Apocalypse Postponed

Sacchi Green

Nooooooo… I don’t want to think about apocalypse, dystopia, anything like that. I’ll face up to those…maybe…when it’s my turn to discuss the topic. But this is my day for promo, and, while I don’t write apocalyptic fiction, I do occasionally face up to some pretty dark situations. In this story, “Danger,” I manage to include shades of war, a certain degree of PTSD, extreme violence, and, at the very same time, an historical event when resistance triumphed.

Here’s about half of the story. All of it can be found in my anthology Lesbian Lust, and also in Thunder of War, Lightning of Desire: Lesbian Military Historical Erotica.
Lesbian Lust
 Thunder of War

Danger
Sacchi Green

Sex. Anonymous, no-strings, cunt-clenching, blast-furnace sex, enough to get me through a few more months of repression. That’s all I was looking for. But deep down, it wasn’t that simple. What I needed was danger, or pain, or pleasure; anything intense enough to fill the void.  
Cruising Greenwich Village wouldn’t block out flashbacks to Vietnam. Not a chance. But the war had cursed plenty of us with more than nightmares and memory lapses and the whole PTSD bag. Only somebody who’d been there could understand the addiction, the need for adrenaline highs. Sometimes sex was the closest you could come. If you got really, really lucky, it might even make you forget for a while.
After a year at a field hospital at Pleiku in the boonies and six months at the main facility in Long Binh, I'd finally been rotated “home” and assigned to an Army orthopedic ward. It didn’t feel like home. I didn't fit stateside any more, didn’t fit anywhere, and over there the war still ground on into a future I wanted no part of.
There wasn’t much of anything I did want, except enough of what passed for sanity to get me through my days. But I was needed; broken men who deserved far more depended on my care; and to keep from flaming out at my job I had to get away from it, if only briefly. So, on a rare weekend off, I took the train from DC to New York, and then the subway, rolling into the Christopher Street station at half-past midnight on June 28th, 1969.
Sweat, piss, and pot smoke soured the underground air. The street-level atmosphere was more breathable, but with an electric edge to it, a manic energy driving the crowds. I wasn’t the only one looking for trouble. Local talent and weekend wannabes, hippies, hustlers, aging beatniks, tourists sucking up the scene; they wound in and out of bars and side streets along Sheridan Square. Mostly guys, but a few women of interest caught my attention as I edged through the throng.
The fringe on a leather jacket brushed my arm in the crosswalk. A sideways glance showed me a lean, tanned face framed by black hair, small feathers tucked into each long braid. A swift jolt of attraction—but my interest would fizzle if the body beneath the Indian regalia turned out to be male. I couldn't make up my mind until I'd dropped back far enough to watch her hips and long legs. Nice ass under the worn jeans, slim, but definitely female. Hippie role-play getups usually leave me cold; on the other hand, a nice touch of sexual ambiguity heats me up, so she'd scored at least a draw.
Once on the sidewalk, she turned and eyed me with more than the usual speculation, as if she thought she'd met me somewhere. Or was considering trying that line of approach.
I needed some decompression time. My gaze drifted past hers with only the subtlest pause at her slim, strong hands, as brown as her face. Maybe later, if she turned up at one of the bars I’d be checking out. I kept on toward my friend's apartment just off the Square on Grove Street, and felt the stranger watching me, felt my own stride alter subtly. My ass tingled. Then I heard her boots on the pavement as she moved away in another direction.
The leather-fetish shop just up the way was closed, but I took a look into its brightly lit windows anyway, reinforcing the sense that no, Dorothy, we weren’t in Kansas any more, thank-you-very-much. Or in Washington DC at Walter Reed Army Hospital, although some of the S/M gear with its metal rivets and buckles gave me an unsettling flashback to the orthopedic ward.
I shook it off. Something different niggled at my mind as I dug out my keys and let myself in through the outer door. Kansas, Dorothy…a headline glimpsed at the newsstand in Penn Station… Oh, right. Judy Garland's funeral had been today. Maybe that explained the crowd's tension, maybe not. I hadn't been a huge fan, but still… I paused for breath on the fourth floor landing, and murmured sincerely, "Thank you, Dorothy, really, thank you very much." Then my key clicked in the old lock, and I went on in.
My college friend, off in Kenya now with the Peace Corps, still hung on to her rent-controlled apartment. I chipped in for occasional weekends. The anonymity of the city suited me, and the edginess of the Village. Not to mention the potential for sex, with all its dangers. Okay, especially with all its dangers.
By ten past one I was showered and ready to roll. Jeans and a denim vest over a gray T-shirt, auburn hair just brushing my earlobes. Not advertising, exactly, but not discouraging anybody who might be shopping.
Sheridan Square was boy-bar territory. I took a look around, though, the memory of the tall stranger percolating to the surface of my mind. The notion of slipping my hands under that fringed suede jacket took on considerable appeal. The thought of her fingers under my own shirt roused my nipples to parade-ground attention. Had I missed my chance?
The crowd was even edgier now. Some folks went about business as usual, whether strutting or furtive, while others clustered in muttering groups. I paused outside the Stonewall Inn. The usual go-go boys didn't interest me, although some of the drag queens could be as much fun to watch as high femmes, when I was in the mood.
