We Are Unprepared. Meg Little Reilly
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biblical,” she said. Her hair was wet and she was shivering, so I reached into the backseat for a dirty sweatshirt that I’d left there weeks ago. She pulled it on and shook her head in disbelief at the weather change. There was a slight smile on her face.
“Ash, we should keep shopping...track down the stuff on our original list. This isn’t going to get less weird, you know?”
I did know. I felt it, too. The sun was already returning, but an uncertainty had stung us with that hail. We needed to start doing things. So I steered the car toward Burlington and the big-box stores that would have what we needed and the countless new items that popped into our heads as the distant notion of catastrophe inched closer.
Pia laughed out loud as we gained speed on the highway. “It’s kind of fun, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Waiting for disaster. It shouldn’t be, but it’s kind of fun.”
I knew what she was talking about. Candlelit blackouts and immobilizing snow days always thrilled me. To be briefly thrust into a more primitive lifestyle awakens something in us. But it must be brief and risk-free to be fun. It can’t be real. The storm predictions before us sounded more consequential than those fleeting adventures of the past.
“Remember that summer storm in our old place when we lost the power for three days?” she asked.
“It’s one of my favorite memories. My sister still talks about it.”
Years before, soon after I had proposed to Pia, a hurricane hit New York on its way off the coast, bringing torrential rains, followed by three hot, powerless days. My sister and her girlfriend were visiting from London at the time, and I was already uneasy about their first encounter with Pia. But I needn’t have been because Pia was at her best when life went off script.
* * *
We spent two boring days playing board games in the dark and finishing all the wine in the apartment. Without air-conditioning, we were grumpy and smelly, just waiting for life to return to normal. Pia was bouncing off the walls and I could tell that she was going to manifest action imminently. Finally, the rain stopped and Pia went outside. She ran to the corner store for a thirty-pack of Miller Lite, turned our speakers out the window toward the wet street and started knocking on neighbors’ doors. She had started a block party. People poured out of their apartments, many contributing to the beer tub, calling their friends to bring more. Makeshift barricades of chairs and garbage pails were set up on either side of the block to keep cars out, and someone filled a kiddie pool with fresh water. Within twenty minutes, there were close to a hundred people in the street, shaking off the sweaty cabin fever of the preceding days. It felt organic and spontaneous—the big bang of block parties—and no one remembered later how it began. But it wasn’t organic; Pia created it out of nothing. She saw the world for its potential and made interesting things happen. Life with someone like that is limitless.
“She’s rad,” my sister said later. “Fucking nuts, but rad.” That was Pia’s effect on people.
* * *
We drove along in silence, thinking about that party and the complicated pleasure of doom.
“I saw the birds,” Pia said quietly. The sun had reappeared. “The dead ones. It’s spooky—the hot weather and the sudden hail. Everything is a little wrong.”
I nodded and put a hand on her bare knee. There wasn’t much more to say, so I kept driving silently. It was eighty degrees when we woke up, and now the dashboard said sixty. The hail, the birds, the panicked shoppers. It was spooky, but I was grateful for the simple, shared task before us.
Forty-five minutes later, we were making our way up and down the aisles of Home Depot, joking about the impending apocalypse and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.
“Of course, the dollar will crash after The Storms come, and we will have to turn to primitive forms of currency,” I said with a wide sweep of my arm as we passed the lawn mowers.
“Like spices and fermented cider and stuff?” Pia played along.
“No, much more primitive than that. Blow jobs primarily. Hand jobs also, though they aren’t worth nearly as much.”
She shrieked with laughter, turning several heads around us. Pia never cared who saw her laugh (or cry). I felt proud to be responsible for delighting this beautiful woman.
We bought a snow shovel and two pairs of work gloves, caulking and sheets of insulation. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it felt proactive. The hurried shoppers around us made small talk about which items were essential in which types of weather events and I studied them closely, eager to pass as an experienced local. We bought what they bought and hoped they were right.
Several hours and hundreds of dollars later, Pia and I were drinking wine on our back porch again, surrounded by bags of items that promised to keep us safe from whatever was coming. The back porch was the best part of that house, looking out on our unkempt backyard that dissolved into dark woods. It was home.
I don’t remember the indoors of my childhood. I grew up in a pretty Victorian house, bigger than most of my classmates’ homes and lovingly cared for, but I didn’t spend much time inside it. My parents were strong believers in the character-building properties of outdoor play, so they hurried us into the woods behind our house as soon as the sun was up each morning. We played until we were shivering, hungry or injured and then slept as if we were dead each night. My siblings eventually resisted this parenting technique, which would undoubtedly classify as some form of neglect today, but I embraced it until high school. The woods were freedom to me: undeveloped; unregulated by grown-ups and infinite in their potential for discovery. There was an order to the woods, but it wasn’t dictated by man. I wanted to understand that order, to have dual citizenship in both the natural and human worlds. Passing freely between them seemed the ultimate power. So I became a voracious consumer of science and nature writing. I wanted to know every species of wildlife and the subtle languages with which they spoke to one another. I wanted to be a part of that organism and welcomed by its inhabitants.
With puberty and the new concerns of young adulthood, my commitment to that mission waned and I eventually left the woods. I went inside. I didn’t think much about that departure at the time, but I’ve come to realize that it came at a cost. The sense of purpose and belonging I’d had in those woods hadn’t been replaced by anything in adulthood.
Pia had her head resting in my lap as we swung back and forth on the bench watching the sun set. It was warm again and there was no evidence of the surprise hailstorm that had barged through earlier that day.
“This isn’t what September is supposed to look like,” I said, shaking my head. I was comfortable with her there in my arms, but unable to relax entirely.
“But this is lovely,” Pia said with her eyes closed. Beauty, she believed, had inherent value. “Remind me what September in Vermont is supposed to look like.”
I swatted a mosquito from her forehead and thought for a moment.
“I don’t know... Colder, quieter... The wind should be louder than the bugs and animals. Do you know that some years on Halloween, we would have to trick-or-treat in the snow? That’s only a few weeks away.”
Pia opened her eyes and touched my face. “I don’t think that’s going to happen ever again, my love. It’s sad, really. Lots of things are going to be different for our kids.”
It was a surprisingly dour observation considering Pia’s recent obsession with having children. But I didn’t know then that her attention had already shifted away from those hopeful plans.
“SURFACE WATERS ARE expected to reach eighty-two degrees—maybe even higher—sometime in November. We will also see warm, moist air traveling up the Gulf Coast and very low wind shear.”
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