that's now in front of these Beavers. But what if they are making a mistake? We assume that we have taken the right road because we need to. But what if their destiny waits on the other path?