SECOND WIND

I was supposed to drive to the airport tonight. Work trip. But it’s a long drive, and storms are due to roll in later. They’ll probably cancel the flight anyway. It’s not crucial I make the trip out. I’m exhausted, drained. I’ll just teleconference in and call it good. So, I decide to avoid the wet roads.

The temptation to spend time in the greenhouse I recently built, listening to the soft plinking of rain, musical in its intonations, is simply too great. Besides, I hate driving in storms. The white knuckling of the steering wheel. The traction control light flashing orange intermittently as you go twenty miles per hour below the speed limit. The gentle tremor of the car as other drivers, more brash than you, tightly zoom past at your elbow, leaving only room enough for a thin sheet of rain to fall between you.

The greenhouse isn’t much, just corrugated plastic over a plywood skeleton, a small hike south from the house on our property. Big enough to stand inside, but not much larger than that. I can’t help noticing the seams where I used caulk that dried white instead of clear, giving it a cartoonish outlined appearance.

Standing inside, I think about my son, who said this very same day, “Dad, you’re the strongest person I know.”

But, son, do you not know that the strongest person you know is broken in body and spirit?

As the soft rain begins to fall on the plastic, drumming with soft fingers, I ponder the exchange, wondering if old Abraham, tying up Isaac on the stacks of offering wood, considered for even a second taking his son’s place. Drawing the dagger down upon himself instead. Hoping the Great Voice forgave him for his substitution in sacrifice. Protecting his son from the harshness of the world around him. Bearing his dreadful fate himself. I tremble a bit at the recollection of the Bible story I had rarely, if ever, thought about in recent years, suddenly brought forth upon my consciousness.

I unfold the lawn chair, tucked upright in the corner of the greenhouse, and recline back into it, falling asleep listening to the soft rain.

In my dream, I recalled the great collection of Torah scrolls I had once worked with. Stacks and stacks. Rows and rows. Unrolled and rolled back up meticulously to determine provenance and value. I recalled the curators, so enthusiastic to share the archived materials, these stacked parchments and skins, inked precisely, with a coalition of gathered rabbis of varying degrees of orthodoxy. Led into the long, sterile collections room, they were shown the scrolls with pride. While a few gave their recalcitrant nods of approval, being content that the scrolls had been saved from the garbage dumps of the world, the great majority of the rabbis fell to their knees weeping at the sight of what amounted to a pile of corpses, left uncovered and unburied. Naked bodies all. The very words of God Almighty, disgraced cadavers catalogued by nitrile gloves and put on display for the world’s cold gaze.

The wails of the rabbis fade quickly as I awake to a loud clap of thunder. Taking comfort in the barrier of plastic between myself and the rain, I continue floating in and out of sleep, disturbed by the memory of my dream. Soon, the soft peace of the plodding rain is disrupted by the strengthening of the storm. The rain begins falling in torrents, soaking the ground around the greenhouse, though the ground inside fortunately remains dry—a testament to the ugly, white caulk doing its job.

Though part of me feels this is the opportune time to make the long, wet run back to the house, I think, This must be the worst of it, I’ll let it pass. But the rain continues to fall harder and harder, picking up in sheets with every passing minute, somehow never reaching its crescendo. When it seems like the sky could not possibly have any more to dump, it rains all the harder.

Weary and unwilling to get drenched, I busy myself by setting seeds in potting mix. Plastic sheets, like ice trays, sit before me; rows and columns of little dirt pods, waiting for the possibility of life. I carefully scatter the seeds, depositing them in separate trays, placing them deftly into the soft mix. I admire in advance the delicious vegetables I will later enjoy, provided they receive consistent watering and patience.

But then the hail begins.

Pea-sized at first, no bigger than the seeds on my trays, the stones grow with each clap of thunder. The percussion becomes louder, getting closer and closer with each passing second, carrying with it ominous portents of destructive capacity. The storm must be close to being right on top of me. I will wait for it to thin out and then I will head back to the house.

The hail, now golf ball sized, inspires fear, which I can feel building in my chest. I pray a foxhole prayer. If only the plastic holds up, I will make amends with myself and God, I promise nervously. Now tennis ball sized, the first hailstone breaks through the corrugated plastic roof. It punches hard into the dirt at my feet. In the same instant that I recognized what happened, I am struck. Hard. I raise my forearm above my head to guard myself, but the hail continues in a vicious volley, crashing against my bruised arm. Each stone is bigger and harder than the last. The assault knocks my arm back into my head, and I drop to a knee. My free hand grasps for the shelf to steady myself, but it only finds the seed tray, the packets of seeds half opened atop it. They spray onto my clothes, sticking to the moisture of my shirt and pants. What feels like a bowling ball crashes into my skull, knocking me backward into the dirt. The pounding continues.

The roof has been fully breached by the hail. The hordes have stormed the gates, and nothing holds them back from raining down destruction. Pounding down upon me, I can’t even bring myself to shield my body with my arms, as I find them battered as anything else. I scream into the void above. But the grey vaults of the heavens do not hear my cry, or simply do not care. They continue to pour forth their payload of icy bullets, battering me senselessly. Head. Body. Arms. Legs. No body part is spared from their destructive issuance. For the first time in a long time, I think about that cry: Eloi, Eloi. Lama Sabachthani. My God, My God. Why Have You Forsaken Me?

The old church fathers once wrote about confident assurance in the storm. “Let the winds blow,” they said. And here I am: at the mercy of the winds. Their unrelenting evisceration in progress, and I can’t help but scoff at the old fathers’ ivory tower conception of suffering when they knew no winds such as these in their own time.

As the pulp of my body finds unity with the dirt floor below me, realization strikes me that the Earth’s body, too, has been used up. Its nutrients pulled forth, every drop of energy it contained consumed and forced to produce tenfold, a hundredfold until it had no more to offer. I feel myself becoming one with it. My fingers sink into the soft, wet mush of mud below me, sliding between my fingers and oozing beneath my fingernails. I feel Her pain. I feel Her sorrow. I too have been used up and have little left to give. But the seeds upon my chest, clinging to my drenched body, itself being ground into a fine loam, will be one last sacred offering. This thought comforts me as the barrage intensifies its unrelenting battery.

I will give Her, the Earth, our Mother my final breath, a second wind. These seeds upon my chest will bring forth the last of my life, a crop a thousandfold of what was planted. I do not fear my fate. I have made my peace, and I resign myself to it as I fade with a final drawn gasp.