But flashy drama wasn't on my wish list tonight. I needed the touch of smooth, unscarred skin, the press of an unbroken body needing no more healing from me than the frenzy of mutual friction could provide. I needed a woman.
No drama? So what the hell am I doing on the streets of Greenwich Village after midnight?
And there it came, like the answer to a subconscious prayer. Four black-and-whites and a paddy wagon squealed to a halt in front of the Stonewall Inn. Cops poured out like circus clowns, rushing to get an eyeful in the bar before the "degenerates" slipped out the back.
It was a regular routine. A flurry of arrests, a few fleeing customers who couldn’t afford to be outed, some stiff fines, and then business as usual by the next night. But this time was different, and if you travel in the circles I do, or even if you don’t, there’s no need to explain the difference. Stonewall is in the history books.
My first instinct was to back off and head for more likely hunting grounds. Other folks seemed to have the same reaction, and the square was emptying fast. I walked a few blocks, going with the flow. But then the sirens of police reinforcements tore through the heavy air, and, instead of accelerating our retreat, turned the tide. Why did they need reinforcements? Something was happening. Something we didn’t want to miss.
Back in the square screams and shouts and the crash of breaking furniture came from the Inn. A tangle of cops with billy clubs and drag queens wielding lethal spike heels came flailing out onto the sidewalk. The queers were fighting back!
And so, suddenly, was the crowd, scream by scream, stone by stone, chaos racing on a torrent of long-repressed rage.    
I was near the front, with no thought but to ride the wave of excitement, until I saw her thirty feet away. Dark braids flailed like whips as four cops tried to drag her toward the paddy wagon. I stared, caught her eye, and for an instant she flashed me a cocky grin, the fire of battle flaring in her eyes. She wrenched one arm free long enough to give me a “thumbs up” sign. That brief glimpse of her hand hit me where it counted.      
I swerved on impulse to charge to her aid, but a bottle shot past me from behind and exploded against a wall. War-zone reflexes slammed me to the pavement. When the crowd closed in it was move or be trampled, so I struggled upright and moved. By then there was no sign of her, and the cops were crouching behind their vehicle.
For an hour or so I hung around on the periphery of the action, not quite feeling like I had a right to be in the front lines. I’d never been hassled by the law, and in the military I’d kept a low, clean profile because my nursing was needed. Or so I told myself. Now I played medic to a few victims of shattered glass and pavement abrasions, applying disinfectants and band-aids from an all-night drugstore and ice packs rigged up in nearby bars. In between I cheered on the drag queens and pretty boys and bears of all flavors who turned the tables on the cops until the boys in blue had to barricade themselves inside the Stonewall Inn and call for more reinforcements.
Once in a while I caught distant glimpses of long black braids and a fringed jacket in the heart of the fight, where uprooted parking meters and benches were being used as battering rams to try to get at the police pinned down inside the tavern. She’d got loose, of course. Whenever I tried to get closer she disappeared into the shifting masses.
Frustration gnawed at me. All geared up, and nowhere to go. I’d come looking for sex, and the charged, manic atmosphere just pumped up my need, but this time groping in a secluded booth at a girls’ bar wasn’t going to do it for me. Even a wrestling match in a grubby restroom would be too tame. Even…
“Hey, medic, over here.”
She was down a blind alleyway, slouching against a wall just at the blurred border where dim light gave way to darkness. Her fringed jacket was off, and slung over one shoulder.
Medic. She must have seen me patching up the wounded, but I hoped she wanted something more than first aid. Either way, I didn’t hesitate for an instant. “Are you okay?” I didn’t see any obvious signs of injury even when my vest brushed against her sweat-streaked tank top. “What do you need?”
No smile now, just a long, searching look into my eyes. My breathing quickened. So did my pulse rate, and an aching knot of need tightened my groin.
“What do you need, medic?” It wasn’t a question. Her voice was low, husky, and certain. My answer was a half-step forward that brought me up firmly against her. One thigh pressed into her crotch. I straddled her slightly raised knee. Just a little more pressure, the slowest of movements…the need was building, along with the haunting fear of giving in to a need for more than I could get.
A glare of blue light flashed past the end of the alley as a cop car sped by. My back was exposed, vulnerable. What if I were caught, arrested, disgraced, fired…
The prickle of fear down my spine made my pulses beat even faster, my body strain harder to feel the responding pressure of hers. I clutched at her back, my hands already under her thin shirt, raising it. Her arms were around me, and she gripped my ass, forcing me to move, to rub against her in a rhythm that demanded fierce acceleration.  “What do you need, what do you need,” she muttered over and over, a low, compelling chant, and all I could do was move faster, rub harder, feel her hardened nipples flick across my aching breasts, and slide my cunt along her thigh while my own thigh met her thrusts.
Distant crashes…panic threatening to take hold…but she edged a hand inside my jeans and wrenched all my awareness back to where our bodies merged. Her fingers slid through my folds into my hungry cunt, her thumb went at my clit with hard, sure strokes—and I plummeted over the edge, all defenses gone, all trust given, nothing mattering but to get more, and more, harder, please, more!—until the whole battery of sensations, fear, urgent need,  loss of control, came together in one massive jolt of pleasure.

