I am in West Virginia by myself right now. While I wait anxiously for the thunderstorm that all weather programs swear is coming, I am cognizant that I am also waiting anxiously for so much else. Rain, as it often is, is a metaphor: for life-giving water; for baptismal cleansing; for clarity and a fresh start. Without rain, things desiccate, become crisp and brittle, turn inwards, die. The West Virginia panhandle is desperately parched; our pastures are becoming barren; all that I’ve planted is gone or barely hanging on; our well is dangerously low. If we lived here full time, we’d be in serious trouble. I’ve already had to buy water and have it delivered to our pool. It’s an expense, though less of one than is repairing a damaged pool liner. And so as do all who rely on water, you do what you can: let some things go to save others.
Last week, someone on this area’s Nextdoor site shared a photo of an emaciated deer dying in her front yard. It was utterly wrenching and despite my best efforts, I’ve not been able to stop thinking of that innocent doe, hungry and thirsty because her habitat is but kindling. The woman called the humane rescue to find it has shuttered because of funding; the next person she called said there was nothing that could be done but to put the doe down. Despite deer overpopulation and the destruction they wreak and the ticks they chauffeur, this doe was not of a nameless, faceless many but a lone creature at the end of her young life. My heart still aches, and I hope she passed peacefully.
I think about all we can and cannot control in life and how meaningful that makes it but also how tragic. So often, too often perhaps, controlling something exacts a toll, a cost, even when your intentions are beneficent. You choose to value one thing more than another. That calculus can be simple, or it can feel impossible. I would save my goats rather than the wild deer that bed down in my gardens at night; I might donate to a homeless shelter but neglect to distribute bottles of water on another day of record-setting heat; I will stay up with my sick child rather than sleep; I have gone to WV by myself even though we move our oldest to college next month.
Sometimes, choice is a joyous freedom but also an illusory one. Sometimes, the risk of inaction outweighs any cost.
While writing, the rain came. For mere minutes. And now it is gone again. How does this change my calculus regarding showering versus laundry tomorrow? Because we are dependent on our well, no more rain will mean one versus both. I’m ok with that, really. Humanity asks and takes and greedily uses too much. All of us could stand to behave more ascetically. Oliver is at camp right now, and there, joyful asceticism could be a motto. No electricity, lake bathing, composting toilets. It costs a small fortune to attend, but it’s worth every penny for the off-the-grid, total-connection-to-each-other-and-nature it provides. An easy calculus.
I seem to have last hit “publish” here in early December of last year. You can’t know the degree to which I’ve missed writing nor the extent to which I have felt muted. Not an easy calculus.
Tom and I were away recently, on a much-deserved 20th anniversary trip, and I swear I drafted a post along the way. However, a search of drafts, recently deleteds, and other such gray spaces showed nothing more than a “new post” from July 3. That post was rather like the “thunderstorm” we just experienced. A fleeting suggestion. Do the clouds feel nervous about bursting? Are they unsure about how and when to open up again? If so, I understand.
If you ask my mom, she will tell you that I always wanted to be a mother. One of my best friends from college, with whom I had dinner just a few nights ago, would say the same. I did. And yet, I admit that 18 years in, I feel very WTF about parts of motherhood. Like, gobsmacked. Astonished. Speechless. Not on my Bingo Card of Life stunned. Listing into the tragic versus meaningful. Done.
After 18 years of giving more than 100% every day from the me receptacle to other receptacles, well, let’s say this isn’t how I thought any involved receptacles would look. One is crispy and stressed; one is supple but lost. Where is the rain? What happened in the passage between vessels? For almost all of those years, I never saw, noticed, found, heard, was made aware of a leak. Where is the goddamn water?
It’s funny. There is no rain, but I can hear it falling softly. It strikes me that this may be what phantom limb syndrome feels like: a clear perception of loss and discomfort in something that is no longer there to feel or perceive anything. Is such a reaction a human attempt to understand the lack of what should be? At the root of my distress is most definitely a failure to, an inability to understand; a lack of understanding. Do I hear the rain because I so desperately want it to be raining? Do I miss a long-held connection because it is suddenly gone?
Yes.
It should rain. We should be connected. The loss of each is awful. I’d choose drought, if that were the calculus. Easily.
