Jed Wolf

Maybe it was from chewing on lead sinkers while fishing as a kid, but I’ve always suspected I might have brain damage. Doctors said lots of kids reverse numbers, count on fingers, and learn things the hard way. Though getting sucked into tornadoes like Dorothy is typical for people with dyslexia, it never occurred to me “there’s no place like home” contained a lesson.

Worrying about flying monkeys all my life didn’t make them go away. After repeatedly being told my problems might not be in such dire need of fixing, I turned to writing to take up slack and make use of my incessant urge solve and sum up everything. As long as I got enough sleep, scribbling helped.

I admit to scraping my way through life like an eight-year-old, compulsively repeating mistakes. Perusing my past, I cringe at how often I reinvent the same wheels to run myself over with on familiar trails of tears.

Far from providing a library of insight, I dread what I’ve strung up on Facebook over time, flapping at me like desiccated coyotes, daring me to reread what I’ve written so I’d quit writing forever. Clearly, I’m a sieve when it comes to learning lessons or retaining wisdom and am as predictable as a two-dollar tag sale toaster to self-ignite.

I wasn’t surprised to return from our 1,600-mile road trip with bronchitis and motel shock. Facebook photo captions posing beneath vermilion cliffs revealed little. I was in one of my self-annihilating, unexpressive phases. The truth would’ve sounded ungrateful.

“Everyone else sure loves Utah,” I thought pretending to revel in scenery I wished would distract me from the herds of fellow travelers breaking for panoramas while Dave and I checked things off our “kick-the-bucket” list.

Outside of Bryce Canyon in the Long Horn Lodge, we admitted the grim reaper was our travel agent and FOMO had booked our dusty eleven day road trip we were sick of by day three.

If he was a different sort of person, Dave might’ve believed his projectile vomiting from Nova Virus was a spiritual healing. I might’ve bought some turquoise had I felt less like death plodding along Arizona’s powdery talcum trails coughing in misery among others making memories.

We didn’t burst spontaneously into tears as a tour guide suggested we might among Sedona’s powerful vortexes. Instead, bronchitis metastasized from deep in my parched lungs into my sinuses impelling me to leave motel showers dripping all night until imagining failing crops and cadavers emerging along the receding shorelines of lake Powell made me stop.

Maybe it was brain damage, years of quarantine, watching too much TV news, coughing in the plane at fires below through breaks in the clouds or geometric Texas transfiguring into Alabama, Louisiana then finally North Florida, but I was paranoid the whole way home.

Gorgeous from 13,000 feet, I dared not consider what neighbors might be like among the lush emerald-greens below. Bouncing through the last thunderstorm, I white-knuckled through our final descent until healing humidity returned to my nostrils exiting the plane.

Compared to frenetic Charlotte, Vegas and Dallas airports, tranquil Jacksonville was a relief. Tanned and serene travelers nodded and the pianist playing cocktail music acknowledged us as we left. Lightning and thunder accompanied us to St. Augustine, but no rain slowed Dave and I down. In less than an hour we were hugging our kitties.

The first thing we did the next day was get tested. Surprisingly, the bronchitis I caught out there, exacerbated by worry, the desert, forest fires and the infamous Sedona vortexes, turned out not to be Covid.

Though we were weak and each of us nearly ten pounds lighter, little had changed at home. Plants needed trimming and amid mailbox notices from realtors dying to sell our house, was an invitation to a big outside party.

When we emerged from our own beds and adobe tinted dreams into the rich green of our enchanted backyard, after tossing out the national park maps, draining the last of the russet laundry water, we felt “The Vortex” preventing us from returning to our previous lives. Relieved to be recovering with our kitties wasn’t enough. Suddenly we “knew” if we didn’t sell our house immediately, we’d go down a drain.

The stock market had plunged. The weather was hot and spectacular dust-filled sunrises and sunsets reminded us of the first hurricanes spinning out of the Western Sahara. Gunmen, elections, inflation, and Russian brutality splattered on social media galvanized our urge to move to Des Pines with a butt-load of cash while we still could and await the end of times.

After talking to a realtor, we began scanning Zillow for deer-proof energy efficient homesteads in North Carolina or Vermont with solar greenhouses and mountain views. With the money we’d make, we could tolerate Virginia winters in a smart home or afford two weeks in the Caribbean each February from a cozy cabin in Maine.

We dreaded attending our neighbor’s party and considered not going. Imagining telling friends we’d made an appointment with a realtor with connections to overseas buyers who told us to price super high ‘cause there’d be a bidding war was too much. Dave and I have lost the ability to pretend.

We’d left friends before and knew how painful it was, but this was brutal.

Sitting by our glimmering pond imagining sharks in the pool and everything dying from salt water, again, I knew I no longer had the energy to recreate it.

While watching mesmerizing koi who’ve gotten really big, slalom between water lily blossoms, a scissor-tailed kite swooped elegantly beneath our trees that “haven’t blown down yet,” I’d been thinking while inhaling fragrant jasmine when Dave, who never chewed on lead sinkers looked at me and said, “we can’t.”

The band at the block party started at 4:00 and cars were already parking in front of our house. I recognized very few people bringing extra lawn chairs over until one-by-one, friends and neighbors from our end of the island arrived.

When asked how our trip was, I cliff-noted our western saga and cut to the Vortex. “Not again?” I heard from the very person who’d first introduced me to hurricane hugs.

While strangers from elsewhere marveled at the camaraderie between people crazy enough to live here, in love with each other and this extraordinary place, where despite regular flooding, property values quadruple, I recalled the fishy taste of lead weights I’d chewed into fangs.

As the sun sank into the fiery sky burnished by African dust, and people I love toasted to the ebb and flow of fears, whirling dervish dancing beneath strings of suspended lights like there was no tomorrow, I thought I’d never be happier and things could not get better until a couple, who’d just finished building their new house asked us to join them and a few others on their rooftop patio overlooking the bay.

In a balmy shadowed reverie on a sofa beneath the stars, I was delighted to be wrong again as the twinkling city danced on gentle waves. I shed a few tears realizing how grateful I was to be miraculously forgiven for freaking out like Dorothy repeatedly throughout my life when I heard something clawing its way up suggesting I buy a gun, take in refugees, move to Mauritania, or write.