Nothing constant in the wild
Letter from Away — April 2, 2024
Engines start outside my window. The muffled pounding of gloved fists on resistant snow, the sound of scrapers looking for purchase under inches of dense-packed, compressed wintry mix. March is leaving the way it came in. However it pleases.
Yesterday’s gray downpour of snow and changeability is now a field of glowing white panels resting on roofs, decks, and lawns while, in quieter moments, from outside my open window, I hear ice melt off trees and drop, as water, onto the thickening slush below.
I am in the recovery stage of a Covid-19 infection. I am asymptomatic; the fever passed a couple of days ago, a third test is negative. CDC says I can mask up and be among the other humans.
As though to remind me of the first spring of our generation’s plague, I picked up the bug at a large gathering, an event the family called a Celebration of Life. Others like me, who had known the deceased for 50 years or so, felt more comfortable with a term that included the sense of grief. Not exactly a funeral but maybe a wake. People traveled across the continent and over an ocean. The service filled a church and was streamed to Oceania, our friend’s good acts having reached, in her lifetime, the other side of the orb on which we all dance.
After the formal and soft-spoken reminiscences, we left the pews and followed a Dixieland combo through the square to a nearby bar where voices, no longer the mezzo-piano of the churchyard, shifted through forte to fortissimo at the speed of white wine and good whisky.
An intimate gathering for a couple of hundred people, all connected through one amazing woman.
When we met, I was in my very early twenties. She was still, but barely, in her teens. Young and wild, by the time we were introduced she had hitchhiked six times across the United States and picked up some construction skills. In Boston she found a good mentor and learned how to rehab broken-down multifamily houses in the community where she lived. Raising two kids, she and some friends began a consignment shop for baby clothes. She bought her first house, renovated it to the high standards in which she’d been trained, moved her growing family into one unit, and rented the rest on decent, working-class, terms. All before the age of 30.
She was always generous. In 1979, when I dithered about getting on a bus with a lot of other hippies, she paid my fare from Boston to D.C. so I could attend a No Nukes rally and hear Kurt Vonnegut and Jackson Browne share wisdom from the other side of a 10-foot hedge.
I was avoiding the crowds whose animated conversation drowned out the words I had woken so early and ridden so far to hear, so the music and ideas came filtered through the greenery without benefit of any visual to give testament to the size of the stage or the number of human bodies spread before it. Later, when the singing and chanting and speaking through microphones and bullhorns had ended, I walked across the messy plaza wondering at the amount of trash — food wrappers, newspapers, cigarette butts — a bunch of environmentalists could leave behind in their fervor to save the planet.
That enlightening bus trip was one of the smaller gifts my friend shared in her lifetime of philanthropy. As she grew from youth to maturity, from owner-occupying landlord to owner of a couple of boutique hotels, the evidence of her kindness also expanded. Old cars were not traded in for new, but rather given to family, friends, and employees who needed them. Foundations were endowed, pies were baked, meals were delivered.
In the midst of spreadsheets and bedsheets, chambermaids and chambers of commerce, she remained the wild card, joie de vivre personified. The celebration of her life brought together old friends and offered up new ones. It is no wonder we shared microbes along with the memories.
A few weeks ago, listening to the NPR quiz show, Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, I learned about a man named Tom Stuker, famous in some circles for spending more time flying in airplanes than anyone not in the travel industry. Stuker bought a lifetime pass from United in 1990 and has, since then, added more than 20 million miles of unnecessary carbon emissions to this tired planet’s burden. That’s more than a 3 million pounds — about what all the people in the Free Press circulation area send skyward in a year. One guy spending more time in the air than on the ground.
Somewhere between Tom Stuker and not flying at all were the attendees of that wake in Cambridge.
Humans, being human, sometimes for no good discernible reason. As I walked across Harvard Yard on my way from sleep to ceremony, I overheard more evidence of our collective cluelessness. An undergrad admissions candidate responding as a parent points out the path to the Design School, exclaiming in dismay, “What! You mean we have to walk out on the street?”
Continuing through the enclave of power and privilege, a student tells visiting family about a dispute with a housemate. “Her reality of how we treat her is not the actual reality,” the above-average American claims, not seeming to understand that all reality is subjective, felt through personal perspective and that “how we treat” one another is all about what the recipient experiences.
I drove home on Sunday full of exhaustion and emotion, arriving with just enough energy to wash my clothes, shower, and hit the hay. By morning my throat was sore and I was pretty sure I had brought back with me the disease that loves to travel. A text from another celebrant confirmed that Covid was once again driving and flying, carrying mortality and discomfort along with our memories.
Yesterday, masked and lifting slabs of wintry mix from the roof of my car, I remembered a thing our dead friend once told me. “The world is a wild place, full of unexpected changes. The more we try to control it, the more we learn we can’t. We mutate or die.”
Controlled environments don’t really exist. The cat always manages to escape the bag; Pandora’s hand is twitching at the lid.
Today, as April steps lightly to the stage, folks complain about the nature of the first days of spring. Even optimists are saying the season is not here but will come eventually. In the spirit of my friend and the lessons of New England weather I say, “This is spring. This is exactly spring.” Enjoy the changes.
Shlomit Auciello is an award-winning writer, photographer, and human ecologist who has lived in Midcoast Maine since 1988. Letter from Away has appeared online and in print, on and off since 1992.
