“Thank God you’re home,” said Cora to Howard as the cold rain started to fall. “Help me get all this stuff inside, will you?” She wrapped her sweater more closely around her and pushed her short, dark hair back under her blue wool cap.
Howard surveyed the front yard, which was covered with old window screens draped in cheesecloth, beneath which apple slices had been drying. He was tall and gangly, with a deeply tanned face and capable hands. Cora was struggling with a large aluminum-framed screen, which twisted in her hands as she lifted it, dumping apple slices onto the wet grass.
“No, I can get this one,” Cora said, squatting down to pick up the apple slices. “Sweetie,” she added, sitting back on the heels of her muddy boots.
Howard nodded briefly, stacked three wood-framed screens together, picked them up, and in a few strides stowed them on the front porch.
The rain was coming down faster now, and by the time Cora had bundled all the fallen apple slices into her turned-up wool skirt, Howard had the rest of the screens moved to the porch. “Shall we get them into the house, then?” he asked. Cora nodded and pushed open the door for him with her shoulder.
The half-dried apple slices were mixed with rain and bits of grass. She looked at the results of her morning’s work, ruined, and felt hot tears behind her eyes. She reached toward the light switch inside the door, and then snorted derisively. “Even after a year, I still half-expect the electricity to work.”
Howard got the screens into the living room, where they lay dripping water onto the hardwood floor. “I know, sweetie,” he said. “And I keep turning on the tap in the kitchen sink. We’ll get over it eventually.”
“We’re going into another winter,” Cora said, sitting down on the sofa with a thump. “I don’t know how we’re going to stand it. We don’t have nearly enough food to last us.”
“Hardly anybody does,” he said. “Though we’ve all been trying. You and I, we’ve been gardening and scrounging full-time, right? Trading the clothes and quilts you make for grains and beans at the Farmers’ Market. Thank God, we have local farmers here growing local food. And by now we have quite a bit of food stored up, canned or dried or buried in the back yard in garbage cans.”
Cora just sat there. “Oh, I know,” she said. “We’re fortunate to be doing so well. We still just don’t have enough, though.” She put the apple slices back on her lap and tried picking out the wet grass. It stuck to her fingers and to the apple slices.
Howard went to the linen closet and got a stack of towels. He spread one out on the floor, peeled the wet cheesecloth from a nearby screen, knelt down and started moving apples to the dry towel.
“It’s the lack of light, too,” Cora said. “It’s the equinox already, and the evenings are drawing in. And we’re behind in splitting firewood, too.” He handed her a towel, and she dumped her handful of slices into it and began blotting them.
He got up and moved a stack of empty screens back out to the porch. The rain was beating down strongly, and the air had grown colder.
Cora let out a wail, and Howard turned sharply toward her. “Oh, it’s just a slug” she said, but her face looked frozen, and Howard knelt beside her and took the slug from her hand.
“The slug was so slimy,” she cried into his shoulder. “I know I should be used to them by now.”
“Here, you can wipe your fingers on my sleeve,” he said, and she did.
“All those apples, all that work – wasted!”
“We can finish drying most of them by the woodstove,” he said. “And the ones that fell, we’ll just boil them to kill any germs. Come on, it’ll taste good.”
“Oh, I know you’re right, but still,” she said. “I don’t want to go on bravely. I want electricity and running water back again. I don’t want to be consoled.”
“We’re both right,” he said. “It’s going to be a hard winter.” And he popped a piece of half-dried apple into her mouth.
“Sweet and sour,” she said, kissing him.
Cora worried about Howard. Between his day job as kitchen manager at Loaves and Fishes, the local community meals program, his wild inventing jags at night, and his work in the house and garden at odd hours, she would have thought he’d be tense and strained. But his skin and eyes glowed, he slept deeply at night, and Cora could hear him whistling in the mornings.
Cora never expected to be a housewife, and yet her main role now was to keep them in food, warmth, clothing and water. Her sewing business had once been her joy. She used to sort gleefully through the huge stock of used clothing that still circulated through the community, pulling out things to rescue and refashion. Now she had to struggle to find time to sew, and she crawled into bed every night like a stranded traveler crawling into an oasis. She had to remind herself to take delight in the colors and textures of cloth and carve out time to see her friends.
Howard, with his friends Andy and Sparky, had been working a couple nights a week to devise a solar still. Their idea was to purify water using existing solar hot water technology to heat and then distill the water. Reflectors were also somehow involved, Cora believed. The guys had a working model, but it still tended to leak, so they weren’t ready to go public with it. They wanted to do solar because firewood was just about the only source of fuel, and hardly anybody seriously wanted to clear cut the forests. Only the emergency services and the very rich could afford gasoline, heating gas, or generators.
