Drenched
Ninety steps into the morning walk last Monday and it started sprinkling. The drops hitting the dry leaves underfoot made it sound more like a downpour and for the first time in too long, I knew my socks would be damp when I got back to the mud room an hour later (hole in my right boot, I’m in no hurry to repair it). No jacket, my distressed Badlands South Dakota ball cap securely in place, I continued north along the path that would lead me, like it always does, into wooded solitude and sanctuary.
(Just over 1,300 miles south, Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine is gathering itself into what residents in six southeastern US states will forever remember as Hurricane Helene).
I didn’t register any wind; the rain fell in straight and gentle sheets over random stretches of the walking paths. I’d move through thin curtains of it and then pass untouched for fifty yards or so before hearing the next approaching wave of refreshment. In that moment, I can’t remember how the city-raised version of me felt all fussed getting rained on in the dash from the front stoop to the car. I have no plans to dig any deeper for that image. I have clean, dry clothes in the dresser at the top of the upstairs landing, including more than a dozen pairs of socks, and that makes me filthy rich by global economic standards. There is nothing to complain about here.
(A red knob of rotating power churns menacingly across the weather app radar, swallowing all of Florida and surging northward through Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas. Helene grows to a Category 4 storm and images of empty grocery store shelves, plywood sheets over windows and stacks of tightly-packed sandbags fill our screens).
It will take more than a morning’s worth of intermittent and widespread sprinkling to quench the land’s bone-dry thirst, and she knows it. Yet, she received those drops, each and every one, with grace and gratitude. Mercifully, I didn’t know—no one did—what was to come. I walked three more mornings in the humid air, still no jacket, and encountered only one mosquito. On Thursday I dropped down into the creek to walk the damp and rocky bed, noticing once-submerged tree roots along the banks searching for deeper wells of water. Tink, one of our kittens, joined me and we both stopped to admire a most handsome frog—dark green, almost-black—who hopped away and out of sight beneath a tangle of grape vines that hung slack and bunched up just along the western bank. I thought he was brave to be living there, no guarantee that the water he loved and needed would return as he’d known it.
(Thursday night, September 26th, Helene makes landfall in northwestern Florida with horrific storm surges and 140mph winds, unloading incomprehensible amounts of rain as she pushed northward into Georgia and South Carolina. Mudslides and flash floods devour homes and livelihoods. Roads become new rivers and higher ground is quickly becoming scarce).
Thursday was my birthday and I woke up missing my parents in an unexpected and melancholy way. As a child, I was terrified of even the mildest thunderstorms and was the first one to descend into our basement, gathering and sorting the pantry’s food rations for us all in case we needed to live there until rescued. Dad kept his eyes on the tv weather forecasts and Mom would pray, glancing out the window with each flash of lightning. Sometimes our street would flood and the basement along with it; many’s the time we bagged up soggy boardgame boxes and soaked stuffed animals, hauling them to the curb, fingers crossed that maybe Christmas would bring new ones to take their place. Five decades later, I’m grateful that our sump pump in the crawl space keeps sucking up and spitting water out of the drainpipe that sticks out of the above-ground row of cinderblocks on which our 1914 farmhouse rests. Mom and Dad would be proud of how self-reliant and resilient we’ve become (living in the middle of somewhere will do that to you). That doesn’t mean I don’t long for their reassurance now and again when the skies grow dark.
Friday morning, another walk around the acreage, stopping in the woods for a few words with some trees I’ve come to know, and a final loop past the stand of sweet gum trees that were fragile saplings just seven years ago (parting gifts from friends Mike and Deb before they headed west for the next chapter of their lives). Their calico red-and-yellow leaves gather in a ragged circle around their ankles, the last colorful postcards from a summer’s worth of memories soon to decompose, shelter and feed an entire micro-neighborhood beneath our feet over the winter. Carefully, I peel a few of them from their plastered place on the grass and let awe wash over and through me. Here in this tiny speck of Ohio’s farmland, drought relief is weeks and miles away, but these leaves are doing their part, holding in moisture for the earth’s skin just on the other side of their delicate veins and something will grow there.
(Some 1,300 miles away, mud obscures family photos and buries the detritus knocked down and blown to bits by the hurricane’s winds. Staggering statistics stop us in our scrolling tracks: 90 dead as of this writing, more than 1,000 missing persons reports in North Carolina alone, seven water plants closed, 2.4 million without power. More rain to come over the next 48 hours).
Just a week ago, it wasn’t worth firing up the mower to cut what patches of grass were a bit shaggy. The dust I’d have stirred up would have been more plentiful that any clippings I’d have created. Waking up this morning to another round of spitting rain, remnants of Helene’s fury, I stepped into the grayish dawn, heart pointed south and east to brothers and sisters unable to comprehend what just happened, their path forward as clear as the mud their neighborhood streets have become. I send my gratitude and a fierce, desperate hope across the towns and fields between us, wrapping it all in the reassurance that they’ll get through this. We’ll get through this.
Tonight, I’ll cling to the beauty of a handful of fallen leaves and, if the sun comes up tomorrow, walk the land for those whose load is too much to carry right now. Instead of rain, I’ll try to drench them in love.
