The day dawns so innocently. The old-fashioned bearded irises continue to bloom; the walnut trees to leaf out, the spinach to bolt. It all goes on, as if the weather hadn’t royally misbehaved for three days now. We’ve had not just thunderstorms but strong thunderstorms, with hail and tornadoes threatening and pure indiscriminate destruction across a wide swath of the South. It kept a friend awake all night in Durham, North Carolina , on the lookout. Entire communities in Alabama and Mississippi were upended. Here, other than some fast, fierce thunder and lightening, the predictions were the worst part. And yet this morning, with a slight breeze carrying the scent of newly opened tulip poplars, the morning sun just breaking the treetops, this day has amnesia, no memory, no regrets, no humility. It just reappears, freshfaced at breakfast, as though we hadn’t been to the police station in the middle of the night.
We have to move on, astonished and grateful. By the end of the day, we will forget our determination to buy extra batteries, check the generator, dusty and unused in the barn. Once again, in a long tradition of once agains, what is known as disaster preparedness will start falling down the list.
Yet anyone with their eyes open knows that climate change, whatever its multiple causes, is real, that these disruptions have just begun, that their intensity will increase. It has to, because we are not learning. Just as those batteries go unbought, so it is our nature to ignore any disaster that does not call our name. The drought in California, the rising seas throughout the world, the melting ice at the Poles, all somewhere else for right now. Yes, my dear friend got no sleep last night, two hours away, but I slept just fine. My irises are still standing on their long vulnerable stalks.
And this blindness, this tendency to cognitive laziness, is not because I haven’t been through it. When Hurricane Irene came through Raleigh, my neighbor’s roof was blown off. Giant oaks came down in our yard. Another neighbor fell from the horizontal trunk of one of them, chainsaw in hand, fell down right next to the cooler. No power for days. Floods in nearby towns. Everything stopped. Everything was altered. So I cannot claim ignorance. And explain this: I was in Girl Scouts all the way to Camp Counselor, when it was my turn to spread the Gospel: Be prepared.
I know that we need to get the generator serviced, that we need to decide where in our house we would go. We need to get all our important documents to the safety deposit box. We need canned food available in the cellar. I know all this.
It is just the beginning of tornado season. . .evidently. . .although I forget, and I get it mixed up with hurricane season which is at the other end of the year.
And then there is my Mama, in the hospital in Greensboro, a week today. It is Thursday. She was supposed to go home Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday. Her surgery for a broken hip last Friday night went well. Supposedly. But now. . .well there is the breathing, and the heart rate, and the fluid. So on we go. My sister is taking my place today. It is a day of rest from being on the front lines. No wonder I think about the battery supply. And yet don’t want to do anything about it.
It is just the tiniest bit unAmerican to be vulnerable. Willingly vulnerable, to sit at my mother’s bedside without an agenda. Each time I visit, I walk in like a sherpa. I carry with me my laptop. In the side pocket of the carry case is at least one magazine, sometimes a book. In my other bag are supplies: water, kombucha, nuts, granola, my morning and evening meds in case I have to spend the night. I carry all this up the elevator to the sixth floor and down the long hall. And then I walk in the door and there is my sweet Mama in the bed.
I enter a different time zone, a parallel universe, that doesn’t include spaces for reading magazines. Time follows the pace of my mother’s mood, her stories, her need for a bedpan or a sip of water. Finding the nurse, a chance meeting with a doctor, getting her from bed to chair in that huge contraption so she can sit up and look out the window. The centrifugal force of the Universe has narrowed to its center: 6N, Room 17 at Moses Cone Memorial Hospital, Greensboro, NC.
Today is a respite. My dear sister is going instead. So maybe I will go get those batteries, and go to the bank with the documents, and maybe ask my sweet husband to take care of the generator this weekend. And maybe Mama will get to go home in the next few days, and our tiny specks of lives will re-enter the swirling mass with fewer exclamation points. Maybe we will carry a little more awareness with us, a little more presence, a little more gratitude. Just maybe. . .
