Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.“I like the weird stuff,” Michele Roussel says, having just confessed that she and her long-distance beau like to read Edgar Allen Poe to one another on the phone. It’s easy to imagine her curled up on the couch in her grey Irish sweater, her dog, Die Dreizehn, sitting at her feet, and she, holding her old tattered book of Poe’s collected works, reading her favorite poem, “The Dream,” out loud:

“In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed—
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.”

For this poem though, Michele doesn’t need the book because she knows the words deep down in her tell-tale-heart. Now, sitting in a leather high back chair at Central City’s Washington Hall Art Gallery, she mouths the next quatrain quietly, rhythmically, to herself, as if it had a life of its own:

“Ah! What is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?”

These days it’s a faux pas to speak so blithely about the dark sides of life, but like Poe, Michele finds beauty in the thin line between past and present, life and death. In fact, that tattered book she clutches so dearly is a totem to the then and now; once it belonged to her grandmother and she cannot read it without remembering her roots, the ones still holding her upright today.

Born into a family of musicians, Michele grew up just outside of Manhattan, the city where her grandfather played jazz guitar, her grandmother sang and her father tapped away on a classical organ inside of storied venues. They played the kind of music that had soul, weaving together the somber with the joyful, a crescendo in moments of what can only be called truth. But before she was ready, her father passed away and still young and searching, she was left to face it all on her own.

So, Michele did what teenagers do and did the best she could, becoming a young mother and a young wife. Looking back, she doesn’t call a single thing “a mistake” because even if her decisions were not always proper, they are the stuff of her life. Were it not for the birth of her first child, for example, she would not have felt compelled to leave the city, a departure she never expected to make.

Then late one night in a smoky comedy club under the streets of New York, she heard a baby crying and knew her children needed to be raised in a different and quieter place. Where exactly, she had no idea. So once back home she rolled out a map and closed her eyes and let her finger fall smack dab in the middle of the Adirondacks in a little town called Arietta.

The young family moved into a little pink house with hardwood floors, a parlor fit for her keyboard, and two screened-in porches that kept the bugs at bay during the muggy summers. In the winter, when it was too cold to go outside, she and her children would play make believe and build fire places out of paper mâché in the living room, and make s’mores on their open flame of their old fashioned stove.

“I never put my kids in daycare,” Michele says, proudly. “I wanted to stay at home with them. So together we learned about dinosaurs and planets. We painted constellations on the ceilings, using real scientific maps as guides because my son was always into science and he insisted.”

When the boys were old enough to go to school, Michele and her husband bought 18 acres and built their own house. Miles away from modern conveniences, they got a horse and a mill instead, cutting down trees and planing their own lumber to first build a tiny house, then an outhouse, and finally a real house they would call home for the next 15 years.

Now, these reflections are, as Poe writes, “dreams of joy departed.” Michele and her husband split ways, she moved to Central City, her kids embarked on lives of their own, and for the first time in her life Michele found herself living by herself. Although she’s not in a house she built with her own hands, she says it is the first place she’s ever lived that truly felt like home.

In part, joy’s return owes to the people she’s met here who she says taught her to laugh again, after a time in life she didn’t find very funny. But maybe it’s more apropos to mention that she never thought she’d sing again either, and while she doesn’t have any plans for formal performances, she has been catching herself breaking out in song from time to time.

“There’s this spot right here,” Michele says, standing firmly two feet in front of her desk at the gallery. “The acoustics are incredible.”

Mountain Folk Tales is a weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the January 10, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)