January 19, 2025

Grainy snow,  mercury dropping like mad. Complex dreams, intertwining with my waking life to an unusual degree. Dreams which try to inform my life many minutes after waking. 

Met ML in The Fresh Market. She was one of those whose home was totally destroyed, and who faces that with an equanimity I find laudable and foreign. Her little creek became a raging torrent when the floodgates were opened at North Folk. Gallantly, she affirmed that opening the gates “saved everybody in my neighborhood.” She was buying supplies for a trip to the beach, to “get away from it all for a while.” FEMA paid to clean her property up, but no farther than that. America is not set up to save her people. I think of the Irishman in the bar in Sligo, “I’d be terrified to be an American. There’s nothing to break your fall.”