As soon as Cora and Howard got the apple slices squared away, there was a hard, brisk knock on the front door, and Howard got up to open it.
“Come on in,” he said. “Cora, it’s Joe from down the block.”
Joe stood awkwardly just inside the door, his high rubber boots and neon yellow slicker dripping onto the floor. “We’re out passing the word around. With the storm coming at us, we fired up the generator down at the station and got on the horn. It’s a late hurricane, though the worst of it may go south of here.”
Howard winced. “Think Binghamton will get a repeat of 2011?”
Joe frowned. “Or those other ones in the years before that. Hundred-year flood my ass. Didn’t used to be we’d get hurricanes this far inland.” He smoothed back his thinning hair, and put his helmet back on. “Anyhow, probably worth keeping an eye on your basement. If you have some time, come on out and help us spread the word, but take care of your own first.”
Joe left with a quick wave, and Howard and Cora headed downstairs. Their basement didn’t usually flood, even in heavy rain, but Ithaca, their small Upstate New York town, was built on a flood plain with hills on three sides, so flooding was always a risk.
The old concrete floor seemed dry, but Howard knelt and put his ear to the storm drain. “Gurgling,” he said. “And a low roar.”
Cora looked around her, picturing the water backing up through the storm drain. “Let’s move the stuff off the floor, then.”
“Everything we can move,” said Howard, gesturing toward a carefully rebuilt Mercedes diesel engine sitting in one corner. “Some stuff is too heavy. But let’s move what we can with the two of us.”
“I wish Sierra were here,” said Cora as they worked. “I still miss having her as a housemate. And I wish I knew if my message got through to her to come into town and visit. I haven’t seen her at all since she got that job at the chicken farm and moved out there. I wonder how she’s doing.”
Howard laughed. “Undaunted, I’ll bet you.”
Most of Howard’s workshop was already on shelves and cabinets mounted on the walls, but he and Cora stacked an assortment of fishing tackle boxes and hardware containers on top of the washer and drier, which hadn’t been used for more than a year.
“Why do we hold onto this junk?” asked Cora.
“Unrusted metal,” said Howard. “Screws and copper wires and rotating drums.”
“We definitely should get rid of the furnace,” said Cora “It was ready for the metal recycling 40 years ago.”
Howard looked at the huge cylindrical monster with its bulky metal ductwork reaching out in all directions. He shrugged and pulled a neat package of heavy-duty plastic sheeting off a nearby shelf. “I think I’ll wrap up the motor,” he said. “My hoping against hope for veggie diesel.”
“I’ll go close up the rest of the house,” said Cora. Howard got down on the floor next to the motor, fastening some plastic sheeting with duct tape.
All the windows were snug and tight, though water streamed in sheets down their outsides. She went out to the back yard and gave the scraps from that day’s cooking to the three chickens. She filled their bucket with filtered, boiled rainwater and closed up their coop securely. Once again, there were no eggs.
She went back into the living room and turned all the apple slices that were drying on the towels. She made a small, careful fire in the woodstove, filled two cast-iron pots with filtered rainwater from the rain barrels and put them on the stove. She added the grassy apple slices to one of them.
Outside, the wind was rising, and the neighborhood was dark. What can I make that’s quick? she thought. She unwrapped some dried noodles she got at the Farmers’ Market, made from local wheat. She pulled down a head of garlic and two hot peppers from the braids drying on the wall. Wrapping her old raincoat around her, she dashed out into the dark with a knife and cut some kale. She chopped the garlic and hot pepper and cleaned the kale.
Then she went back down to see what Howard was doing. He was still lying on the floor next to the motor, winding a final strapping of duct tape around the double layer of plastic sheeting that now encased it.
He got up when he saw Cora, and they went back upstairs.
“I’m filthy,” he said. “Do we have any hot water?”
“Pretty soon,” said Cora. “I’m trying to be sparing with the wood.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, opening the stove and adding more kindling.
Cora glared at him. “We’re way behind in splitting wood. We’re going to need a lot more before winter.”
“Shhh,” he said, pulling off his grimy pants and shirt and socks. He put another piece of wood on the fire and poked it into place.
“God, even my underwear is dirty,” he said.