High Anxiety

Sacchi Green

Sometimes writing what you know is the last thing you want to do, and the last thing people want to read. I’ll tack on a short story excerpt at the end of this, so feel free to skip to that if you’d like. The story is from an historical anthology coming out later this year, and is about PTSD (or shell-shock as it was called during WWI), which may or may not qualify as angst, but is probably close enough.

 First, though, before the story excerpt, here's my write-what-you-know tale of angst, or something like it.

I’m not sure how different angst is from common anxiety—maybe an upscale, existential form. In any case, I have all too much of both for comfort. There are valid reasons for my anxiety, but when it extends into unrelated areas of life, becoming the default setting of one’s mood, I think we’re pretty much in angst territory. Situational angst, if that’s even a thing.

I’m not really that badly off, except when I’m semi-awake and it isn’t really quite morning and my defenses are down and I still need more sleep but worries both genuine and imagined get tangled together in dreams that feel too real. Daytimes, most of the time, I cope with whatever needs coping with, which right now means writing about angst.

In a stroke of serendipitous coincidence, I just came this bit of information in a local newspaper, a welcome aid to putting off getting personal:  

“Research suggests that anxiety is at least partly temperamental. A recent study of 592 Rhesus monkeys found that some of them responded more anxiously than others and that as much as 30 per cent of early anxiety may be inherited. Yet what is inherited is the potential for anxiety, not anxiety itself.”

