Oddly Enough

Oddly enough, for Lindsay Adams a move from the busy life of her hometown Washington, DC, to the rural life in West Virginia becomes not so much about a choice as a fulfillment of destiny. The journey the reader takes with this protagonist, a funny and insightful though confused twenty-five year old, back and forth between the two seemingly polarized landscapes, ways of life and suitors of Washington, DC and rural, mountainous West Virginia is as down-to-earth and realistic as it is romantic.

Is twenty-something Lindsay Adams living the wrong life? Her struggle to answer this existential question plays out in this lyrical and funny modern twist on a classic tale. Lindsay thought she knew how she should live her life – as one of the intelligentsia in the city of her birth -- but in the wake of 9/11 and her grandmother’s death, she suffers panic attacks. Deciding to drop out of graduate school in Washington, DC, and with a sense of urgency she follows her mother, a recent transplant herself, to the mountains of West Virginia. There she awakens, like Sleeping Beauty, to new possibilities. Lindsay hasn’t quite broken up with her urbane, literate boyfriend, Juniper, but she begins having a secret affair with a sheltered, engaging, country-boy, Elliot. When she travels back to DC to sort through her grandmother’s belongings, she mulls over her many options while she wrestles with this central conundrum: What kind of life would feel as if it was genuinely her own? A life of urban sophistication on which she has already embarked with Juniper? Or the surprising, even shocking, choice to retreat to a life of simple, country pleasures embodied by her new romance with Elliot? Oddly enough, she has no idea what to choose.

Sarah Wadsworth lives on a mountain in West Virginia where, among other things, she raises animals and a garden and sometimes hunts for wild mushroom accompanied by her dogs, Red, Blue, Bear and Ollie, her children and their dogs, Rex, Gus, Avie, Delaware, Milo and Maybel. Her short story “If There Be Any Praise” was published in the Winter 2002 edition of ‘The Hudson Review’ and her novella ‘1939’ will soon be available as an ebook.