“It’s wet, too, all down one side,” said Cora, and they both dashed for the basement stairs. Sure enough, the floor was growing damp, a dark stain spreading out from one corner, water gathering in a low spot in the concrete. Howard put his grimy clothes right back on, and they gathered mops, rags, buckets, and began sopping up the water.
The water seeped in very slowly, but eventually they had to bail, literally. They scooped up water in pails, took it outside to dump in the storm sewer, where more water was rushing to the lake. Several of their neighbors were doing the same thing, and they all spent most of the night helping each other, sharing their buckets and the single hand pump someone had. One neighbor, a softly pretty young student named Cate, brought out a jug of apple cider and a pan of maple rolls, both of which disappeared almost instantly.
By morning the rain had stopped, there was only a thin film of water on their basement floor, and Howard and Cora were exhausted. They could see some of the damage through the windows: big branches down, torn plastic caught in the tree branches, the chicken coop slumped slightly out of plumb.
Howard built a hefty, substantial fire in the woodstove, and Cora didn’t say a word. While he boiled water and set up the French press, Cora surveyed the food they had. Oh, let’s have something other than that everlasting oatmeal, she thought.
She sliced up some odds and ends of vegetables, two red peppers, some new potatoes, a couple of carrots. She chopped a thin burdock root she had dug up by the fence along the school playground and sautéed it with onions and garlic in leftover bacon grease She looked under the front porch, and sure enough two last shiitake mushrooms were blooming on one of the mushroom logs. She sliced them thinly and added them to the pan, then ran out to give the scraps to the chickens and fill their water bucket. The back wall of the coop had pulled loose on one side, and she shoved it back into place as best she could.
Howard meanwhile had brought up the large enamel washtub from downstairs, scrubbed it clean, and set it with some ceremony on the kitchen floor near the stove. As Cora watched, he mixed cool rainwater with hot and added a few drops of the lavender oil he had distilled over the summer using his first small prototype of a solar still.
“You go first, sweetie,” he said, helping her pull the layers of damp muddy sweaters over her head. Most of the mud came away with the clothes, and Cora blotted her muddy hair with a dishtowel before she stepped in.
She wanted to weep, the water was so warm and soothing on her feet, and then she sat down in the warm water nearly up to her waist.
“How’s the temperature?” asked Howard.
“Could be just a little warmer,” she said, and he poured in more hot water from the teakettle.
Cora did weep then, just a few tears seeping out from her eyes as Howard took a clean wash cloth and began to wash her face and ears. He smiled at her silently and kept washing and rinsing: her shoulders, her breasts, her back, the parts of her underwater.
Then he cupped water in his hands to wet her hair, rubbed in a little liquid soap and massaged the suds into her scalp, behind her ears, along the base of her skull.
She learned back into his supporting hand as with the other hand he poured warm clean water through her hair until it squeaked.
She reached over and embraced him, filthy t-shirt and all, and he hugged her back.
She stepped out onto a towel, wrapped herself in her robe, and helped him out of his soggy underwear. He added more hot water to the tub and climbed in. She soaped him all over, adding more hot water when he wanted it, and working the knots out of the muscles along his spine. She blended some pleasantly warm water and poured it through his hair, stroking out the soap and the tangles.
“Coffee in two minutes,” he said, stepping out of the washtub. ”We have anything for breakfast?”
Cora just laughed and stirred the potatoes and vegetables, which were starting to brown nicely. She added some chives from the plant on the windowsill.
Howard set the table, and she divided the food onto two plates and sat down with him.
They held hands across the table for a moment, then kissed each other’s hands, let go and began to eat.
“I’m still surprised your conscience doesn’t bother you, drinking coffee,” she said, sipping contentedly from her own cup.
“No, it really doesn’t. I don’t know where Sparky gets it, and I don’t want to know. I realize it can’t be ethical, but I just don’t care. I don’t make that much money from working, but I can’t think of anything else I’d rather buy with it.”
“It’s so great not to feel grubby for a change,” Cora said. “Another thing I don’t seem to be getting used to.”
The next day after Howard left for work, Cora had fed the chickens and was starting in on the endless laundry when the front door slammed open.
“Hey, beautiful,” said Sierra, kicking off her muddy sneakers and striding across Cora’s kitchen floor in her sock feet. Her blond hair was cropped short, and she was tall and lean and definite.
“Oh God, I missed you,” said Cora, running over to hug her. “When did you get into town?”
Sierra wrapped her arms around Cora and lifted her off the ground for a moment. “Twenty minutes ago? I came right over after I checked in with the Fire Department.”
