After the Rains

On Wednesday, July 10, exactly a year after historic flooding, Vermont was hit with another storm.  

I wasn’t home.  My phone pinged with alert after alert: tornado warning, heavy rain warning, flash flood warning, severe thunderstorm warning.

As the storm intensified, all I wanted was to go into it.  

To be home, not 8 hours away on the edge of Western New York, which too was hit with the remnants of Hurricane Beryl.  

On Thursday, I woke to more alerts: Active evacuation in Moretown.  Flooding in Barre.  Flooding in Plainfield.  Emergency shelters open.  

I scrolled social media and watched photos of the storm’s damage pile up.  I called Edge and got the update: the bottom of our farm road blown out on one side, both town roads leading the farm impassable. 

Here’s a drone video of one of the roads, taken by our neighbor:

Meanwhile, I sat in a conference workshop, braced for another round of Vermont Strong — the slogan carried over from 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, pasted over license plates to raise money for storm repair — and scrawled these notes:

I am so tired of being strong.  What if we let ourselves be soft?  Might we change then?  Might we let rivers stretch and not try to hold them to one course with concrete and cinder blocks?  Might we leave the floodplains?  Not rebuild, but start anew?

Grief.  Such weight in my body.  

Grief at all that is lost, all that’s being lost — the ability to rely on weather patterns.  The ability to farm without drought or rain washing crops away, flooding, cutting off access.  

Grief.  More than anything, we need a way to feel it.  A way to hold and be held how soil holds.  And then a way to catalyze and move like rivers move, like waterfalls.  Set rivers free.  Set ourselves free.

In the conference room, I cycled from grief to future-thinking to overwhelm and sadness. 

Yearning to be home welled up and pulsed through my body. I wrote in my notebook: when my home is hurting, I want to be home.  To go closer to the wound.

I wondered about climate and war refugees, who can’t go home.  The terrible ache of that.  

I wondered again what resilience means.

When I finally did make it home, it was by taking detours to bypass the closed roads.  

With the amount of road repairs needed, we’ve had to close our Farm Stand just at the start of PYO flower season.  Despite the damage to our town roads, our hillside farm didn’t flood.  Despite the saturated soil, missed succession plantings, and inability to plant outside right now, I see the devastation to other farms across the state who are underwater.  

Some have asked how they can help from afar.  In the immediate term, donations to  NOFA-VT’s Farmer Emergency Fund are a meaningful way to support farmers impacted by the storm.  

In the long-term, we need more than reactive repair.  We need future planning.  New policies.  Accountability from the fossil fuel industry.  

We need community care.

Today, I offer a poem, for poetry is a form of care. 

This poem is still coming into being, but it feels right to share the in-process version.  After all, we’re all in the process of figuring out how to move forward.

After the Rains

We saw the stones
how they’d flowed
onto roads
how granite blocks
that once anchored bridges
tumbled away in the rush

It started simple:
one raindrop
then another
gathered and multiplied
until even pavement rippled 
and ripped away

Could we learn to roar 
like a summer storm
Could we rise like flood
waters and remake
the future

The old roads don’t
lead the way anymore
Here, let’s add our tears
and let them lift us

Let our grief
and our rage
unmoor the greed
that led to this

Let the thunder
in our hearts
break open
clap so loud
it shakes us all
back into balance

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