September 7, 2020
There is no way to capture the bright red sun. It’s calm, but not a restful calm. It’s the uneasy calm of resignation, nothing to do but hold fast. Yesterday, Jay and I were sitting on our front patio, watching the smoky haze wind through our streets. He told me about the little girl down the street who was playing earlier that morning.
“Haven was walking down the sidewalk all alone, pushing her little doll stroller,” he began. “She stopped to take care of the doll, kind of moved her blankets around and talked to her… Then she got to the corner and looked both ways. When she started to cross, she waved and said ‘thank-you,’ like someone had stopped to let her go. She was in her own world where everything was just normal and people are good and stop for you to cross the street. I felt like I should warn her that the world is ending.”
“The world isn’t ending.” I said.
“There is literally ash raining down on us right now. The sun is red.”
“OK, these are strange days, but people are still good enough to stop and let a mom cross the street.”
“Last night a guy burned because rioters were throwing Molotov cocktails. Lots of Molotov cocktails.”
“Would you have known about that if you weren’t reading news? If you weren’t paying attention to the media, would you know anything about people accept for all our great neighbors and the people you work with, who aren’t throwing Molotov cocktails?”
“It’s just so weird,” he said.
That it is. It’s as though we’ve been sitting, balanced, on a teeter-totter suspended between hope and despair, moving gently up and down NOT QUITE all the way, just waiting for one to take over and leave us up in the sky dangling in uncertainty or down on the ground trying to hold it all together. Interesting – and a little frightening – that the one on the ground holds all the control. I guess we should make sure our ground is not shifting.
Now a cold front is moving in. It’s a welcome reprieve as it’s been in the upper 90’s for most of August and, of course, the fires. I think maybe it’s been a record year. The Pine Gulch fire in Glenwood Canyon is still burning and is at about 140,000 acres. It’s the biggest in Colorado history. Then there’s the Grizzly Peak fire in Grand County, and of course our Cameron Peak fire at 60,000 acres.
Today was going to be a day to prep for the cold front. Bring in the peppers. Dry the herbs. Erect tiny greenhouses to over-winter my hibiscus (if that sounds experimental, it’s because it is).
But the sun was red. Now there is no sun. There is nothing but brown clouds that kind of glow pink. “It’s hard to motivate when you’re looking at Armageddon,” I just told Jay as he mentioned cutting back the chokecherries.
And it’s cold. I guess the front is coming early, which is good news, but I expected 90 degrees again today. It’s cold around the edges, like the air leads with a chill, then warms to the touch. That’s a sure sign that we’re heading for a weather change.
The sudden cold has thrust me into the inevitable disappointment over the undone. According to the air, fall begins today and I did not achieve summer’s fitness goals or change out the patio light fixtures or get my firepit built.
We’re at the end and I don’t feel like I began.
“It is hard to motivate when you’re looking at Armageddon.”
This year, under the brown sky with no sun and against a backdrop of riots and unrest, it is harder to settle for undone. It feels like this abrupt transition into fall could be the precursor for an abrupt transition into something more. But so many things feel so irrelevant. Do I need to be so worried about the extra weight? Does it really matter if my firepit is welcoming if I can’t welcome my friends?
As cryptic as this sounds, it is not death, not the end of life that feels imminent. It is the end of THIS life. We talk about “getting back to normal,” but I don’t know that we will. I don’t know that it’s wise to fight for normalcy when we have changed so much. Instead, maybe we should re-define normal around resilience. While we have been barricaded behind front doors and Zoom meetings and masks, our nation changed. Our expectations are different and so are our standards. When we emerge, we will deal with economic and material destruction that has been unknown to all but the Greatest Generation.
When we long wistfully for casual chats with our hairdresser over highlights and a cut, we are beginning to understand that it won’t be as easy as it was before. We have lost loved ones, businesses, jobs, favorite places, and structure. But we have held onto each other. We have fortified our families and our friends and perhaps the expectations of our image-driven culture matter less. Perhaps we learn to settle for the basics and the essential. We have been craving that, but the truth is that it’s not an easy change. The masks we wear on our face are just the physical symptom of our lives. We have spent more than a decade behind social media masks, hiding our imperfections, protecting those around us from the full force of our messy hearts. When we take off the masks, we may see a little less polish and a little more struggle. We won’t have perfect outfits and perfect rooms. We’ll have comfy clothes and disheveled homes that have seen a lot of real life. Perhaps THAT will be our new normal – real life.