“Cornbread?” asked Cora, cutting a piece and putting it on a blue plate without waiting for an answer. “How’s life on the chicken farm?”
Sierra shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Brad and Grace are doing great, but their well got flooded. It smells like nail polish remover.” She stopped and took a big bite of cornbread. “They’re trying to borrow a horse and cart to haul water from town. I said I’d ask around.”
Cora shook her head. “The only people I know with a horse are charging two hundred an hour to rent him out.”
“Okay, scratch that,” said Sierra, continuing to eat.
“Look, I brought you a present,” she went on, holding out a small package double-wrapped in plastic. “Half a pound of organic alfalfa seeds for sprouting in the winter. Brad and Grace grew way more than they needed.” She dampened a cloth and began wiping the counters as if she still lived there. “So it looks like you guys survived the storm all right.”
Cora pulled her workbasket over next to her chair, and picked up a down jacket with a broken zipper. “Yes, except for being sleepless zombies,” she said. “All through the neighborhood, most of us were up half the night sharing a few buckets and a hand pump to get water out of our basements.”
Sierra hung up the old dishtowel on the line over the stove. “Cora, it’s really bad south of here. People say that the flooding was even worse than the so-called Hundred Year Floods in 2010 and 2011. The Susquehanna is still rising, and acres and acres of land were flooded. No one knows yet how many people are homeless, how many farms and businesses are ruined. A guy rode up from Spencer on his bike asking for help with cleanup. He said there’s 6 inches of contaminated silt on all the pastures between there and Owego. I said I’d bike into Ithaca and pass the word.”
There was a knock on the door, and Cora opened it to find an elegant young black woman in an olive green ski jacket carrying an armful of fliers. “Hi, I’m Mia,” the woman said. “Cooperative Extension is sending out volunteers to post fliers on people’s doors. We’re letting people know not to drink creek or lake water. It’s contaminated with toxic substances, so don’t eat the fish, either. You’ve probably heard: the settling ponds for waste water from hydrofracking got flooded, and the creeks and aquifers are all contaminated. It’s worse to the south in Binghamton and Owego, but we also have contamination way up here. I see you have rain barrels, but remember to filter and boil the rainwater, okay, even if you’re just using it for washing? Rainwater can contain algae and all kinds of particulates.”
“Yes, thanks, we’re doing that,” said Cora.
“Also,” said Mia, “The City’s got some water purification processes going, and they’re going to start giving out free drinking water twice a week, starting tomorrow morning. Your block is scheduled for 9 am. Each household can have up to 12 gallons. Please bring your own containers.
“Thanks,” said Cora. “We appreciate it.”
“One more thing,” said Mia. “Would you be willing to go door-to-door on the rest of your block to post the fliers?”
Cora and Sierra both nodded and took some fliers.
They didn’t feel like splitting up, so they walked together down one side of the block, knocking on doors and leaving fliers if no one was home. When they got to Cate’s house, she invited them in for pumpkin oatmeal cookies.
“So what’s this about, anyhow?” asked Cate. “I haven’t really been following it.”
“Well, the hurricane went through south of here, and they had a lot more flooding than we did,” said Cora. “The river overflowed, and everything was under water.”’
“The water is really toxic, too,” said Sierra. “It’s contaminated with fracking fluid, all kinds of toxic chemicals, even radioactivity. So just boiling the water doesn’t help.
Cate looked puzzled. “But I thought we fought to keep fracking out of our area.”
“We did,” said Sierra. “But south of here, Binghamton and Owego had their first natural gas wells hydrofracked last spring. The people and businesses still hadn’t recovered economically from the flood of 2011. They were desperate from the loss of jobs, and they needed the money so badly that they waved the drilling rigs right in. And the contaminated water migrated underground.”
“But what are we going to do?” asked Cate.
“That’s why the City’s giving out drinking water,” said Cora, ignoring the larger question. “Our time slot is 9 am, down at the corner of Cayuga Street.”
Later that afternoon, Cora and Sierra scrubbed out all the dusty plastic soda bottles and plastic buckets they could find and filled two backpacks and the wheelbarrow with them. They put old plastic jugs in the panniers of Cora’s bike and tied more soda bottles onto the handbars and the seat. But they had to use rainwater to wash them, so it wasn’t clear how clean they really were.
After they had fed and watered the chickens, they stayed up talking in the candlelight, and when Howard got home around 10 pm, they made up the couch for Sierra. “Stay as long as you like,” said Howard. “We’ve missed you.”
