AARON

On the 24th, a thunderstorm treated my town, and specifically my block, to a microburst so strong that a whole line of empty cow barns a few houses up from us was lifted off its foundation and flattened. That squabble you’ve got going on with your spouse about the way the house is cleaned (or not) can be OVER. All you need is 100mph wind trying to launch said house to Lake Erie.

Like most people, we’ve had some dirty rotten luck in our lives. I want to be clear that this was not that: two of the neighbors’ trees were ripped in half and had their tops deposited on our ancient and enfeebled garage-that-can’t-be-used-as-a-garage, not the almost-brand-new electric car we just got, which was sitting right next to it. OH MY GOD we said, after it was clear that our heads were not going to get ripped off (for we were cowering in the basement, where water was squirting in around the window frames), THE GARAGE IS FINALLY GOING TO DIE! I believe I jumped up and down a little. (Some of you may remember that I have often invited you to back your vehicle into our garage to knock it over “by accident” some night when no one’s watching, and that you have failed me utterly, so let me say: thanks to acts of god, you are now off the hook.)

These are the things one expects from weather: occasional realities that remind you about that whole mortality phenomenon, dealing out devastation and celebration as though from the same trick-or-treating bowl — as if off-brand gum and full-sized Snickers were interchangeable. What one doesn’t expect of weather is for a character named Aaron to show up and change everything.

It started with my husband’s reminder that we call a specific tree-care company, the one that relieved us of the locusts that had flattened my garden not once but twice with their brittle, ten-ton deposits. I vaguely remembered liking the dudes from that company, but not for any reason other than the destruction they unleashed on the locust perpetrators. Then Aaron showed up, and I remembered a bit more rather quickly.

There’s nothing obviously noteworthy about Aaron—not any more than with anyone else— but once you get talking to him, sticking your thumbs in your overall straps and saying the things you’re supposed to say after a huge-ass storm (“how d’ya like THAT pile-up?” / “bet you guys are drowning in calls right now, eh?” etc etc), you find out pretty quickly how much Aaron a) loves his job, and b) loves people. He takes his time strolling the devastation, making notes on a clip-board. To anything you might say, he has a bright-eyed, knowing look— a listening look— and a ready response. He’s willing to elaborate on any theme you might put forward, as though you’re writing a school essay together: you provide the topic, he’ll haul up some evidence. Aaron is a collaborator.

My children, uncanny wild beasts, sniffed Aaron out immediately. Before I knew Aaron was in the driveway, my son was yelling off the porch to him about how the storm knocked a panel off his ride-on John Deere. The whole time I was trying to talk insurance coverage and mulch pile location with Aaron, my kids were haunting the background, circling like small but voracious predators, making loud comments in the hopes that Aaron would choose to elaborate their particular threads of thought, including the VERY BIG BLADES ON THE ROTOTILLER.

I don’t think Aaron said very much to them, beyond some kind and mild responses to their urgent bits of news, plus maybe a small expansion about the busted rototiller, but let me tell you, the man made an impression. I didn’t really know it until I started dragging downed branches around the lawn in order to make a pile for his crew yesterday evening.

The nanny is away on summer vacation, which means of course that my husband, my father, and the babysitter have also gone away, which means of course I am in Endurance Mode, sunburned and dehydrated, humping impossible loads of kid chowder around the Finger Lakes with no sense of time or hope. It also means that I’m fairly inured to all the sounds of children, such that I respond in the exact same way to the phrases “mommy I saw a pigeon” and “mommy I set the house on fire”— glazed eyes, quarter-smile, all-purpose “mmmhmmm.”

But when the children miraculously started playing independently in the dirt under one of our pine trees, looking for “dinosaur bones,” my weary mud-stained face could gaze out at the lawn and send the message to my gelatinous brain that I needed to consolidate all those heavy limbs for the tree care guys. Work Horse Mode. I went out and started hauling, pitching my body at about 45 degrees to drag this shit over to the locus of devastation. Eventually the kids started calling me, as they always do, and I didn’t really hear it, as I often try not to, and so one of them finally shouted, “HEY AARON!”

“Hey man,” I heard myself reply, in a super-relaxed, super-mild, quasi-surfer voice. “Are you that kid I met yesterday with the rototiller?” And we were off to the races.

Reader, let me tell you, these children have NEVER been so interested in me, my views, my well-being, or what I think of them. They shadowed me over several acres, making sure “Aaron” saw that they were also pulling smaller branches, and narrating how they “know how to do that!” My son showed “Aaron” all his vehicles, jabbering solicitously about how fast they were, don’t you think?! And then my daughter kicked it into high gear, talking to me as if I were a brand new best friend.

“Hey Aaron, do you know my toenails are purple? It’s wearing off actually. I know how to get water from the sink! Let me show you. I get a glass and a straw and use the small spout because the water is cleaner there. Have you seen my artwork?” <previously monosyllabic, contrary, hissing child takes “Aaron” to the fridge and narrates all her drawings and paintings.> “Do you know how to do watercolors? I’ll show you.” <locates, opens, unloads, organizes her easel set, gets paintbrushes and water and paint and paper out, none of which I’ve ever been able to get her to do for herself, and begins painting, pointing with her free hand to the different effects she’s getting with the brush, and naming every color clearly, as though “Aaron” is now both friend and charge.

We even get into a heartfelt, sighing discussion about siblings, how and she asks “Aaron” if he has a brother, which of course I decide he does, and we commiserate about the difficulties of sharing. She wonders, knowingly, “is he just two?” <nods sagely> “Two is a hard age.”

It doesn’t stop there— we go for almost two hours on the novelty of having Aaron in the house. A tour of the dress-up box, explanations of several more machines, any story they can remember that might catch Aaron’s interest. The magic of Aaron, of course, is that he IS interested, and can be, because the devastation all around him is not his own, but is something he specializes in clearing. As Aaron, I get to see my kids for a minute as others might, someday— not so much bloodsucking groundhogs as spirited humans with a startling capacity to engage.

Aaron just called, actually, to ask when the best time to come with the machinery was. I said that he’d better avoid the 10:30-12:30 slot, since my mother will be watching the kids then, and if there’s both a non-mom caregiver AND heavy machinery going down, they’ll “eat her alive.” He laughed, a no-reservations kind of laugh.

Thanks to the general revived understanding on our block that entropy is the natural state of things, we haven’t had to answer any awkward questions today, such as “why are you wearing nothing but underwear and ear protection and picking up sticks in our lawn?” Because that’s the way the world is, Jan. Today we all know it, which is nice.

I will keep you apprized. But so far, these are the gifts the devastating weather has brought.

“Hey Aaaaaaaronnnnnn…. check out my scooter.”