It’s Come to This

ALL NIGHT, THUNDER. Low mutters rumbling from Minneapolis, like a neighbor’s angry spat through a flimsy wall. This has nothing to do with you, lucky you. Then whole minutes of reassuring quiet—entirely phony, as it turns out. The calm before the …

The first cracking fusillade hits, slams. The window sash judders.

The basso voice of existence smacks up close and personal. The world is enraged. Has its reasons. Take that—and that—and that.

Lightning rips the navy night.

The rain is loud, metallic. On the corner, the great hackberry is struck, all its trembling leaves. It splits to the creamy core we’ll touch and marvel at in the morning, cool like any dead thing. It is—was—more than 100 years old. The hackberry can live 150, even 200 years, a neighbor reports, having Googled. She sounds angry, as if the haggard thing, already in decline, had betrayed her, a suicide.

The rage doesn’t stop, the storm just moves on, past Stillwater, before dawn across the St. Croix into green Wisconsin. The air, freshly ionized, is buoyant after the night’s grand mal seizure.

This I love, the Midwest doing summer.

YOU STILL DRIVING? It took a moment to understand the question. At your age, he says, are you still …

He’d come to remove the frayed boxwoods from around the electrical transformer in the little courtyard, a heavy job, too much for me now. Fresh morning after the wild night. I was admiring the sharp, tidy way he worked. He reminded me of my father,

Patricia Hampl is the author of numerous books, including The Florist’s Daughter, A Romantic Education, I Could Tell You Stories, and The Art of the Wasted Day. She is Regents Professor of English emerita at the University of Minnesota. never a speck of dirt on him, like a surgeon at his potting table in the old glass-paned greenhouse.

Still a daughter, still measuring things, men especially, against my Depression-era good guy, the steady worker. What was he like, my dad? Decent. There is no better word to describe a man. Decent. Modest prewar word. How lucky was I? That lucky, to have him as a father, born more than a century ago, over 20 years gone to glory, as people used to say.

Still a daughter, lifelong ingénue.

You aren’t that much younger than me—I almost said that, squeeze of citrus to my voice. Defending myself against the insult of age. I liked him less now, this deft worker. I’m nobody’s daughter anymore.

But I just mumbled, Yes. Still driving. His reasonable question, my neutral answer, pretending no offense taken.

On to brooding, the new vocation. It takes up much of the day and night’s desert landscape. Insomnia keeps a