“No, I need to get back tomorrow,” said Sierra. “But thanks anyhow.”
The next morning at 8:30 am, Cora and Sierra put on the backpacks and pushed their wheelbarrow and bicycle loaded with containers down to the corner of Cayuga and Oneida Streets, where they joined the line of people sitting on the curb. The air was surprisingly warm, and people around them were taking off their sweaters to catch the sun. Cora had brought along some felted wool sweaters to make into baby pants. Wool baby pants were selling better than almost anything else she made.
Sierra shifted around on the curb and swung her foot. She refused Cora’s offer of some sewing or seam-ripping to do and instead picked aimlessly at the raggedy hems of her jeans.
Down at the far end of the line, a bedraggled young woman was crying, leaning against a quiet older woman, who was patting her back and rocking her. “Josh, oh Josh!” the young woman wailed. A woman next to them murmured and reached out also to rub the sobbing woman’s shoulder.
Just then, the water truck pulled up. It was a regular City of Ithaca pickup truck, with large plastic barrels of water filling the bed. Two men got out, one of them with a shotgun.
“Easy does it, folks,” said the driver. “Plenty for everyone. Just line up quietly now, and there won’t be any trouble.”
The people in the line looked at each other, surprised. “Was there trouble somewhere?” one woman asked.
“Don’t know,” said the guy with the shotgun. “This morning is the first run. Point is, you can’t be too careful. Security, you know.” There were two spigots, one on each side of the truck, so the waiting people split into two lines and helped each other fill their containers. The driver got bored and examined the tires of the truck, while the other man cradled his shotgun and stared grimly off into the distance. After a while his shoulders relaxed, and he leaned against a maple tree, humming.
Twenty minutes later, Cora and Sierra had loaded up all their containers. They tucked three filled soda bottles into the stroller of a frazzled-looking young mother, said goodbye, and started pushing their load back down Oneida Street toward home.
When they got home, they transferred water from some of the soda bottles into the big cooking pots. The kitchen was now filled with containers of water of different origins, and Sierra made labels:
Rainwater, unprocessed
Rainwater, filtered and boiled
Rainwater, distilled
City water
Cora wanted to keep going with the washing, especially some of the grubbier socks and underwear, but she found it hard to use up any of the water, much less decide which kind to use. She finally settled on city water and started the clothes soaking in the dishpan, which was about the only container she had left.
Sierra took off to go back to the farm, loading her bicycle with several two-liter soda bottles of city water. Cora thought to herself that Sierra was being overly ambitious, as she still had that long hard ride ahead of her up South Hill, but she didn’t comment, and the two embraced warmly.
After Sierra had gone, Cora examined the socks and underwear that had been soaking. The water looked like compost tea, but the clothes were nowhere near clean. She slammed a cast iron pot down on the woodstove and poured in more city water to heat. Then, moving more carefully, she carried the dishpan out the back door and poured the dirty water onto the roots of the pumpkin vine.
While she was in the garden, she picked some more tomatoes, a red bell pepper, and some kale. Start some beans, she thought. She brought out the sun oven that Howard had cobbled together the previous spring, put in a pot of filtered rainwater, added a cup of black beans, closed it all up again, and turned the oven to face the sun.
“It was crazy at Loaves and Fishes today,” said Howard that evening. He dropped his backpack and jacket on the floor and sank into the old armchair. “Almost everybody was tired and wet and dirty and grouchy. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I don’t know why I didn’t just take my germs and go home.”
“Have some noodles,” said Cora. “I made them with lots of garlic and hot peppers. They’ll be good for whatever you’ve got.”
Howard slumped more deeply into the chair. “I don’t know what came over me, going in to work. They tried to send me home, but I just hung in there till the end of the shift. I probably infected everyone in the place.”
“Oh, well,” said Cora, handing him his noodles in their most beautiful Chinese bowl. “You’re home now, and you can rest.”
Howard slurped his noodles. “I have this dull ache all over, and the inside of my nose feels raw,” he said. “Did you say you cooked some beans?”
“Here you go” she said.
“Thanks, sweetie,” he said, pressing a damp bandana to his nostrils. They sat in silence for a moment.
“I have this dull ache behind my eyes,” Howard went on. “And there’s a kind of coldness to the ache.”
Cora’s mouth tightened, but she tried to be supportive. As she thought about it, she herself had a kind of dull ache at the top of her head, more like a sensation than an ache, really. And her eyes felt hot.
