I looked up from my brunch at the Round House Cafe this morning and saw Mandy Meyer-Hill sitting at the corner table, in soft and earnest conversation with her daughters, Delaney (on the left), a sophomore at Cambridge High School and Marleigh, a senior at the high school who works at the cafe on weekends taking orders and cleaning up.

We gave Marleigh our order when we came in. Mandy and Delaney came in to eat before Delaney’s performance in a play next door. Marleigh took her lunch break to join them. Scott and Lisa Carrino took a short break to come over and sit with us. We are usually at the cafe Sunday mornings, we had a lot to do today but we ended up sitting there and drinking coffee for two hours, so many friends came in.

This is an anchor in our lives. You could see and almost touch the closeness and love at the table.

Mandy’s life is changing. She is a former social worker, now a healer and popular massage therapist.She is a good friend of Maria – she is one of the good witches who meet at the cafe for lunch once a week –  and also a student in my writing class. When her girls were very young, Mandy got divorced, her husband moved far away,  and she changed her plans and chose to live the good and hard life of a single mother determined to raise her children lovingly and well.

Mandy is a gifted healer. After my open  heart surgery, she came to the farmhouse every week to give me a series of massages, they were transformative, they were the beginning of my healing, I rested deeply and spiritually after them.

Mandy’s office is on the second floor of the cafe, she and her daughters often interrupt their busy lives and meet there. Marleigh is leaving in September, going to attend the State University of New York at New Paltz in September, Delaney is now acting in Hubbard Hall’s production of The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

Maria and I saw it Saturday night Delaney is a great screamer.

She seems to be everywhere, doing everything.

Delaney is playing one of the young and possessed girls in Salem, N.Y, who accused their elders of witchcraft and sent many to their deaths. When she was a freshman in high school, she enrolled in my writing class, she is especially charismatic and engaged with the world.

Mandy’s life is going to change again, in a year or so,  and she is well aware of it. Her beloved girls will both be gone, as the children of rural life so often are, there are not a lot of opportunities for them here, and Mandy has always encouraged them to follow their bliss.

Now, perhaps, it is time for her to follow  hers. They almost seemed to be talking about that.

Seeing the light struck this very close and loving family, I went over and took a photo of them. It was, to me, an image of community, of what the cafe means to people in our small town, we are fighting hard to keep the community that has not yet been taken away from us by the new and efficient global economy.

Scott and Lisa are fighting for their cafe.

Their landlord has put it up for sale and they need to buy it or go somewhere else. Scott and Lisa relish Sundays, it is the one day they can take a few minutes to talk to people.

They put up a gofundme site two weeks ago and have raised more than $31,000 to help them buy the old bank the cafe now occupies. Their wish is to stay there. Watching Mandy, Marleigh and Delaney sitting in the cafe, in the glow of their great transition, I was reminded of just how important community is, and how much the cafe has come to embody it.

In a few minutes, Marleigh would go back to work, Delaney would get ready for the Sunday matinee next door, Mandy would go to see it for the third and not the last time.

The threads of this family and so many other families run through it.