Post-Flood, the Chaos.

I keep writing about this flood, because the flood’s marked our summer: before and after. I’ve written that our house was spared (thank goodness, thank goodness), but the pieces are all around us. Immediately post-flood, such an outpouring of generosity, and then, the predictable, the wearing down, the exhaustion, a growing sense of uncertainty. Rain falls and falls. We can no longer ignore that the summer has been wet and cold. And yet, how selfish it feels to complain, when we are in the Shire of Vermont.

My own saga unfurls publicly in the wake the flood. The property my ex-husband owns is posted for a tax sale; it’s been six years since he paid more than pennies on this bill, sovereign citizen that he is. My name is posted in the tax sale, that the Court removed my name from the deed in our divorce. I’m drawn into his life again, the facts of my life bantered about with people I know and those, I’m sure, I’ve never met.

The property is valuable — 92 acres with a large sugarbush. In the midst of this, someone I know from long ago phones me. The morning is dark, and I haven’t turned on any lights. His words are so kind it’s like sunlight in this gloomy summer. There’s no resolution here, no possible decent outcome. I will likely never speak to my former spouse again. I’ll never own this property. And yet, my life will hopefully go on and on, for decades yet. For these timeless moments, I drink in that unbidden kindness, let it fill me. I feel it within me, the possibility of how my life might turn.

And, because it’s August, one of my favorite Hayden Carruth poems, August First.

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems… The sky
is hot dark summer, neither
moon nor stars, air unstirring,
darkness complete; and the brook
sounds low, a discourse fumbling
among obstinate stones….
I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue.