We Are Unprepared. Meg Little Reilly

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СКАЧАТЬ spend the whole afternoon browsing quirky local shops. But we were really only playing; there was no consistency or order to it. Dinner was often organic frozen pizza, and dust gathered in the corners of our beloved home at an alarming rate. We hadn’t been playing house long enough to get the act down.

      I spent the first hour of my workday looking past my computer screen through the dirty window that framed our backyard. The browning grass was about six inches tall and peppered with old dandelions. Lady ferns spanned the perimeter of the lawn, claiming more of it all the time. I thought I saw the vibrant blue of a closed gentian flower, a comforting sign that autumn was close and nature’s clock wasn’t entirely out of whack. This day didn’t look like the previous one. Darker clouds had moved in and parked right above us, as if daylight had never quite arrived. The thermometer said sixty-eight, so it was moving in the right direction, but still too slowly.

      August emerged with a soccer ball from the path in the woods that connected our homes and I watched his little body dribble around imaginary opponents. It was just after eight, so he wouldn’t have to leave for school for another half hour. My stiff legs twitched at the sight of August’s weightless movement around the yard and couldn’t resist joining him. With a few brief words, we were passing the ball back and forth between us. His kicks were usually too far to one side or the other, so I spent a lot of the time chasing after the ball and dribbling back to the center of the yard. After a thoroughly aerobic kickabout, a wild shot to the left planted the ball into a dense blackberry bush.

      “This one’s all you, buddy,” I said, but August was already parting the prickly branches.

      I bounced on one foot and then the other, trying to revive the spring I remembered in my feet from youth soccer games.

      “Hey, look at that.” August pointed to a patch of moist earth beneath him where a perfect footprint had been left by a small animal.

      I leaned in. “A fox maybe? I don’t know...” I crouched down to get a closer look as August pulled himself out of the bramble and fastidiously cleaned the soccer ball with his hands.

      “When I was a baby fox...” he started.

      “What?”

      “When I was a baby fox, I liked to run through these woods.”

      When I was a baby fox. He wasn’t talking to me, exactly; just reminiscing to himself. He was in his own head now. He said things like this from time to time, weaving imaginative fantasies with the tangible present. It wasn’t the sort of thing that seemed worrisome, not to me anyhow. No, these were precious clues about who August was. This was a small, open door to a brilliant and busy interior life. A vibrant ray of light poured out that door, illuminating a slice of our backyard. I wanted to see more of it. Were all children this amazing and I’d just failed to see it before now, or was there something special about this dirty, neglected little boy who roamed these woods alone whenever he had a chance?

      I knew that the neglect was in some part responsible for what made August extraordinary. He hadn’t been properly socialized. August was unschooled in the parameters of our adult reality. He was smart—above average at least—but like a baby, he still lived in a world in which you could hear colors and touch sounds and reach back to memories from lives lived before this one. The curtain between real and unreal hadn’t yet come down for August. I don’t know when it comes down for the rest of us, but tragically, it must be so early in our lives that we retain no recollection of the change. Or perhaps that’s an act of mercy committed by our brains because the memory of our former selves would leave us wanting forever. August was still that early self, unmolested by reason and order. I hoped for him to never change. Like a collectable figurine, I imagined boxing him up neatly and preserving him on a shelf. But of course, that impulse was in direct opposition to the conditions that enabled him to grow this way. He needed safety, but not captivity. How a parent maintains such a balance, I couldn’t imagine.

      We kicked the ball back and forth for another ten minutes before August announced that he needed to catch the bus for school and disappeared into the path that connected our homes. I spent two more hours at my computer before calling it quits and heading out to the shed. I’d been making incremental progress on a maple coffee table for weeks and was itching to get back to work on it. It wasn’t real woodworking—I bought each of the raw pieces precut from the lumberyard—but the act of sanding and hammering and staining was no less satisfying. I had a compulsive need to drive each day forward with projects, tangible evidence of progress made. But more than other hobbies I’d flirted with over the years, making furniture felt like the best fit. To be dirty, scraped and physically tired—these were admirable male traits to me. As a child, I most loved my father when he was building things. I can distinctly remember the smell of his sweat mixed with sawdust and the way his thinning T-shirts clung to his skin. Even after years spent in Brooklyn, living among the overeducated creative class, that was what truly stirred admiration in me. It was self-improvement by hammer, and I nearly believed I was building a better version of myself with each swing.

      I moved a hand plane slowly back and forth along the underside of the tabletop and thought about August in that small dark house. He was the only child of two reclusive, spaced-out aging hippies. The father never seemed to leave the house and the mother was a part-time cashier at the yarn shop downtown. They were poor, but not hungry. What worried me was their absence from August’s life, his unfettered freedom to roam and their apparent disinterest in his whereabouts. There was something going on inside that run-down little house that wasn’t right, but I hadn’t put my finger on it yet.

      Swish, swish, swish. The plane moved rhythmically with me until it felt like a part of my own hand and the texture of the smoothing wood passed right through it to my fingertips. I thought about August, the dimming woods behind our house and the enormous changes our lives had undergone in just a few short months.

      I must have been out there for several hours because I didn’t notice how cool the air had gotten until Pia’s voice shook me out of my trance.

      “What are you still doing out here, Ash?”

      She stood in the doorway of the shed, her keys dangling in one hand and a cloth shopping bag in the other.

      “I’m working on the legs to this table. Come take a look. It’s really coming together. I need advice on the finish.”

      I suspected that she wasn’t interested in the finish. It was getting dark out, though I guessed it was only about one in the afternoon.

      “We need to go inside and start preparing,” Pia said, slightly agitated. “Have you looked at the sky? Those snowstorms are coming. This isn’t a joke.”

      Behind Pia’s silhouette in the doorway, I could see charcoal clouds moving in. I hadn’t noticed the weather change from dim to ominous in the time I’d been working, but something had indeed shifted. Anyhow, I was tired and happy to have her back, so I followed Pia inside to the kitchen table, where she unpacked the contents of her shopping bag. I mentioned that the nor’easters weren’t expected for another month or so, but she pretended not to hear me.

      “Heirloom seeds are the way to go here,” Pia said as if I’d asked. She pulled handfuls of small paper seed envelopes out of a cloth bag and stacked them on the kitchen table. “Hybrid and GMO seeds are going to be useless in the future because they aren’t stable, or can’t be stored, or something. Apparently, we have to have heirloom.”

      She was lining the seed envelopes up in rows, according to variety.

      “I have black turtle bean, snowball cauliflower, green sprouting broccoli, champion radish, golden acre cabbage,” she went on. “Plus I got these moisture-sealed containers, СКАЧАТЬ