The Wind Has a Bad Case of the Nerves

Election Day

Nature seems to have a hard time understanding what season it should be right now. For most of my lifetime, there was a predictable, easy flow, movement from one season to another. Sweater as a transitional object. Today is November 5, and it is currently 75 degrees, too warm for a woolen. My climbing roses and butterfly bush are still pushing blooms amid brown and decaying leaves. Lazy, sluggish yellow-jackets re-appear flying close to the ground, a potential danger I thought was over. I can still get stung. But the other morning in my shed it was so cold I could see smokey breath and my fingers were too cold to keep writing.

If I just look out the two windows in front of where I write in my shed and the one on my left, I can imagine myself deep in the woods. From there, I can’t see the highway filled with angry, rushing drivers. The political signs on the lawns or the 15 foot tall grim reaper our neighbor put up for Halloween. The hardships of young families trying to live a suburban life. Most of all, while in my shed, I don’t feel as I did before that there is something I must do, I alone can do, to provide rescue. I write postcards to swing state voters and those who have voted sporadically where I live. Something.

I’m more inclined these days to be alone in my shed, coming out of solitude only to take a refreshing gulp of love from my grandchildren, their parents, a cousin exactly as old as I am, a therapist, a friend of 64 years and her mother. Within those circles and in my shed writing, are where I feel real. When I step outside these orbits, the rest of the world and oddly, even the weather feels unrecognizable and surreal. My rational mind, that could once discipline unknowable and unpredictable phenomenon into “facts” and data through the wizardly powers of statistical analysis, no longer believes itself. It’s the other mind, the one that knows a bird of a specific species appears to tell me something and the one that draws a tarot card. The one that I discover is far more reliable and has greater validity. I give that mind a greater life. The mind that has no beginning, middle or end, no narrative arc. This mind is the one that just starts writing and does not know what will come out, what it will become. That through the descriptions and the drawing out of the details will come a memory, a word, a person or random idea that would never appear if I tried to hunt it down.

The wind today shakes the trees and makes them tremble erratically. It seems to have a bad case of nerves. The marsh grass is not gracefully bowing together, dipping their feathered heads in unison as I have observed before. Today, when I gaze out over the marsh, it was as if I was looking at an ominous brown and black choppy sea. The grasses, despite their differing lengths and shapes, are no longer synchronized and moving together. There are disparate patches throughout the marsh where some grass blows jerkily left, some right. There is no continuity. The marsh is as unsettled and disturbed as I’ve ever seen it. The word that pops into my head is “herky-jerky”. An adjective used to describe something that is progressing in an irregular manner. Something characterized by sudden unpredictable movement or style, difficult and not easy to follow. Irregular, uneven, spasmodic. A memory comes of when someone was trying to teach me how to drive a stick shift. No smoothness, no peaceful transition, only jarring, grinding, shaking gears, wondering if you’ll ever get to where you need to go. My country tomorrow.

Late falling leaves lie in colorful clumps, just begging for a child to jump in them or perhaps an exuberant adult to pick up a handful and throw them in the air. No one stops. They’re too anxious to play right now. Like me, the leaves on the ground have entered the last season of their lifecycle. Many people will rake, blow, discipline, bundle, pick up, and take them to landfills where they will combine with other organic matter to become methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Or they are burnt and create low-level pollution.

No matter who wins this election, there will be a world I have never known before, one I still won’t be able to recognize. If this weren’t the case, the race would not be so close. The things that have been said that I can’t unhear. The shaking marsh grass tells me this will not be a smooth transition, nor an easy ride.

We decide when it comes to our leaves they will become mulch and compost. They’ll break down over time and become part of the earth, providing nourishment for future years’ plantings. Or perhaps they’ll provide shelter and food for the many birds that will stay this winter and that tell me things when I simply stay where I am and listen. Perhaps this means I still have hope. A hope burnished by the lived experience of the fits and starts of change that I will need to see me through the days ahead. A hope that this same level of action, passion and mobilization will continue, that we have the understanding that true change will only come from us the people making it happen, not through whom we elect. We can’t stop there. Look what happened when we did before. In this country it is never, ever over.