Aftermath

There are times in our lives when it feels as if everything is the color of tea. The familiarity of our lives stained pale.

The waters of the flood have retreated but they have left much more than silt and mud in their wake. Our dirt road is patched but still bears the scars of gaping holes. I come the back way around the pond and drive up the hill where I abandoned my truck and stood with Muir next to an out-of-control river in the pouring rain waiting for help. I put my foot down, look straight ahead and drive.

The road down to our pastures, ripped open by torrents of water, have been put right by a generous friend’s bucket. Once again the sheep, a dog and I are able to walk easily up and down the hill each morning and evening.

Our mail carrier has returned in her black jeep, its side bearing the white block lettered “Zena.” We walk to our box stuffed full of advertisements, magazines and bills.

There are moments when things feel normal, and then they don’t.

Sunday night was the perfect night for a ballgame. The blistering heat of the week had relented and the air was cool and clear: you could smell relief. We picked up sandwiches and chips, stuffed them into a backpack to eat illegally in the stands and headed for Montpelier, meandering through a maze of orange-coned streets trying to reach the field. As we drove we passed homes the river had entered without permission. You could see the violence in the uprooted trees dropped carelessly onto what had been someone’s front lawn. A clear line of gray muck identified the water mark leaving everything with a frightened, haunted feel. And when we arrived, we learned the game had been canceled.

We felt discomfort in the intimacy of the piles on people’s lawns; children’s toys, family’s furniture and rugs ripped from the floors of bedrooms. Everything tossed hurriedly as if trying to beat something unseen.

The grass in front of our state house is empty of frisbee players, picnickers and tourists. Industrial metal dumpsters line the street. As we cross Main we see a store owner sweeping. It feels shocking to see our beloved Main street stores gutted. No colorful skirts in the dress shop window, no laughing skateboarders rolling down the sidewalk. Our bank boarded up, our favorite Indian restaurant sign swinging from a broken hinge. It is so barren and difficult that we feel that we don’t belong, voyeurs at the site of a terrible accident that we have all been in.

The rain returns repeatedly. This is not the soft rain that you fall asleep to; this is a hard, driving rain that triggers fear. I get up in the night and pull the window shut regardless of the heat. In the morning our rain gauge measures another inch or more. Paul can’t help doing the math and reports that we have had almost twenty inches of rain in the month of July. I hear him but don’t acknowledge it.

I sit and wonder about something being surreal while at the same time too real and I struggle to learn how to live with this vague feeling of continual uncertainty.

But in the mornings I open the metal gate into our garden, one or more dogs racing ahead of me. The steamy weather with the water that has damaged so much has somehow caused our garden to explode. I kneel down and rummage through the leaves in the bean patch and begin pulling thin wisps of green into my basket. Beside them two yellow squash nestle in the warm dirt. I pull pregnant pea pods and tug rhubarb from its roots. My basket quickly fills and I walk slowly back up Magic road eating a dirty carrot. Our dinners are brilliantly colored and simple. I slice fresh tomatoes into hot pasta and sprinkle it all with goat cheese and cut up cucumbers, then I saute green beans in olive oil and toss them with sesame seeds.

I sit and wonder at the gift of the bounty and at how the same rains that have taken have also somehow given.