SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
Morning, yous,” she says quietly, opening the door and letting the birds out into the damp and heady tall grass. They are ferociously happy—clucking and eyeing her, there is no mistaking the look—with gratitude. She dumps yesterday’s water, refills it with clean rainwater collected from a barrel out back. Fills the second bucket with grain. Throws the birds handfuls of scratch, which they come running for. “Thank you,” Deb whispers to them, gathering four still-warm eggs. Thank God for these birds and her garden on the hillside outside her cabin, small but robust, teeming with tomatoes, beans, corn, potatoes, kale, fall raspberries, all undamaged by the heavy rain.
A Grace Paley line rings in her head: “Here I am in the garden laughing.”
Isn’t that her, after all these years? Deb goes to the garden, picks the day-ripened heirloom tomatoes, their purple and mottled skin, their bruised husks and tender bodies sweetened to perfection, and places them gently in the basket.
She laughs thinking of that year at the commune—candlelight and homemade rotgut cider, the basement full of acorn squash and soft apples. Their tomatoes that never ripened due to insufficient water, lack of fertilizer, insufficient sun. But look at her garden these days: enough to feed them for months! For half a winter. She’ll fill the root cellar Stephen dug years ago with carrots, potatoes, cabbage. Fill the Deepfreeze out on the back porch with peas, tomatoes, zucchini, beans.
Deb brings the eggs and tomatoes inside, turns on the radio, though she hates to hear the news these days, can hardly stomach it at all since Bonnie’s disappearance. Sure enough, it’s more of the same: the pro-Assad army waging a cyber war in Syria; a family searching for respite in war-torn Somalia; a piece on the surprising number of extreme weather events in 2011: heat waves, Texas wildfires, earthquakes, dust storms, tornadoes, Irene. The director of the National Weather Service says he’s never seen a year like the “deadly, destructive and relentless 2011.”
Deb sits down at the table. Pours herself a cup of cold coffee.
She recalls Ginny quoting Yeats, drunk on that rank cider: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Ginny laughing, holding her side, suddenly crying. Bird going to her, kissing the soft lobe of her ear. Opal dancing in the corner, a goopy-eyed newborn kitten in her hands, sick with worms and fleas. The center cannot hold. How had they known it, and Yeats, before them? These apocalyptic fevers seem to always come and go—but is it real this time?
Thank goodness for her Mason jars lined up on her shelf, full of beans, rice, lentils, quinoa. Raspberry jam. Plum jam. Apple butter. Self-reliant—is she? Those ten days with limited roads and no power she fed them all. But a year? Every day she makes a pot of soup—chili or lentil or white bean, full of tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, summer squash, kale, sage, and thyme—a splash of pink sea salt from the Himalayas—and brings it, with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, to Hazel’s kitchen. Hazel hardly eats anything at all. Vale eats ravenously.
“Thank you,” Vale says after each meal. “Thanks so much,” her eyes on the pine floor, before turning and heading out the door.
Vale growing more distant by the day. Drinking too much wine.
Deb thinks how the storm and the opioid crisis here are, in some ways, symptoms of the same illness. Pharmaceuticals and crude oil. Hurricanes and heroin. Flooding and fentanyl. All of them making their way upstream.
“Goddamn money,” Deb says, rising, dumping the rest of her coffee into the sink.
But there’s action brewing, too, according to the next news story: protests happening in New York. Thousands of people camping out at Wall Street to protest big banks and corporate greed. The journalist describes a poster of a dancer atop Wall Street’s charging bull. The words below it: BRING TENT.
The spirit of the Arab Spring protests taking root here, too, Deb thinks, feeling an old flicker. Does this next generation have it in them to fight unbridled greed?
Deb clicks off the radio. Goes outside to use the outhouse.
Thank God for this, too, she thinks, a couple hens trailing by her feet. She leaves the door open three seasons of the year, loves the view from the seat: mountain and mist and fog and rain and sunshine, cresting the farthest hill. She has papered the walls with New Yorker covers, keeps a stack of magazines to flip through. She never minds the cool shock of the seat in midwinter (except on the coldest days, when she swears like a sailor), is always grateful to head back inside and warm another cup of coffee. Is there a greater pleasure?
Deb stands on the porch—feels the sun wash over the pores of her face.
In the post-oil world, she thinks, I’ll be heating the water on the wood stove. Canning tomatoes in ninety-degree August heat. Only I’ll be dead by then, won’t I? Here we are, coasting on resources—the wheat, the beans, the coffee, the wine, the salt, the propane for her gas stove. How rich we are without knowing it.
Deb turns to look at Hazel’s house down the hill. The irony, she thinks—that Hazel is the only one who might still know how to survive that post-oil era but she’ll be long gone by then.
The sky is apricot colored, luminous with the sun’s rising. The birds come onto the porch and cluck by her feet, that familiar and comforting din. Undeniably changing, this world, but beautiful all the same, Deb thinks, tipping her head back. Songbirds still singing, stars still coming out each night, the earth still ripe with grass, leaves, dirt, apples. Isn’t that the heart of it, this living? Death and beauty. Death and beauty. Pied, over and over again.