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, which will protect seeds in even subzero temperatures.”
Pia pointed to a cloth shopping bag on the floor that held small hard boxes one might take on an underwater expedition. She stopped to take inventory of her purchases, her finger nervously tapping a bag of radish seeds.
“Wow, you’re not kidding about these disaster preparations!” I laughed, assuming she’d appreciate the humor in it all, but she didn’t laugh back, so I stopped. “Pia, do you really think our food supply is going to disappear because of a big storm? In the United States?”
She looked up at me, frustrated. “Maybe not right away, but eventually, yes, it could. Ash, you know you have an almost fanatical trust in the system—our government, capitalism, whatever. It’s possible that our civilized society is only a few bad storms away from chaos, you know?”
Her humorlessness was a surprise to me, but I got the message: take this seriously. I didn’t have any reason to fight with her about it, so I shrugged and walked to the refrigerator to take stock of its sad contents. Should it matter that she was going a little overboard with this disaster planning, I wondered. What was the harm in being prepared? It irked me that she couldn’t laugh about it as we had in previous days. But, whatever. The refrigerator housed a slimy bag of scallions, separating cream in a precious glass bottle and a growler of lager. My stomach fluttered.
“Okay, I have no problem with all this, Pia, but don’t make this about me.” It came out meaner than I intended.
“It is about you,” she said. “It’s about you and me and our life here in the woods. Will you help me get ready for these storms or not?”
I realized that we had already settled into a language for the new weather reality before us. There were The Storms: immediate, multiple and unseasonable storms of every variety that we should expect for several months, beginning soon. There was also, further off in the future, The Storm: the collision of several atmospheric forces that would create something so historic and violent that we still chose to believe it was a statistical improbability.
Pia went on, “Ash, I’m going to a meeting tonight and I would really like you to come. It’s just a group of locals who are brainstorming about storm preparations. I think it’s important.”
I didn’t want to go to a meeting. I wanted to lie on the couch and drink a beer and read a book that had nothing to do with weather or survivalism. But she looked like she needed me.
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to listen.” I shrugged.
Pia jumped up to throw her arms around my neck and I was immediately pleased with how I’d handled the situation. I didn’t mind being taken on her impromptu adventures and I appreciated the freshness they injected into married life. Freshness was never a problem for us.
* * *
“Let’s memorialize this moment!” That was what Pia had said when we first arrived at our new Vermont home.
It was a brutally hot June day and we’d been driving for seven hours. The air-conditioning in our car had broken in Connecticut, so our clothes were damp with sweat when we finally peeled ourselves out of the seats at the end of our journey. I got out first, sending Dunkin’ Donuts cruller crumbs everywhere as I stepped away from the car to relieve myself. Pia wiped her sweating face on her shirt and stretched to touch her toes.
It