That Brief, Almost Utopian Moment

My family has been reunited – under the same roof – for six weeks. Every day, dump trucks come and go along Highway 80 and our side road, Lower Browns Creek Road, removing piles of ruined items from the edge of the road. Organizations like Samaritan’s Purse and the National Guard moved some of the items there; other times homeowners, neighbors, or a friend’s excavator got the job done. For months, we have been waiting for the contractors hired by Yancey County to come and remove this debris of our lives, and this week, they began.

Mattresses, dressers, appliances, books, stuffed animals, swings, lawn chairs, fencing, roofing tin, cabinets, sinks – you name it, it’s there … alongside the leaning mailboxes and snapped trees and still-stunning vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I don’t think I will ever be able to forget seeing an upturned kitchen sink lodged high in the branches of a tree. Or the pink teddy bear, nose-down, caught between downed electrical lines. Or the toy Tonka truck that is inexplicably hanging from a repurposed tree limb that’s also holding up the local Wi-Fi line a few hundred yards from my house.

In the house next door to ours, members of the Cajun Navy have taken up temporary residence (it was an AirBnB), as they continue to offer their much-needed skills in our disaster zone. River and I have made new friends at the local Catholic Church, where we help sort donations and practice our Spanish. Further down the highway, we’ve synced up with Bald Creek Relief, which has repurposed an old elementary school into one of the most admirable, well-organized distribution centers I’ve ever seen. (The first thing you see when you sign in as a volunteer to hand out food and supplies is a note that says: RULES: NO JUDGEMENT.) And we visited River’s keyboarding teacher’s farm to listen to her story about the barn, the bridge, the shed, and the 8’-high by 500’-long berm that was completely washed away.

Now we have the Los Angeles fires. The phrase alone makes my stomach wobble and my senses turn inwards. California: We are with you on this journey; it is long and has many stages for which there aren’t even names. But you will make it through, because like North Carolinians, you will:

“…marvel at the brief, almost utopian moment of opening in the midst of tragedy, when everyone wanted to talk about meaning and did so in public with strangers…a moment of passionate engagement with the biggest questions and with one another…[when we could] coexist boldly and openly in a great mixture of colors, nationalities, classes, and opinions…[and] the dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times.”
—Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

It’s a strange thing, gathering on Zoom with wonderful creatives from across the globe and striving to do good and witness good in this conflicted world … then driving to pick up my child at school and dodging the downed lines, slowing at the temporary one-lane bridge, and trying to figure out what to do when he says, “Mommy, I can’t talk about those times. I can’t ever talk about them again.”

But friends and readers, it isn’t all bad. And it isn’t all good. It’s complicated.

What is there to do between work, volunteering, remembering how to be a family, and helping our kids with homework? Brad and I asked ourselves exactly this, and decided that the opposite of a disaster zone is a theme park. So for Solstice, our big gift to River was to go to Dollywood for three days. It was just what we needed.

We’ve also made changes to our daily lives that will help us center family time in more tangible ways: I’ve temporarily stopped attending my 6:30 am online Buddhist study group, in exchange for more spacious mornings and goofing around with River before school. Brad has reduced his work hours by about 24 hours per month. We’ve taken stock of our monthly expenses and started saving for a family trip to Alaska, where we are so well-cared for by friends that we can actually make this vacation within our financial reach. Above are a few snapshots: the Black Mountains, Dollywood, River asleep, and one of the bulk-food rooms we helped organize as volunteers.

As always, thank you for reading, sharing, pondering, and responding.

 

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