“These noodles are great,” said Howard. “Very soothing to my throat, which is really raspy. I forgot to tell you – we had some leftover kale today, and I brought a little home. I left it on the porch.”
“Good,” said Cora. “Maybe I’ll make kale and potato soup tomorrow.”
“How about some of those Korean greens you make?” said Howard, wiping his nose again.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Cora. “Let me get you a clean handkerchief.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’m feeling pretty sick.” He took the hankie that Cora held out to him and blew his nose quietly and discretely, his head turned away from her.
“I’m not feeling too great myself,” said Cora. “I think I’m getting what you’ve got.”
“Oh, honey,” he said with a sigh and kissed the top of her head.’
“Why don’t we both stay home tomorrow?” she said. “Eat lots of garlic and hot peppers, catch up on sleep.”
“I don’t think I could sleep,” said Howard “Not with so much work to be done.”
Cora sighed. “You’re so right,” she said. “The whole back of the chicken coop pulled loose in the storm. A weasel or fox could get in at any moment. We need to split a bunch more firewood, and somebody needs to get the garlic planted. I can’t believe we’ve left it this late. And we need to get all those apple slices back out into the sun before they go moldy. I meant to do it today, but I was so busy scrubbing the basement walls and floors with the last of the Chlorox Joe gave us.
Howard was pushing some bits of hot pepper around in his empty bowl with his chopsticks, pushing them together and then moving them apart.
“What?” said Cora.
Howard shrugged, “They asked me to go to Owego. The Red Cross and the Chamber of Commerce are setting up a community support program like what they did in 2011, only larger-scale. They need someone to organize the community meals.”
Cora let out her breath with a whoosh.
“They say just for a couple weeks,” he said, putting down his chopsticks.
“That doesn’t sound very realistic,” Cora said. “Sierra said all the low-lying fields are covered with 6 inches of mud and fracking fluid.
“The fracking fluid is everywhere,” he said. “All their water is undrinkable, with dead fish floating to the surface. Most of their crops are contaminated. And even if they get crops planted in the uncontaminated soil next spring, and find clean water to irrigate it, it’ll be at least July before they can harvest much food.”
“You want to go, don’t you?” said Cora. It wasn’t really a question.
Howard grimaced. “How can I not, Cora? Imagine if we were in that situation.”
“Howard, we don’t have enough for ourselves as it is. Remember what the flight attendants used to say: put on your own oxygen masks before helping children.”
Howard sighed. “Everybody keeps saying that, or else some crap about natural selection or only the strong survive. But how can I turn my back on people when I know how to help?”
“Maybe you could go down there for a couple weeks, help them get organized, and then come back here.”
“Do you really think I could walk out on them?”
“But Howard, I need you, too.”
“You could manage without me. You know you could.”
But later, when Howard got to his feet, he swayed and grabbed onto the back of the couch. “Whoa,” he said. “You were right. I ache all over. No question. Bed for me.”
“Me, too,” said Cora. “My head feels like someone is squeezing it between two blocks of ice.”
They spent the next two days moving listlessly from bed to sofa, taking turns making ginger tea and miso soup. Cora leafed through an old issue of Threads, and Howard read a vintage R. Crumb comic book, but mostly they just slept. At one point, Howard sat up in bed and said, “You know, resting is such a good idea. I don’t know why I didn’t listen to you in the first place,” and they smiled into each other’s eyes.
Finally Cora woke up feeling a little better. She toddled out to the yard and looked around. There was so much to do to get the garden ready for winter. While they were sick, frost had hit the tomato and pepper plants. The asparagus needed to be cut back. They still hadn’t planted the garlic. There wasn’t enough mulch, and straw was practically impossible to find these days.
What do I have? she thought. Well, I have my health. I have Howard. I have Sierra. Friends. A neighborhood. A garden and a house. Some drinking water. Sewing skills. I have a lot of scrap fabric, especially all those scraps of felted wool. Actually that would make a great mulch.
And then the images of the people in Owego came to her mind: Sierra’s stories of the families just a few miles south of the chicken farm, their houses and barns moldy and unlivable, their pastures covered in silt, all their possessions coated with toxic mud.
She marched back into her studio and began opening boxes, pulling fabric off shelves. Soft sturdy linen curtains, silk dresses from the 1980s, cashmere sweaters with only a few tiny moth holes. Cottons of all sorts: velvets, corduroys, chambrays, knits. Warmth, she said to herself. Beauty. I can make some quilts, and warm mittens and hats and socks, she thought. I can do it.
