Jen Has A Little To Say

 

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I guess this whole story started with my teenaged observations and narration of our lives after the whole world had been changed for a few years. It is actually the story of our own close encounters with death and our ultimate survival. Survival took everything we could muster, since we were mostly kids and teenagers who survived, with just a few helping adults such as the neighborhood ladies who helped Lou and me. There was Roops of course, later though.

I’m still me. Lou still thinks I’m bossy! Well, about that, some people are born to be in charge, and that’s just a fact. I do give Doug veto power, but I make most of our decisions. He is fine with that. He is busy with greater things. He is constantly in close communication with Roops, combing what remains of the world’s internet for news. He and Elvin and OZ love the computer OZ made and whenever they have the time they are typing and reading. Lou and I do some too, we all had to learn to type on our own.

Doug is officially the local authority if anybody needs that. Most people manage without him.

I’m a mother now too, so everybody better pay attention! Gabriel especially. He is the light of life, but a little agent of entropy! A good deal of life consists of repairing the damage and frequent admonishment.

The next order of business seems to be another wedding. Since I am expecting again, we are filling this house pretty full so before the next wedding, of Lou and Elvin of course, we are thinking of building another room and maybe something more to the house. Of course, OZ will have to help Doug and Elvin plan it and build it. A lot of materials will have to be found somewhere. We might end up having to look them up in the defunct lumber yard down on the highway. In fact, that will have to be the way. We hope that the lumber and other materials are still in good shape and that no one else has taken them. We use horses and wagons to carry large loads, such as lumber.

It’s a funny time. A great deal of property belongs to no one. The owners died years ago. We feel odd about just removing things but if we do not, they will go back to nature right where they were left years ago. We are so short on manufactured products. One of these days anything useful will be gone from the empty houses. This is one of the reasons that Doug is so interested in encouraging people to start making things for their own and everyone’s use.

Lou and I grieved our parents for many years, but there was so much death all around. It became just part of the landscape of life. Doug and Elvin didn’t talk much about their own parents, but we had come to know them a little just by hearing the guys talk about them. Judy, their mom, was a mom who stayed home with her kids and Mac, their dad had been a manager in a plant that processed locally grown vegetables into frozen products. We used to see the packages in the grocery store before.

There was so much death at that time that no one was buried in the normal way of times past. There had been no funeral directors or fancy funerals. There just couldn’t be. In a way it was almost a nice thing that so many people never left their own homes in death. They were often in the ground on their own places. Doug’s parents were in the garden at their home in Arlington, and mine and Lou’s were right outside on the side of the backyard near the roses. It is an odd thing, but real. Some people are still, after all these years, in their own beds in their own houses since there was no one to care for their burials.

Time does go on. Our children’s generation will know nothing of the mood and terror of those days. Their lives will just be their lives, all that they ever know. Oh, of course, we will try to tell them what it was like to live among so many people, to drive cars, to be rich in ways that we can’t imagine now. But they will never know how it felt to lose so very much. They will never know their own grandparents. They will never know what it feels like on the first day of school, meeting thirty new classmates, like we did. Perhaps their own children will.

The few babies and children that I know are healthy and bright, as children should be. We are blessed.

I have been sitting in with Ellen at a few births. I am learning how to help so that someday when she is gone there will be a midwife in Milltown. Someday we hope that there will be physicians again, but that looks to be a long time. Right now, most people do what they can for medical care. Herbal medicine is used and other traditional methods. We are studying textbooks all the time trying to pick up useful medical information. There aren’t any colleges to attend, so we do what we can.

We continue to be watched over by the Lights. We see them from time to time.

Those are my thoughts on this day. Soon the building will start.

Link to all so far: In the tenth year of the pandemonium.docx