We Are Unprepared. Meg Little Reilly
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to me, but to the world. Pia was that enviable combination of beauty, self-possession and grace that makes people want to be closer. She was magnetic. Not quite fit, but small and smooth in the most perfect ways. She attracted attention, male and female, everywhere we went. Every head tilt and arm stretch seemed effortless, though I knew that they were choreographed for an imaginary camera that followed her around. As an artist, she’d achieved only middling success, but Pia was unmatched for the artfulness with which she inhabited her own skin.
“I think this is serious, Ash,” Pia said. Her eyes were wide. “We all knew these storms were coming eventually, and now they’re here—not that they would ever admit the real cause.”
There had been no mention of global warming in the news report, but by then no one needed our reluctant government to confirm what we knew to be true. Pia was reflexively defiant of all authority and she seemed to enjoy the vindication that this weather report was already providing. I reached a hand across the front seat to squeeze her knee, sensing that the mood in the car had shifted. We had been drawn out of our own anxious heads and were feeling unified now by our fear and fascination with the coming storms. A familiar wave of guilty relief washed over me. I suggested that we relax on the back porch with cold beers, which she did not object to.
Pia stretched out on a hammock on the porch while I went inside to grab two Long Trail Ales from the fridge. The sun was low in the sky by then and our house was finally beginning to cool. Even though it was September, the temperature hadn’t dropped below eighty-five during the day yet.
I held a wet beer against Pia’s thigh, which made her squeal. She pulled me into the hammock with her, an unsteady arrangement, but I was happy to have her body pressed against mine after a particularly trying couple of days. She was a virtuoso of affection—both creative and infectious with her demonstration of love. After years together, I was still always grateful to receive it.
I ran a finger along the curve of her breast and she closed her eyes.
“We need to start planning,” Pia said. “We need to start stocking up and fortifying the house and...getting seriously self-reliant.”
We talked about self-reliance in those days as if it was a state of higher consciousness. It was the explanation we gave for leaving our jobs in New York and starting a new life in Vermont. We wanted to grow things and build things, preserve things and pickle things. We wanted to play our own music and brew our own beer. This, we believed, was how one lived a real life. There was a pious promise in the notion of self-reliance—a promise that we would not only feel a deep sense of pride and moral superiority, but also that it would ensure eternal marital bliss. Some of this we were not wrong about: it was supremely satisfying to eat cucumbers that we had grown and sit on furniture we had made (two Adirondack chairs assembled from a kit, technically). Pia was taking a pottery class in those days and our house was filled with charmingly lopsided creamers and water pitchers with her initials carved into the underside, like a proud child’s bounty from summer camp. I had taken a weekend-long seminar on beekeeping and the unopened bee materials that I ordered online were still stacked neatly against the house. When the news of The Storms broke, we were only three months into this real-living adventure and we hadn’t learned much at all yet.
Pia and I weren’t alone in these aspirations. There were others like us around the country, young(ish) people, intent on living differently. In the aftermath of America’s economic crisis, a burst housing bubble and an overheating earth, we were part of an unofficial movement of people who wanted to create a life that wasn’t defined by a drive for more stuff. We wanted to spend less time at work and more time with each other. We were smug, sure, but I still believe we were basically right in our quest to find pleasure in simpler pursuits. It wasn’t so much a rejection of our parents’ choices as it was an admission that those choices weren’t available to us. The world was different and we were adapting.
Isole, Vermont, was an answer to those yearnings. It offered a delightful mix of hippies and rednecks, cohabitating in the picturesque valley between two small mountains. You went there only if you knew what you were looking for. There were old farm families and loggers who had been in Isole long enough to remember when it was pronounced in its traditional French way: EE-zo-LAY. But the economic engine of the region came from outside money in our time—reclusive liberals with trust funds, self-employed tech whizzes and socially responsible venture capitalists, all hiding out in a picturesque hamlet that was too far from a city to ever be truly civilized.
I liked to think of myself as a native because I grew up in central Vermont, but the real locals knew us as outsiders. We had come from Brooklyn, where we’d spent the previous twelve years building successful and lucrative careers. Pia had worked in advertising and I was a partner at a graphic design firm. The firm was well established by the time I sold my portion of the business back to my colleagues, but I had been there in the early days, before we had an in-house gym and black-tie holiday parties.
Pia and I fell in love with our Vermont farmhouse on vacation earlier that year. We had taken an extended spring weekend on Crystal Lake. It was too cold to swim, so we took long drives around the Northeast Kingdom, basking in the slowness and serenity. On the last day of our stay, we drove past a perfect yellow farmhouse on a slanted dirt road with a just-posted for-sale sign out front. It was our sign, we decided. We had been waiting for it.
Years before, Pia and I had made a pact to live a different sort of life one day. We had only the vaguest plan to escape the city and remake ourselves, but we were sure the details of this plan would present themselves when it was time. So when we found the farmhouse, we recognized it as the natural extension of the dream we had created together. I sold my piece of the firm and stayed on as a long-distance consultant. Two months later, we were unpacking in Vermont. It was such a fast and easy process that we didn’t have time to iron out all the wrinkles of our new life. Pia didn’t have a new job lined up yet and we hadn’t met a soul there.
It sounds reckless in the retelling, but that was an important part of its appeal. Pia was great at embracing the new and unpredictable, but I was far more cautious, so this leap to a new state also felt like a leap toward my wife. We were going to forge a new path together, armed only with years of shared daydreams about a country life.
The hammock rocked gently as the breeze picked up, and I could smell the goldenrod that was being mowed at the farm upwind. Pia was still listing things that would need to be addressed before The Storms came: gutters, faulty wiring in the basement, a stuck bedroom window. I knew she was probably right; if this storm was for real, then we did need to start preparing. But I stroked her hair and suggested that we spend the rest of the now-enjoyable Friday relaxing. We could get to disaster preparations tomorrow.
“Hey, dudes. What are you doing?” said a squeaky voice.
Approaching us was our seven-year-old neighbor, August, whose dilapidated little house sat on the other side of a thick wall of trees and shrubs to the east. His place was invisible from our porch but connected by a short, neat path that I had helped August clear to facilitate easy movement back and forth. I had met August on the first day of our arrival, when he walked through our open front door and began peppering us with questions. He seemed desperate for friends and bubbling with curiosity. Since then, I’d seen him almost every day. He’d come over to kick a soccer ball back and forth or invite me to check out the new fort he’d built in the woods behind our homes. Pia thought August was sweet, but it was I who spent so much time with him. I wondered sometimes about the adults in his life who had left him so hungry for attention, but I didn’t ask many questions, mainly because I didn’t know what exactly to ask, but also because I enjoyed our time together and wanted to just be with him. And August was helpful. He’d spent his entire short life in those woods and he knew more about self-reliance and country living than Pia and me combined.
“What’s up, buddy?” I said, reaching a hand out for a sticky high five.
As usual, August was barefoot, filthy and smiling. The burdock lodged in his curly auburn hair appeared to have taken hold days before.
August wanted to play Frisbee, so we hoisted our bodies out of the hammock and met him on the lawn. The mood had shifted and we were happy to play. That was the way things changed