As fear and overwhelm swirl around our ankles and rise like floodwater filled with broken things that were once shelters, bridges, and landscapes, I am tempted not to post (or is it repost?) the documentation of the destruction.
Because it seems we are being forced to make the choice to see, or instead burrow back into sleep, although there are some variations. So I will write what my efforts lately are to stay awake, hoping you will speak of yours.
I cook. I have people over to eat, talk, sing sometimes, help with the heavy physical stuff. All kinds of people. Do you know what that means, all kinds of people? The labels drop off when we’re face-to-face, working together. Physically, literally working together. No future, no past, no ideologies, just someone helping me start the damned brush mower, loading firewood to the barn, carrying what’s too heavy for me now. Forms of true love.
I listen to the air, the wind in the trees, the woods, the wind chimes. The bluebirds, the mourning doves in the morning. I listen to the breath of my pups as they sleep. I write and then read some of it out loud and hear – not my own voice, but the words. I listen to dead pianists playing dead men’s songs. I listen to sopranos singing arias, and I sing along as though I am still 23 years old and have that absurd range and tight vibrato. I hear what is there and no longer there.
I passed the holding tank on the way to the hay field and heard how faint the overflow was. I saw the water level, which was where it shouldn’t be. Found the right hard stick, stuck and twisted it through the outflow pipe, and suddenly, a mass of stuff poured out.
The sun was going down, it was bracingly cold and wet, and the dogs were happy and at peace because we were together there in the most interesting place of all, their world of a million smells and other critters, life forms, dead bones and flesh, the Outside, where we really belong, don’t you know that, our silly Human? That’s what they think.
I had almost forgotten how to live. I almost forgot how to drive the old red truck over to my friend’s house to get her horse shit for my compost, to sit in her kitchen with her giant new rescue dog – still covered in healing wounds and scars, who looks at her with adoration. How to sit on the phone with another lifelong friend for an hour across 2,000 miles before she goes into the hospital, the friend I laugh the most with, the one who always says I love you before we hang up in case it’s the last conversation. She wants me to hear that in case.
It ain’t over yet. I heard the tiny green peepers in my neighbor’s field last night, earlier than ever before, according to my 30-year farm journal. I pulled the red truck over just before home from Bonnie’s to look for Virginia bluebells at a deserted farmhouse, knowing they were maybe up and they are, two inches of thick spike. One slender buttercup in spite of what is coming.
Is it a kind of bravery inherent in all life? Is it in us, the roots underground that will not die, the water that will not stop flowing, the song that must be sung, the bells, the birds, the frogs, the arias, the poems?
Are you still here, and are you listening?
