Porches were made for October.  To sit, still, in the late afternoon, and absorb the low hanging rays of warmth. The trees glow orange and yellow and red as if lit from within.  I watch the bees, frantically foraging the last of the blooms, knowing my own pantry is full of the food we tucked away all season long.  We are slowing down.  Tucking in. It is the season for rest and repair.

​We have decided to grow food all winter long, but my body is slow to catch on.  It refuses to adhere to this new schedule.  It resists the change in plans.  It is counting on the seasonal down shift.  And so I find some compromise.  I try to free up more leisure time in my schedule (I schedule the leisure time-HA!); I wind down the day a bit earlier. I allow a bit of focus to fade. I sit, still, in the late afternoon on the porch that was made for October.

In an attempt to make time to create a healthy movement routine as we edge toward winter and changing roles on the farm (read: more office chair time), we dragged ourselves out of bed and headed to the gym for an hour before sunrise.  We came home and poured ourselves a big glass of kombucha and had some yogurt and seeds, like we were checking “healthy habits” off from a list.

​To be sure, there is something to this whole mindset shift thing.  In sociology we called it the broken window theory and it went something like this: a broken window, even a tiny one, in a public place will lead to more vandalism and broken things.  I like to translate that to the positive in my “made bed theory”: a made bed, even an imperfectly made bed (which I assure you, mine is), will lead to more things put away instead of strewn about.  Turns out, our environs impact out mindset. And today, ours began at the gym.

And so, our instinct to do ALL the healthy things this morning after the gym probably comes from a similar place. You know, doing one healthy thing puts your mind in a healthy mode and you’re more inclined to do other healthy things. But you know how I feel about maintenance (in case you don’t: I detest maintenance),  I had the urge to check it off my list forever.  Like, “let’s get this healthy stuff out of the way today so I can sleep in and eat donuts tomorrow”.

I know I could probably live a long time and more or less function without maintenance.  I see it happen all the time around me.  The problem for me though, is that I still have a long list of things I want to see or do, and my hobbies mostly involve a highly functioning body.  Sigh.  I don’t want to have to miss out on a fantastic view because I can’t hike up there to get it.  Unfortunately, this requires reminding myself of this when I’m cozy in bed at 5am as it gets colder and colder outside.

I have always had at least a little bit of trouble with the whole “let go of what is not under your control” thing.  I mean, for some things, there’s a chance I could get it under my control right?  Today, I was actually en route to Burnsville (a 5 hour drive round trip) with my tiny load of campstoves and butane (per request lists for those areas still without power) when I thought to call another local organization to see if they had larger loads headed up there that I could contribute too and stay local to volunteer. Yes, they said, they have trucks going all the time. So I re-routed and figured I’d start there.

​I arrived to utter chaos.  I mean, did you know diapers multiply if left to their own devices?  The evidence would suggest they are related to rabbits.  And they were everywhere.  Pallets of them stacked, boxes and boxes and loose packages of diapers nearly two stories high, filling the equivalent of at least an entire Lowe’s home improvement aisle.  And there were stacks and stacks more of them outside of the giant warehouse!  I tried my best to ignore them, but those little buggers would be playing in what was left of the aisle (probably attempting to reproduce) and trip me up.  I looked politely away from them at the chaos that was the rest of the warehouse.  I mean, where do you start?

What I’ve learned from the enormous destruction and mess that Helene left us with is that you just start with what’s in front of you (unless, um, it’s diapers, then you start with what’s in front of you when you look away from the diapers).  You let go of the efficiency you’ve practiced for twenty years and just carry the one little thing around until you find its place or find someone who knows where its place is located.  Then you grab the next little thing and do the same.  Eventually, people will ask you where something goes and you’ll know.  And eventually, the lot of you will put a tiny little dent in the chaos.

​But it seemed like we were only unloading trucks and trailers and cars and buggies and never loading them.  My campstoves and butane remained in my truck. The full warehouse had a magic spell on it that allowed it to invisibly expand to take on all the new inventory and the volunteers accepted it all with grace.  Even the brave woman who decided to tackle to mountain of diapers.

Finally, an empty truck and trailer pulled up and I saw generators and fuel and heaters being loaded and I thought “well there’s the truck going to the place that needs my campstoves and butane!”  I loaded them on with all the other stuff.  At some point, I asked where the truck was headed, expecting to hear about someplace in Mitchell or Yancey counties (the counties still mostly without power). “Creston” the driver replied.  Huh.  All of the Blue Ridge Electric customers have power, which covers Creston, and so I began to question (silently) the appropriateness of the load of generators that we were sending up there, but figured this was a good time to let it be out of my control.  It was time to let those campstoves and butane go, even to where they were, perhaps (there may be things I don’t know, after all), less useful.  And then to turn the next thing in front of me and find its place; to keep working my little niche in the chaos for the day.

I am panic scrolling, desperate to find a place to plug in, paralyzed by the sheer grandiosity of human need.  It has turned into an obsession.  I cry at the drop of a hat.  In town, businesses are open, people are going about their lives.  The normalness of it amps up my anxiety.  It feels crazy that life should just go on here while life as been torn to shreds just a few miles west of here.  I am wild eyed, a bit out of control. I just want someone to tell me WHAT TO DO. 

Eventually, I come to realize that I am that person.  I breathe deep, and start small.  I mean really small. Start with the things I can do. Right now, as we crank the farm back up and I am needed here a bit, I can donate money.  I create a disaster relief budget.  This is starting to feel a tiny bit better.

​I narrow my vision from the sheer vastness of need to what I know and love.  My friends.  My friends that have lost their livelihoods.  Start there. Get that old Venmo account back up and running.  Take care of my friends first.  Then, widen the focus just a tiny bit to the places I love the most.  The Toe River.  Devastated, but the community is working to tirelessly to help each other and I can support them from afar with funds.

Breathe some more.  Put your own oxygen mask on before you try to help those around you.  Okay.  Systems, even if still a bit unorganized, are starting to take shape. Systems allow me to see more clearly where I can be of help.  The farm has power and water and communications and doesn’t need me much.  Now.  Ten days in.  Now is the time to plug in.  It doesn’t matter where.  Just do it.  They can shuffle you to where there is more need.  Just take that first step and plug in.  Another step will appear, and then another.  Consider that other people are doing exactly the same.  All those tiny steps.  This is what humanity is about.  We are nothing without each other.