“I was scraping moss from a rock when the first crack of thunder, followed by a not-so-distant arcade of lightning flashed its warning, signaling me .. to do what? It’s been like that all week. Languid, slow moving dance moves, tuned to sudden changes in barometric pressure, paced to a changeability seemingly on steroids, demanding closer attention to the location tools, & my own wandering work patterns. Far below, folks move in and out of guest houses, pull in & out of driveways, or linger, next to empty houses under construction, while my pedestrian activities drone on. I guess the fairy class I belong to is an almost invisible scurry, mostly known to plants, and older stanchions, like mammoth ancient trees, or wildlife disturbed or intrigued, by what I do. I pause, to reconnect with my water jar, sometimes sitting on a stone bench, or wall, or pressed tightly between hollyhock stalks, & rose blooms, against a tractor shed’s clapboards. I frown at the lack of gravel here, the runaway weed populations I’ve neglected there, the flop of prodigious shrubs outgrowing their plots, I thought I’d pruned into submission, in the cool of early spring. Nothing is under control anymore. It’s midsummer, and it’s been a hothouse July. Picking an innocuous gas station to pull into, I’m waiting at the register while someone gets two Creemees, the cashier on double duty between the drive-in window, and me. Another pause, I don’t resent. I feel someone else behind me, also waiting, and look down at my hands, which are smudged, and still colored with dirt. My pants have ripped, in the back, from being scraped against granite, all day, and my carefully coiffed hair hasn’t been that, for weeks. There’s no point in trying to disguise my readiness, to plunge under sumac, or grab onto roots. It’s affected my choice of gas stations, I’ll admit it. I feel far, far flung from days when dressing up for performance was a thing, or being clean. They’ll be time for that, but not now, not in July. I feel pride only in the company of other dirty workers, right now. The ones stuffing insulation into attics over 100 degrees F.; or digging ditches for the phone company. I could use a Creemee, too. We ran from the rain, and didn’t run from it, again, today. Rushing, as we were, from bed to bed, trying to free peony blossoms from rot, or pound stakes into the soil, before the next deluge. There was respite under the Volvo hatch-back, during the worst of it, and a desperate run for cover, when things really got serious, to a covered deck, sluicing rain in buckets, while we pondered our next moves, our next design project, our available options to salvage the work day. “I have PTSD”, she confided, as we sat huddled under the overhang. “I saw my friend thrown back by an electrical surge, across the room”, she continued. I had my own story, to relate. “it’s nothing to mess around with,” I agreed, though still aching to finish our beautification goals. “He was only a six year old”, I recalled. “He needed to pee”, I remembered. The storm on route had been mighty. It was not an opportune moment to leave the safety of the vehicle. But he would not be seen, & ran behind an innocuous shack. The lighting struck, wires we hadn’t noticed, wires, wires, wires. Those unimaginable moments, timeless, still seared into my memory. He’s still with us, but the tiny body in my charge had nearly been fried. His tears, his conflict, my mothering, and all of it, like an absurd choreography. On the drive home today, moving through massive fronts of chaos, I could only be thankful that today, one simple future stemming out from what didn’t happen allowed me to be just another grateful survivor, of what is didn’t happen. We called it, and ended early. East to west, the worst of it was done. Less made, but nothing lost. The peonies could wait. The tiny, trapped bird we’d scooped up with a shirt, was hopefully, still alive under the Elderberry.”
