We are prepared this time.
Prepared for winter. Prepared for Trump.
I used to live in a very tall house. It was taller than the others on the block, with tall trees, a tall porch, and tall doors. I used to sit in my bedroom at night, under the tall ceilings, next to the house’s tallest window, and rock my son to sleep while looking at my neighbor’s roofs around me.
But my favorite window was one in the back of the house; a small window that looked out into the yard from a second-story bathroom that had been added onto the house years after it was built, when plumbing was finally added. I loved it because it looked over my vegetable garden and the rows looked so tidy from up above like that.
I also loved that window because it looked west. See, I lived at the time in Indiana and everything is so flat there. So when you looked west out of a second-story window of a tall house, it felt like you were looking right through to Colorado.
I had grown up in hills and hollers and rainstorms would sneak up on us there. They’d catch me and my brother outside and we’d run home wet. But from that west-facing window in Indiana, I was never caught off guard. I could see a storm coming for days.
Living there I learned that I could prepare for things. I could look out the window and see dark clouds coming and figure they were about over Terre Haute, so I’d stick my umbrella in my backpack before leaving for work. Or I could pull aside the curtain and see a creamy white horizon and know that tomorrow it would snow. I could do things like put cinder blocks in the back of my pickup truck or grab the hair dryer and restretch the plastic over the drafty windows. My roommate could walk to the corner store and buy a pack of cigarettes and I could drag the potted rosemary inside across the kitchen floor.
I’m watching the snow fall outside my window tonight– much anticipated, much predicted by radars and weather apps that I didn’t have back then, in the years before I had the money to own a cell phone or a computer of my own. I grabbed lettuce and orange juice from the store last night in preparation for this storm and my neighbor made fun of me. Lettuce? He said.
This morning a friend messaged me and said how surprised he was that more wasn’t planned around Trump’s inauguration. He is thinking about walkouts, marches, rallies, things like that. I’m surprised, too. Eight years ago there was a ferver, an energy, somewhat manic time as Trump came into power.
But this time it feels like we’ve been staring out the west-facing window watching something gather on the horizon. We know what it coming and we have meteorologists in the form of journalists and historians to confirm for us what it is.
So, as I talk to other organizers, other mothers, other writers, my family and friends, I am seeing us each pull the potted rosemary in and put the plastic on the windows.
I’m watching us pull our people around us, check-in with the most vulnerable. I’m watching people go to planning meetings, talk to their churches and mosques, consult with their neighbors. I’m heartened by this– the lawyers brushing up on constitutional law, the teachers setting up phone trees, the anarchists setting up Signal chats, the writers using more periods than exclamation points. I’m relieved that we know more and are more certain of ourselves. We have learned to prepare.
After all, we’ve been through a thousand storms. I think of the time my tent poles broke on Ocracoke in the wind or the time the rain cut off the roads outside Cataract stranding me and my friends — so I know that some storms are worse than others. But still, we know the motions to take– we know how to reach out for our loved ones and pull our coats up to our chins with our free hand. And because we know that, we also know how to plant after the ice has melted, after the wind has died down, and once the rain has gone.
Get your bread. Get your milk. Get your lettuce.
Get your friends. Join an organization. Get off the internet and into formation. Button your coat.
I believe we are ready this time.
