Flood 2

By Paul Ford

A second flood in two weeks brought five and a half feet of water and inches of thick river mud into my mother's basement. So I came down to Maryland on Sunday. I've squeegeed and pressure-washed for two days. The mud was remarkable, filled with oils, swirling, stinking. It covered the first five steps up out of the basement. Photos of myself at 15, of my brother, my grandparents, emerged on the floor, torn and purple from their soaking. I threw them away.

I threw away my high school yearbook, hundreds of books that had belonged to me at some point, or to my mother. Also, I need a tetanus shot, under the advisement of the state of Maryland.

Tetanus and mud, and sore shoulders, uninsured, fat, behind on many deadlines, money dwindling, now up at night on dialup to finish the work I couldn't do because I was sweeping shit, and happy. Old men from down the street and the smell of gasoline, pulling out the washer and dryers, piling things into pickups. Some days you pass out of the daily shadows and into sharp relief, and an invisible camera catches you. Today it would have caught mud flying, mud on my face, sweat pouring, hour after hour of motion. Not a real photo; a photo filed away into the ether, a photo you sense but don't see, an image immune to time and further floods. Sometimes I imagine these pictures when I'm out walking: the Plymouths cruising down broadway, men in tricorner hats and long rifles running through Brooklyn, men running away from a fire. Pictures taken with clouds for film and the curve of the sky as a lens.