Keene Valley is the place where Cima and Tomas spent their weekends together before the pandemic, and the destination Cima intended to return to after Tomas’s death. Its particular landscapes—the view of Noonmark, the trails, and the cold swimming hole—make it more than a remembered setting: it is bound to their shared rituals and to the future they thought was still ahead of them.

Setting and Landscape

Cima recalls staying with Tomas in a white clapboard cottage in the village, with Noonmark visible from its sleeping porch. She describes the mountain as small and sharply peaked, a modest counterpart to the Matterhorn. On Saturdays, they would climb its ledgy trail to a rocky summit just beyond the stunted firs, turning a nearby landscape into a familiar weekend destination.

Their routines also carried them beyond the mountain. In the evening, they rode single-gear bicycles up a paved country road, then followed a trail through maples to a swimming hole fed by a small waterfall. They would wade barefoot upstream and jump into the cold water. The location is preserved through these repeated journeys and acts: climbing, cycling, walking, and swimming together.

Cima and Tomas’s Shared Life

Keene Valley belongs to the period when Cima and Tomas were waiting for their lives to begin in earnest. Tomas was finishing his degree; Cima worked in public health and hoped to have a child. Their weekends offered a life already rich in shared habits, even as they thought of it as a prelude to later commitments. Cima’s retrospective account reverses that expectation: the years of uncertainty and waiting now seem to her like the sweetest time they were given.

The memory is specific rather than idealized as an abstract idyll. One weekend, Cima developed poison ivy badly enough to miss two days of work; other evenings ended with the tired pleasure of a bicycle ride and a walk to the water. Such ordinary details give Keene Valley its emotional weight: it is where an unfinished future was lived as a succession of small, intimate rituals.

Tomas’s Death and the Planned Return

When Tomas died in the hospital, he was calling for Cima and looking for her. She could not fly back to New York in time because her mother was also dying, and she chose to stay with her parents. Her friend Joel, a doctor who ran the hospital wing, offered to cremate Tomas and keep his ashes. Cima was grateful for this care and planned to return in a week or two, drive upstate, and scatter the ashes in John’s Brook, in the mountains outside Keene Valley where the couple had spent their weekends.

That return remains a plan in the account, not a completed act. Keene Valley consequently holds both the remembered ease of Cima and Tomas’s life together and the unresolved work of mourning: she identifies the place where she intends to carry his ashes, but the evidence does not describe her making that journey or scattering them there.