On the First Cold Day

I wish there were words to describe how it feels, living in interesting times.

I wish I could explain how surreal America felt, for the first seven months of 2025. And then, in late September and early October, I started to feel guilty. I felt guilty for all kinds of reasons.

The mad king began murdering Venezuelan fishermen, ordering his minions to blow up their boats, and it made me feel like a murderer.

The mad king’s masked agents shot pepper bullets at a pastor who was calling them to repentance, and it made me feel as if I, myself, was stoning a prophet.

I have a friend who lives in Chicago, seven hours away, where every single day it’s another horror story. Masked government agents are driving around residential neighborhoods with guns, looking for brown people to menace. Children have been dragged out of apartment buildings naked in the middle of the night. And the mad king just keeps sending more soldiers. I worry about her children every night. Every morning, I check to see if she’s all right. But I’m not worried about my own safety yet, and that makes me feel guilty.

So little has changed in the Valley. Oh, the prices for food are outrageous and they’re going to get worse. Jimmy the Mechanic went to the junkyard for car parts, and found that everything was expensive there as well. A few neighbors took down their raggedy TRUMP VANCE 2024 flags, but not all. The local charities have fewer things to give away; the grandmother of the Baker Street Irregulars is fretting about Christmas. But I am not afraid when I go out. I don’t worry about the families who live on my street. There are no masked men terrorizing the neighbors, not yet. They have no reason to terrorize a small town in a blood-red corner of Northern Appalachia. We don’t deserve to be punished. Our electoral votes went to the Mad King. That makes me feel unclean. It makes me feel spoiled and selfish.

I would far, far rather suffer, than watch other people suffer from a distance.

The other day it was hot out. The air smelled like Autumn but felt like July. I desperately wanted to drive out to the countryside to find a crick and go for a swim, even though it was the first week of October. But Jimmy was still working on my car. I walked under the trees in Union Cemetery, crunching on acorns and the first of the fall leaves while the rest of the foliage was still a dull green overhead. I skirted around the burial plots, seeking out the big trees to shade my walk. That was how I found the Fighting McCooks.

The Fighting McCooks were a family of Civil War heroes from Ohio, six of whom reached higher ranks than Brigadier General. Several of the McCooks fell in battle or succumbed to the aftereffects of battle wounds, dying to make men free. There were more than half a dozen McCooks buried at the edge of the trees under a line of stone rectangles. Just reading their names, somehow, I felt all the fear and suspense and anger that have been bouncing around my stomach since last November. I wanted to cry, but the tears caught in my throat. Then I walked the rest of the way through the cemetery, to the grocery store by the middle school, and looked at the Halloween decorations, and felt happy again. And  I felt guilty, for feeling happy.

Today was the first cold day of Autumn. It rained for the first time in I don’t know how long, soaking the grass and making life seem worth living. It rained so hard that Jimmy’s boy missed the bus. He stayed home from school, so I took him for a walk around the neighborhood after the downpour had slowed to a drizzle.

He’s been thinking about wars lately.

“Did you know, in wars, sometimes they bomb cities?”

“Yes,” I said solemnly. “They do bomb cities.”

“And the cities burn, and the buildings fall on people.”

“Yes. And some families lose everything, and they have to run away from the cities and live in a tent as refugees. It’s terrible for them. They’re cold and hungry.”

“An I was in a war,” began Jimmy’s boy. I don’t know why some of the children in Steubenville say “an” or “and” instead of “if.” It’s a linguistic eccentricity I’ve heard some places in Northern Appalachia. Jimmy’s boy says ‘an.’ “An I was in a war, and they were bombing some buildings, I know what I would do.”

“So do I.”

“An I was in a war, I would buy grenades! An I was in a battle I would buy a bunch of grenades, and throw them at the bombers!”

“I would buy first aid kits and help the families,” I said. “And then I’d set up a school in a refugee tent and teach the children things so they could still get an education while they were running away from the war.”

Jimmy’s boy promised to protect my school, with his grenades, when the war came.

We stopped to pick up an armload of fallen pears, from a pear tree somebody had planted just to get the blossoms in spring. And then we went a little further, near the cliff’s edge where LaBelle drops away towards the Ohio river, across from the foothills of West Virginia. A bit of the fall color was really visible from a distance, for the very first time.

Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children,  for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.’ At that time people will say to the mountains, ‘Fall upon us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’  for if these things are done when the wood is green what will happen when it is dry?

The feelings rose up in me again, but again, I couldn’t cry.

The rain kicked up, and we went home.