We Are Unprepared

“You don’t have to do this—not now, love,” I said gently. “Let’s have a cup of tea and then go to bed.”

To my surprise, she nodded and stepped out of the mess of objects into my arms. I led her by the hand to the couch in the living room, as if a stranger might still be lurking around a corner, and threw a blanket over her while I prepared mint tea for each of us. It was cold downstairs. We had turned the woodstove on earlier that week for the first time, but it had burned out hours before. I focused on making the tea, unsure of whether I was angry or frightened.

It wasn’t uncommon for Pia to find inspiration at odd hours or obsess over a project for a few frantic days. Those episodes were exciting for her, but never upsetting. And often they really did produce something inspired, like the time Pia made an entire quilt to hang on the wall in our old apartment. She had taken a workshop in abstract quilting and spent hundreds of dollars at the fabric store. Oddly shaped strips of colorful torn fabric shed threads around the living room for days, until one sleepless night, I awoke to find a striking quilt the size of an entire wall draped around her as she trimmed stray ends. The vibrant colors danced together in an explosive design that looked something like a sunrise. It hung in our apartment for two years, until we moved to Vermont. The quilt was a symbol of Pia’s exuberance and artistic gifts. I don’t know why we hadn’t hung it yet in our new home, but I missed it as we drank tea on the couch. The quilt always helped to explain and excuse the erratic aspects of passionate Pia.

We sat quietly for a while, staring forward at the inert television.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I don’t like this about myself. I wish I could change it.”

I hugged her. “I know.”

“I’m just...scared. I can’t explain why.”

I wanted to be entirely there for her, to dedicate myself to conquering the internal and external threats that frightened her. But I was scared, too. The future that we’d planned for had been unmoored by the storm reports, and I wanted comfort now, as well. I didn’t know where self-care ended and selfishness began or what my obligation to my wife should have been then. I only knew that suddenly I didn’t have that selflessness in me. I was afraid, too.

We shivered together under a blanket, each privately fearing the changes afoot.

SIX

“I THINK YOUR joists are rotting,” August said with authority. “I’ve seen this before.”

We were on our knees in the backyard examining the underbelly of the porch steps, which appeared to be melting into the earth. This was the sort of handyman challenge that little August excelled at. In all his solo wanderings to neighbors’ homes and nearby farms, he’d gleaned useful information about just this sort of thing, so I was happy to have him close by as we tinkered. Plus it was an effortless way to keep an eye on him under the new arrangement.

I squinted to see deeper into the dank cavern. “Do you think we need to rebuild the steps entirely, or can we just replace a few of those pieces?” I asked. I had no idea how to do either of those things.

August stood up and put his finger in the air like a cartoon character signaling that a big idea had hit him. “We should go see Peg! She has a buttload of leftover wood from when she fixed the doors on the stable. It’s walnut, which is wicked hard. I’ll show you how much it hurts when we punch it.”

Lacking any other ideas and curious to meet our neighbor Peg, who lived just through the woods on the other side, I agreed and followed August’s determined march toward the road. Pia was reading a book about candle making inside and seemed happy to have us out of the house, so I didn’t bother disturbing her.

It was late Sunday afternoon on November 3 and the autumn cold had finally arrived. I wanted to bundle August up in one of our extra winter coats, but that wasn’t the kind of relationship we had; not yet. We both watched the sky as we walked, which was as magnificent as any I had ever seen that time of year. We were entering the part of fall when everything shifts to gray. It’s a transitional period between the fiery explosions of foliage and the austerity of winter, and you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention—but everyone was paying attention in those days. The sky wasn’t steely as it should have been, but speckled pink as if a firecracker was suspended in the clouds. It had something to do with the wild temperature fluctuations and the hurricane that was, on that day, attacking the Carolinas. The effect looked magnificent and felt eerie as we walked along the road.

Although Peg was our immediate neighbor, I’d had very few interactions with her and knew virtually nothing about her life. As far as I could tell, she was a busy sixtysomething woman with a lingering Irish accent and no immediate family nearby. Even August was light on details about her. Some people move to the woods to be left alone and I assumed Peg was one of those people. So it was a surprise when she opened the door with a big smile and personable ease.

We stepped inside to find that Peg was involved in an elaborate applesauce-canning project, which she left unattended to make tea for the three of us. Because of the applesauce, we were surrounded by a heady fairy-tale scent, but hers was not the home of a kindly granny. Everywhere I looked, there were artifacts from different parts of the world—African masks, Chinese vases, tiny Russian dolls swimming in a bowl with stray pennies and paper clips. It was dizzying but beautiful and utterly natural, not the curated gallery of someone looking to impress. This was the cluttered house of a woman who’d lived a full life.

August and I immediately forgot the purpose of our trip and instead drank tea on worn, mismatched furniture in the living room while Peg told us about the objects around us and the circumstances of their acquisition. August had never been inside her house either, and he peppered her with one breathless question after another, which relieved me of the job. She gestured constantly while she spoke, pointing to trinkets and tucking behind her ear the stray gray hair that kept falling from a loose ponytail. I noticed that her clothes looked as if she might be scheduled for a safari later that day. She wore a white linen shirt tucked into those polyester khakis that looked like rain would slide right off them. They had multiple pockets of varying sizes that I assumed were intended for compasses and jackknives.

Peg was a botanist and a professor at Lyndon State College. She had published two books on the reproductive patterns of conifers and lived in several countries, which she would drop into the conversation like afterthoughts (“that was when I was in the Philippines, which has a sensational culture but disappointing food...”). She never married, but there were pictures of a younger Peg with tanned men in adventurous settings displayed around her home. August inquired about a large instrument that occupied the corner of the living room and she explained that she played the cello in a local ensemble “not terribly well.”

