Eye of The Storm

The muscadines made me cry, lit the fuse of despair, those wild grapes broke my heart. That wasn't till lunch or so. Early, in the dark at 5:30 am, I got Momma out of bed and down the stairs into our safest room. We listened in our silence. But I knew the train-approaching sound of a tornado. Stuff slammed against the side of the house and I knew the stomach-dropping sound of big limbs creaking and vibrating as they hit the ground.

One cracked. But it never hit the ground. I couldn't figure out that noise, that lack of finish.

In gray dawn light, I walked in wonder and then ran into my neighbor, already on his tractor. We reconnoitered; the dirt road was blocked by massive trees on each end. He got his extension truck and two chainsaws, and his wife followed on a tractor. We picked through cable lines. But the power lines were gone—not down, just gone. You heard me. they were gone. Whipped into the woods or wrapped around poles? Who knows where?

Even when laid on their sides, I understood trees and vines enough to duck, weave, pull, and caress my way into the thicket. Something about them being horizontal, about me being in their canopy, previously their private places, made bushwhacking through this space intimate. I liked it. I combed through the tangle with my 16-inch while a guy with a really big saw followed, getting the 2-foot diameter trees, and his wife, on a tractor, followed grappling brush to the sides. It's a tree thing, a completion thing, a satisfying 5 hours of work.

By noon, we'd cut 100 yards of trees and one way out and some folks were working from the other way. I walked back home, smelling of chainsaw fuel. That's when I realized our little generator wasn't going to work and there were no parts and no generators for sale for hundreds of miles. I should have known better than this.

I knew better than to open the freezer too. Think of the work in muscadines. First, spending hours choosing the right varieties, planting and training and building a trellis. The purple bag by the ice tray was mushy. I thought of the time spent cutting, seeding, cooking and bagging these.

I slammed the freezer door shut, sat on the floor and cried. Over mushy purple muscadines and the grape hull pie they were supposed to be.

You know what's sad in an infuriating way about all of this? We do it! We contribute to intensifying storms by not caring about climate change on a severe and global scale. WTF? We allow unbridled development with improperly channeled water, no underground electrical grid, and woefully few infrastructure improvements. At the same time we crow about how exciting it is that amazon is building a warehouse in our county.

OK. On a personal level; I messed up. I admit it. I should have tested my generator last week. If I'd done a few smart things, I wouldn't be crying over sour grapes. But other’s messed up big time. (*jf note to self: edit out the rant about libertarians, nikkie haley and her ilk, profit-driven developers, and self-interested government leaders who could have prevented this.)

Here’s a video of our road work. If you can’t see this video, download the ap for your phone or laptop. I swear you’ll enjoy this all a lot more….

Since we don't have broadband, y'all give me some leeway on the grammar and spelling in this post. There may be a few edits I missed. We can’t even run our business now. So no shipping plants for sure. We can ship books and t-shirts. Check out my previous books here while we try to get things back to normal.