With an eye on the storm

(When real life seems like a parody of itself, The River Muse adopts the persona of Dolly Dualander, woman of many homes.)

“Why, we are almost homeless!” Dolly sputtered in disbelief, as the mighty Delaware waged its battle with her precious land, her river view, her idyll, her aerie.

The day before, Dolly and her neighbors had helped clear a friend’s basement of boxes of linens and memorabilia, in preparation for the promised deluge. She felt sure that the Buddha statue in her friend’s yard smiled approvingly at her, even though she found it too heavy to relocate to higher ground.

Dolly did a Reiki blessing on her house¾all the way around this time, remembering the last flood. That time¾was it only last spring, she wondered?—she had sent her powerful chi in an arc from left to right on the riverside of her split-level contemporary home. But she had never figured that the river would sneak up from behind, as it did that year, flooding the garage and soaking the carpeting on the family room floor.

This time, Dolly swept her chi in a full circle, hoping to keep the new flokati rug dry, and her home safe.

Dolly and her son spent the day before this deluge in preparation¾readying the sandbags and the improvised barriers her husband had prepared after the last disaster. That flood was the second “hundred-year” flood in a year. This would be the third in 19 months, but there was no way to imagine it would be worse than last year’s.

As they waited for her husband to return from the city, Dolly and her son surveyed the rising tide from their separate perches. Dolly sipped a Mai-Tai from her zero-gravity lounge chair, poolside, while her son sat lotus-style on their private suspension bridge taking photographs with Dolly’s Nikon, as beer coolers and dislodged trees from upstream swirled in the eddy.

“Darling, please come in,” Dolly wailed to her son, whose lean body had grown strong and muscular in the months since his fall from grace at the state art school. The boy’s father had given him steady employment shoveling silt from the perennially flooded basement of his tavern. Her son spent whatever money he made on film processing and cheeseburgers.

Saving for the future was one life lesson Dolly had omitted from her children’s education. She had never learned it herself, preferring to enjoy the present and forget the past, rather than plan for the future.

Dolly’s entreaties to quit the bridge went unheeded, until her husband had returned from the city, urging the boy to find another perspective for his photography. A perspective Dolly is too demure to utter in print.

Her husband always had a way with words. A gifted writer, he had put his own ambitions on hold, choosing to provide a stable income for his family, and especially for the flower of his boundless love, Dolly. Dolly had needs. She was not content with a lovingly crafted loft in Manhattan’s tony Tribeca, nor with the quaint summer Catskill bungalow the couple owned.

Dolly had always wanted a home on the water. The Hudson perhaps, or the Pacific Ocean. But when the home she came to call Dunowen, her “fort on the river” went on the market, Dolly persuaded her hubby to reach under several mattresses for the downpayment. He had obliged her, as he always did.

Was it her great beauty, she wondered, or her boundless talent, or her soothing touch on his tired muscles after a long day of writing checks? Whatever it was, Dolly had a man whose life was dedicated to her happiness. And her happiness, like her talent, knew no bounds.

It was not unlike her to announce the acquisition of a new car in a casual phone conversation. On her return from a college reunion in ‘2000, she drove a classic Jeep, circa 1988. “Look what I found on Commonwealth Avenue,” she squealed. “I just had to have it!”

Now, the Jeep stood in the driveway of her drenched Dunowen, its seats caked with river mud. The dogwood tree she planted two years ago, in a grand re-landscaping project, was gone. The lilacs and the roses, the climbing hydrangeas, were crushed under latticework. The pool she tenderly hand-vacuumed and skimmed only days earlier, in a nod to frugality, was now a crumpled mass of vinyl and steel. The cedar deck, her husband’s finest handiwork, was left without a speck of soil to stand on. It hung, like a preposition, in the moist air.

With it, hung Dolly’s future as a multiple homeowner.