September 11th and the twin towers.  March of 2020 and the start of the pandemic.  These are two events I have witnessed in my lifetime where I a think of my life before that moment…and then after.

The third happened last week, when a shooter, a neighbor, drove through our hamlet in the middle of the night.  He shot the firehouse, putting bullets into the doors and through the trucks.  He put a bullet through a neighbor’s pool.  And he put three bullets into our Honor store, puncturing two freezers and a refrigerator, shattering the glass front of our merchandiser freezer, before driving through the rest of the town, firing his gun outside people’s homes.  

It’s hard to talk about something I’m not supposed to talk about.  There is concern for the safety of my family.  There are protocols that must be followed to ensure the criminal justice system can do its job.  

But the newspapers and television stations have given the above facts.  So I can give those to you.

And that’s all I will say about the event itself.  

The rest of what I want to talk about today is what it feels like to go through this.

Thank God no one was hurt.  That’s the reprise I’ve heard over and over for the past week and a half.  Or, At least Vladmir Putin hasn’t dropped a bomb on you.

Repeatedly, I am reminded that it could have been so much worse. 

I parrot these facts like a mantra, admonishing myself to be grateful.  It’s only financial damage.

I sit with Mom and Dad in the living room at the farm.  We say it there, too.  Thank God No One Was Hurt.  We need to keep this in perspective.

But as we sit facing each other, Dad fixates on disparate, non-related details:  Information about the shearer’s arrival.  Information about a new climate policy that’s going before congress.  Mom repeatedly starts new sentences, then stops them.

“We need to make sure we —“

“Are we going to —“

“I think we should —“

After each start, she forgets what she wanted to say.

She loses her words so much, I fear she is having a stroke.  Then she just starts to cry.  

We need to keep this in perspective, I remind her.

But my stomach turns in knots.  My chest feels tight.  I force myself to eat.  In the early mornings, I sit at my computer, attempting to keep up with the bookkeeping for the farm.  A simple fifteen minute job takes me two hours.  The tasks stack up, and I fall farther and farther behind.

Keep it in perspective, I remind myself again and again and again…Perspective, perspective, perspective…

Then my neck seizes up.  Pains pop up in my arms,  I can hardly move them.  

It feels like my body is filling with black, sludgy poison.  I forget to do basic tasks.  I lose phone numbers.  I make lists, lose my lists, make new lists.  Then I don’t get any of the tasks done, and re-write the same list and try again.  Corbie calls the house.  I start crying, then pull myself together.  Matt and Erin call the house.  I cry again, then pull myself together.  My brother calls.  I cry again, but of course, pull myself together.  Justin from Green Wolf calls. I repeat the process., hating myself for this.  Feeling ashamed of my self-indulgent tears, questioning my right to them when, really, it’s so much worse in so many other places.  

We notify our customers of the event, and word spreads through the news.  And the letters begin pouring in from customers, from readers, from listeners.  

Perspective, I remind myself as I try to answer them.  I’m supposed to be in a place of gratitude. 

And the black sludgy poison feels like it spreads farther through my body, oozing from my stomach through my intestines until finally, I recognize that the bullets didn’t hit me, but I still have untreated wounds.

And I put the bookkeeping aside.  I leave the writing.  I stop attempting to respond to the letters.

I don’t want this poison in my body.  The only thing I can think to do is let it move through me. 

I go to sleep at night, then wake crying.  Bob and I sit together in the woods, staring vacantly at the stream, and we stop trying to figure out how we’re going to fix things.  We come back to the house and as he cooks breakfast, I’m swallowed by the sorrow.  I can’t hold it in, limiting it to soft cries any longer.  I moan, I wail, I scream.  It feels as though snot pours out of every orifice of my body.  

Fuck perspective.  I have a vision of community.  Of people caring for each other, nourishing each other.  Trusting each other.

And it has been pierced with bullets by a fucking neighbor.  And I need some time to put thoughts of gratitude and forgiveness aside.  I need my time with sorrow. 

The girls are holding me now.  They don’t try to make me stop.  They just hang on..  I don’t know if they’ve ever seen me like this.  I don’t know as I’ve ever seen me like this.  

But it feels like something is happening inside me.  The black ooze feels as though it is leaving my body.  

I cry until the sobs turn to dry heaves.  Then I crawl into the bathtub, then crawl into bed.  The dogs pile in around me. 

When I wake up, I remember that it’s music night.

Corbie and Carle come.  Corbie’s made twice-baked potatoes laced with heavy cream and bacon, and a pile of chicken.  Carle has a jug and a euphonium for his instruments for the night.  Tracy and Justin and Avan show up with salad and a guitar.  Bernie brings curried potatoes and a fiddle.  They sit with all of us, listening quietly to our tortured, scattered conversation.  One minute Dad is fixating on the shearing schedule again.  The next, I’m telling them something about the shooting.  The next, Mom is ordering me to return someone’s phone calls who needs chickens.  No one cares.  They just sit and listen.

And then the music starts.

I feel it pulsing through my body.  In spite of my sadness, my chest loosens, my body sways.  

We move from English Country tunes to blues.  Then Bob starts strumming Proud Mary.  I try to join in, but I can’t quite find my way.

Justin steps up beside him.

Left a good job in the city

Workin’ for the man every night and day

And I never lost a minute of sleep

Worryin’ ‘bout the way things might have been

His singing helps me find my own voice.  We’re singing together now.

Big wheel keep on turnin’

Proud Mary keep on burnin’

Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river

I feel surrounded and protected by a circle of love, acceptance and music.  I’m dancing with joy as we sing.

And I recognize keenly, in that moment, the difference between sorrow and regret.

The fact that a gun was fired throughout our community and into our community-centered business fills me with sorrow.

But I don’t have one ounce of regret about anything we’ve done.

And tomorrow I will remember my gratitude and grace.  Maybe I’ll even go back to  understanding that we are lucky things weren’t worse.  We will pick up the work of putting the pieces back together. 

Then, on Saturday, we will open for the season and begin cooking breakfast for our customers and neighbors again.

There will always be a  before and after moment from that gunfire.  But that doesn’t mean the work stops.  It doesn’t mean the dream goes away.  It doesn’t mean I stop loving this life I was handed.  But it does mean, before the work resumes, I need a time of sadness. 

The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Tomoko Nishida-Castro and Theresa Jones.

Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  If you’d like to help support my work, you can do so for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.