Last Monday night, a storm ripped the roof off the boathouse next door and sent it crashing into the corner of our building. It struck just behind my writing desk. The force of the blow slammed the desk backwards and hurled it across the room, its wooden limbs sent flying as if it had received a sucker punch.
Just before the impact, I had awakened in bed. There’d been thunder and lightning all night, and I’d managed to sleep through it, but now something extra broke me out of my slumber. An extra sound.
Groggily in the dark, I knew only that something was Not Right, that the noise had become Too Loud. Just as the thought fully formed in my mind—we-need-to-go-to-the-basement–RIGHT-NOW—just before I bolted out of bed—the sound of an explosion ripped through the next room over.
“What the hell was that?” Ron and I stood, blind, fumbling in the dark for our glasses. Outside, the gale still howled with freight-train force. The sound was deafening, as if the storm was in the room with us.
I groped for the French door next to the bed, which led into the sunroom where I write. I reached for the switch and flipped the light on.
The room where I write had been replaced by another room, a foreign one. One where the desk leaned haphazardly against the recliner, its folding hinges busted, my wooden writing chair splintered beneath its carcass. Shattered glass lay drizzled across the wooden floorboards like clear sugar beneath the gaping black maw of the window.
All these objects were just resting there, as if they’d been this way for hours.
Before the impact, my laptop had been perched atop the desk. When the desk was blasted out from under it, the laptop had remained behind, like the flowers in Bill Murray’s tablecloth trick in Ghostbusters. Still standing. Except there’d been nothing for it to stand upon, so the laptop had dropped vertically to the floor.
From where I stood slack-jawed in the doorway, I now spotted it, resting gingerly upon the crystal shards of glass with rainwater puddling across its closed silver lid.
“The laptop!” I crunched across the broken glass to whisk it away to the dining room table, drying it lovingly with a towel from the kitchen.
The cats had made themselves scarce under some furniture haven. Tornado sirens struck up, too late, in the distance. I could barely hear them over the storm.
Later, after our fumbling with Hefty sacks to cover the hole where the window had been, after sweeping up the glass, sleeping restlessly, waking to see the damage in the yard, calling the landlord, and rearranging the broken furniture, I realized the strange tidiness of this event. The symmetry of it.
Because change is in the air, these days, in Ron’s and my life. The storm only punctuated what’s already taking place.
Three years ago I decided to become a writer, and this past year-and-a-half I’ve really been getting my start. Writing almost full time, I’ve drummed up some momentum, so that when I go back to paid work it’ll be easier to continue writing too. I set up my writing desk just a year ago, placing it against the corner window overlooking the lake, designing the perfect little writer’s space.
When I finished Draft 4 a month ago, it signaled a shift. I’m looking for paid work again. And we’re moving, leaving Madison in just under two months for Portland, my hometown. My family is there, and I’m excited to go, but the change is painful and I’ve often wondered if it’s the right decision.
We’ve been in Madison eight years. Our friends are here. Ron’s native landscape is here. We’ll be bidding farewell to our lakeside apartment.
So when the storm hurled my writing desk across the room, it felt almost like a stern, no-nonsense blessing. Almost nothing was touched except the desk. The plant sitting inches from the desk remained in place, serene, observing. Even my laptop was spared.
It was like God punched the base of the window to send me a loud, clear message: Yes. Get moving. Time is up. Time to go; time to make a change.
The storm happened on the first night of my writing conference, and another strange symmetry had already occurred that day. I had shown up in my assigned room, where five classmates and our teacher and I would discuss our manuscripts all week. Walking in, I grinned and shook my head. This was the very same room where I’d interviewed for a job three years before, and it was the job interview that had catalyzed my decision to become a writer.
Now here I was, back in this room, with its long wooden conference table and its floor-to-ceiling glass wall, its huge windows overlooking Lake Mendota. I hadn’t been here since the interview. So much was different now. I was married to Ron. I had quit my stressful job. I had become a writer and finished a manuscript.
I believe in omens, and even before the storm, I felt that the room assignment was a sign—that I was on the right track, that I had made the right decisions these last few years. Maybe the storm that night was an addendum: leaving now, too, is right.
Synchronicity used to happen to me a lot, but it has become elusive the older I’ve gotten. Perhaps I’ve just become more cynical. I was painfully shy as a young woman, but very in tune with myself. As an adult, here in Madison, making real friends and settling into marriage and into my job as a scientist, I became comfortable with myself in a way I never had been before. But I also lost some deep connection, and part of my aim in writing has been to try and recapture it, to get back in touch with my heart.
Last week, at the writer’s conference and after the storm, I felt an elusive harmony, as if me and God, or the Universe, were on the same page. I felt inexplicably blessed all week in myriad small ways. I knew, for instance, that I’d win the giveaway mug at the conference. When my name was called, I ambled to the front of the room unsurprised, as if the mug had been mine all along.
I seem to have caught a wave lately, the way I used to now and then. I can’t surf or waterski—when I try, my feet won’t stay under me and I fall forward, the cool water rushing over my head, my weary limbs bobbing helplessly. Life is often like that too.
But every so often, I’ve felt this harmony. When it happens, I can sense the cool crest of the water beneath me. The breeze playing across my face. Myself, just gliding along.