I loved Peg immediately. She was expressive and a little kooky but obviously smart and accomplished. I wondered about the men who appeared in her pictures. She seemed like the type who might casually refer to them as having been lovers, a word that made me shudder but seemed completely natural on her. I also liked that Peg had made her way from Ireland, around most of the globe, to Isole—and that she seemed to think it was as wonderful as I did.

“And what about you, Ash?” Peg asked, picking up her teacup after a summary of her time spent studying shrubs in Senegal. “What brings you here?”

I wished I had something less conventional to tell Peg than the fact that I was returning to my home state to eat organic food with my lovely wife, who’d been acting strange lately. Instead, I gave her a version of the truth that emphasized my love of nature and new furniture-making hobby, which I thought might make me seem slightly less boring.

“You didn’t like New York?” she asked.

“Oh, no, I love New York,” I replied. “The energy and the culture... I know it’s a cliché, but all the things people say are great about New York really are great. I will definitely miss it.”

“Then why did you leave?”

“Well, Pia and I had always dreamed of starting a new adventure somewhere, living a little more mindfully and simply...something like that.”

Our reasoning sounded obnoxious as I said it aloud and I made a mental note to prepare a better explanation for future conversations.

“So why Vermont?” Peg probed. “You could have gone anywhere, but you’re back in your home state.”

I took a breath and started slowly. “I guess for me it was more like I needed to get back to my natural habitat.”

I waited to see if this was enough for Peg, but she didn’t appear satisfied, so I went on. “It’s like everyone is born with a certain constitution, you know? And you can enjoy all kinds of places, but there’s only one place that you feel absolutely at home in. That’s how I feel about the woods of Vermont. I could never envision myself growing old in a different environment. I don’t know, maybe that sounds insane.”

Peg nodded and smiled slightly. She appeared to understand.

August pushed off his chair and announced that he was bored.

“What do you want to talk about, buddy?” I said.

“I want to know what Peg—who is a scientist—thinks about The Storms that are coming.”

August said scientist with great emphasis and I made a mental note to nurture this interest in him.

Peg set her teacup down and picked a piece of lint off her safari pants before looking back up at August and me. She was serious all of a sudden.

“August, the most important thing for you to remember is that everything is going to be fine. You’ve got a house and two parents and me and Ash, and we’re all going to make sure you’re safe.”

August didn’t look particularly distressed to me, but Peg gave me a firm look suggesting that I needed to play a role in this lesson.

“She’s right, buddy,” I said. “It’s just weather. We’ll make it an adventure!”

It felt strange to speak that way, and I realized that perhaps I had no idea how I was supposed to speak to children.

August shrugged and looked bored again. “Okay. Can I feed carrots to the horses?”

Peg sent August to the stable with a small, dirty tote bag of carrots and sat back down across from me. Then we had a very adult conversation about August’s parents’ negligence and how we could help provide him with a sense of safety in the coming months. I was reminded again that there was a lot I didn’t know about looking after a child.

“And The Storms?” I said. “Do you think they will be as bad as the predictions?”

Peg looked into her tea. “I do. I think they will be much worse, in fact.”

“But how can you know that?” Her certainty shook me.

“Governments are conservative about such things. They have reason to be—every storm report has the potential to move markets and set into motion a series of events at a global level. It’s not willful deception, exactly. It’s more like a compulsory downplaying. If the US government panics, everyone panics. So yes, I think The Storms are going to be much worse than they are predicting.”

It seemed as though Peg had more to say on the topic, so I waited.

“And these predictions ring true to me as someone who has studied the earth for most of my life,” she went on. “In the field and through a microscope, I’ve been watching things change for years. I’ve been waiting for The Storms, in a way. And it’s not just these storms; it’s the dramatic changes that are about to start happening regularly. This is the real lie that our government is telling: they are leading Americans to believe that this winter is an anomaly, a freak event for the history books, but it’s not. There could be something bigger right behind it, and then another after that.”

Still I said nothing. Peg seemed to need to tell me this story.

“Of course, it’s not just the United States. It’s also the governments of China, India, most of Europe—the rest of the world is doing the same thing. They know that their own big storms are coming, though they will be different everywhere.”

I thought of a movie that Pia and I had seen in the theater about an earthquake in the Pacific Ocean that triggered a tsunami in China, which sent global oil prices into turmoil, causing war to break out across the Middle East and parts of Africa. After the movie, we’d laughed about how improbable it was.

I must have looked concerned because Peg held up her hands and said, “I’m not a climatologist, and any good scientist knows that there’s so much more we don’t know, so I suppose anything could happen, Ash.”

Peg said my name quietly to herself twice more, and she seemed to move on to a different thought.

“Do you know about the ash tree?” she asked. “It’s very important in Celtic mythology.”

I raised my eyebrows, trying to follow the turn in conversation. “I had no idea. I guess I don’t really know why that’s my name.”

“It’s considered one of the most powerful of all the trees,” Peg said without a hint of jest in her voice. “Actually, in parts of Europe, they used to use it to make spears and the handles of weapons. It’s associated with enchantment and healing. The pagans considered it positively holy! There’s a lot going on with the ash tree. Were your parents druids or hippies?”

“Ha.” I laughed. “No, not to my knowledge. My grandfather was a logger, though. I don’t know; that’s the only tree connection I can think of.”

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