Hindman Settlement School, Kentucky 2022

Before the water, trees swayed in upstairs windows at Stucky’s grandmother house. Bedazzled writers danced, swinging in Contra Dance to techno tunes, Robin or Lark. Riotous trivia challenge under a disco ball, then Open Mic, and workshops, We ate tomato pie, washed dishes, and snapped beans on the porch. Before the water, we wrote, read, and practiced our craft. Together, creators imagining, dreaming in sympathy. Before the water, we were Hindman.

During the water, glaring emergency lights framed grievers, helpers, heroes, faces shocked to silence. Such peace exuded from the petite poet that the therapy dog sought her comforting hand. A line of burdened backs slick with rain climbed the hill towards higher ground. During the water, sitting vigil, exhaustion became stunned, deep dreamless sleep.

Through the water, life stood still beside me. I remembered how to step outside my body during trauma. Emergency lights framed kindness, gratitude, resilience, and fortitude. Through the water, compassion’s heat grew, steaming off the rain of sorrow. Above the flood, the comfortable peace of the poet held us all. Together, we passed on to dawn.

Leaving the water, I abandoned my good car bought when my mother died. Left my dishwashing bonded writerly kin to scatter to the four corners, Left the ancient chapel and the music of the gathering place. Left the porch rocker and the heady mountain air. Left the white homeless ducks on the lawn. Left the piece of my writer’s heart that lives at Hindman. Ate one more pimento cheese biscuit, went west to the flat land, turned east towards my mountains, to come home to the Blue Ridge, without the blessing of poetry, without the poet’s sermon, reborn into a wasteland.

After the water, I write to hold in the light the bright heart of Hindman, to frame the weeping hills, and resilient folk, to contemplate the brevity of life from the distance of disaster, to support the recovery of the community where each does the work before them, each shovelful of mud, each recovered work from literary ancestors, each cup of clean water, each pimento cheese biscuit. Each word, song, picture, dance, poem.