We’ve spent the better part of the last few weeks under “red flag“ warnings. High winds, high temperatures, grass and ground as dry as old bones are a recipe for prairie fires.
With these kinds of conditions, it’s almost always a matter of when — not if — a fire will start, and how far it will spread when it does. Across the border in Wyoming, fires are blazing and can’t be stopped. We know it could be us next.
Meanwhile, in the mountains of Appalachia, whole towns were swept away in minutes as fast moving rivers overflowed their stone boundaries. Driving along the highway yesterday, the vegetation cured to gold, the few trees that dot the hills too dry to even change colors — the leaves are just curling up and flying away — I tried to imagine that much rain, and I couldn’t. The fear though, that I could imagine easily.
I was driving home from a show. I’d been hired to perform at an Ag Appreciation banquet in the Black Hills, and I’d stayed overnight in the cottage of friends with a farm nearby.
Before I left, I’d stopped at the house of a musician acquaintance who is in hospice and had requested music whenever possible. I sat on one side of his bed and sang him some songs while one of his childhood friends sat on the other, smiling and humming along. Periodically, his son would walk in to check on him, to bring water or medicine or gather up the wild, half-grown kitten who kept sailing through to attack our stockinged feet. The room was dark, the house quiet, and the childhood friend’s smile was one of the kindest I have ever seen. The man was in a lot of pain, but he was surrounded by love.
Driving home, I kept thinking of fires and floods and of the man’s son, who put his life on hold to care for his father. The son was living through a slow-motion disaster; the river of people flowing through the house daily — home health aides, old friends, random strangers with guitars — while the waters rose around his father, preparing to carry him from this place to the next. And when the waters recede, his father will be gone, the house will be empty and the son will be left to clean up whatever remains as those of us who survive the ravages of disaster always are.
On a trip this summer, I finally started reading a book I’ve meant to read for awhile, Ross Gay’s “The Book of Delights.” The book is a series of essays written over the course of a year celebrating ordinary joy. Gay wrote them to give himself the task of noticing all there was to be delighted by, even while acknowledging that life is full of overwhelm and woe.
“It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything— lives with some profound personal sorrow…” he writes.
“The Book of Delights” was not Gay’s first brush with this practice of noticing. Years before, he wrote a poem called “Sorrow is Not My Name.”
It starts: “No matter the pull toward brink./ No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits./ There is time for everything.”
He then goes on to name a dozen small miracles that surround him — the sickle of a vulture’s beak, the bird’s good coat of feathers.
I made it home in time to hear the fire trucks screaming down the highway heading east. My husband started making calls, and while we waited to find out more, I imagined fire sweeping across our pastures, swallowing everything it touched.
But, I was also thinking of that old friend’s kind smile and of an exhausted and devoted son, who was giving us all a gift by helping his father leave his body behind with such tenderness.
And I thought of all the trees on all the hillsides softly dropping their leaves, just as tenderly, one after another.
“Is sorrow the true wild?” Gay writes and then asks, “What if we joined our sorrow, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?”
