Precipitating Incidents

Today I want to capture some moments from the past week:

--On Thursday, I switched from my NPR station which has begun annual fundraising.  I heard the KISS song "Beth" for the first time in years, perhaps decades.  I sang along as if no time had passed at all.  Why does my brain store such minutiae?  I also heard the ending differently.  I now see this song as an artist struggling with the balance of commitment to the band, to the song, and to the one at home who waits.  At the end of the song, the band will be playing all night.  The singer has chosen the band over Beth.  In my younger years of listening to the power ballad, I don't think I fully realized that.

--I have been using my critical facilities for more than simple pop songs.  I continue to be so very impressed with what Marge Piercy managed to capture in her novel Vida:  the intersection of politics, gender, history--and such wonderful descriptions of food.  Piercy was one of my all-time favorite writers when I was in undergraduate school, and I'm glad that her work holds up.

--I'm struck by how many writers I've revisited this year--and how much I still enjoy their work.

--I've gotten writing of my own done this week.  Never enough.  I am not that singer of "Beth," choosing art over all other commitments.  But it is good to write and good to send packets of writing out into the world.

--Let me also remember the trauma of September that continues to ripple through the weeks.  For us, it was Hurricane Irma, but Hurricane Maria haunts me too.  I predict that we will see Hurricane Maria as prompting a huge migration that will change Puerto Rico, Florida, and points beyond in ways that we don't fully understand right now.

--We had another visit from the insurance adjuster yesterday--the flood insurance adjuster.  We had some puddles of water in the front bedroom, but the adjuster wondered if there was some way to assess if the underside of the house was damaged.  We have a board that my spouse put in place to replace the rotting wood that was revealed when the huge fish tank was removed.  He pulled up that board to reveal that we still have 6 inches of water under the house--one month after the storm.

--Earlier, I spoke to another insurance representative, this time from the wind policy company.  He asked me to tell him about the damage, so I did.  He said in a quiet, awed voice, "Wow.  You had a lot of damage."

--It's no wonder that I've been feeling overwhelmed at points--we have all this damage, and yet life goes on, at a hectic pace.  I am not kidding when I say that this storm has made me rethink many of my life choices--I would say "all of my life choices," but the sensible part of me only lets my brain go back so many years--that way madness lies.  Even rethinking the move to this neighborhood only makes a certain amount of sense; I don't have a time machine, after all.  Many of the decisions that I've made I might make differently, with the benefit of hindsight.

--And yet, I'm also aware that we're lucky.  We have floors under our feet.  We solved the rain coming through the walls and ceiling in the laundry room.  No one is counting on us for the cottage's return to normal.

--We may look back and see this storm as the precipitating incident that propelled us to a good place.  It has happened before.