How can they tell that a trait like anxiety is inherited rather than learned unless they separate the youngsters from their parents? And wouldn’t doing so quite naturally cause anxiety? Well, never mind. Let’s not get anxious about those poor baby monkeys.

Back to the hereditary theory. My mother was always on the pessimistic side, apparently in the philosophical belief that it was better to expect the worst so that it wouldn’t take you by surprise. That’s not to say that she was always in a state of anxiety, but especially in her later years she went out of her way to find things to worry about. She’d answer my phone calls, even those she was expecting and knew to be on benign topics, with a lugubrious, “What’s wrong?” (I don’t ever recall telling her anything was wrong over the phone.) In her last several years, when her health was declining and there were real things to worry about, she accepted her own condition fairly calmly, but worried all the more about other family members and various other factors. When I semi-kidded her about some really far–fetched idea, she admitted it, but said with a bit of a laugh that worrying was her hobby. “What else do I have to occupy me?”

I have plenty to occupy me, but lately I find myself getting uptight with far-fetched (but not impossible) worries. If family or friends are traveling I’m on edge until I know they’re safely home. My granddaughter is the light of my life, but as soon as she was born I thought of her as another hostage of fate. I think my mother did, too. Well, if anxiety is hereditary, I hope we haven’t passed it on to that next generation.

I’m not obsessed with worries all the time, or if I am, it’s more of an undercurrent. I don’t have a real claim to angst. I’m sitting beside a swift mountain stream right now, enjoying my surroundings, pleased to have harvested at least two gallons of wild blueberries in the last three days, plus a bountiful crop of wild golden chanterelle mushrooms, one of the kinds you can find in Whole Foods, but mine are much fresher, and free.

Life is, on the whole, good. Even when death has to be taken into account. A week from next Saturday I’ll be taking my ninety-five-year-old father for a PETscan, one more test for what looks right now as probably, but not quite conclusively, lung cancer. He knows this. He’s still quite sharp, just a bit on the forgetful side. He tells doctors that I come with him because of his poor hearing, but we both know it’s just as much so that I can remember and keep track of what’s going on. It’s also because he isn’t driving any more, thank goodness!

I know how lucky I’ve been to be on good terms with my parents, and how remarkably lucky I’ve been for them to live so long. My mother made it to ninety-three. What we’re dealing with now usually happens to people far sooner, and is a natural phase of life. But it’s never easy. Uncertainties, tough decisions to be made, questions that can’t be fully answered. If he does have lung cancer, we have to think in terms of how much arduous treatment would be worth it, and what the prognosis would be with treatment or without it. If it turns out that he doesn’t have cancer, he still has recent and worsening breathing problems, even though his health in most other ways is remarkably good considering his age. He was heroic in taking care of my mother the last while before she had to be in a nursing home for care, and he visited her there every single day. (My brothers and I made sure one of us went with him three or four days a week.) But he has a horror of being in a nursing home situation himself. He has so far resisted living with me, an hour or so away from where he lives now and where I grew up, or at an assisted living place near me, but those options are open to him. He wants to stay in the home he shared with my mother, with friends nearby, his church, his twice-a-week bridge games at the senior center.

I want whatever is best for him. I worry about what is best for him. I’m the one he depends on, and however much I worry in those early morning hours when I need to sleep but can’t, and often in the earlier night hours when I’m first trying to get to sleep, I’ll cope with whatever needs coping with. Anxiety is a natural phase of life, too, a repeating one.

Now for the story excerpt. This will be in Through the Hourglass, one of the three anthologies I’ve been editing lately, and isn’t actually erotica, although I’m tempted to expand on it sometime in the future and include the steamy bits I know are there between the lines later in the piece.

Crossing Bridges
Sacchi Green

Upstream the river riffled over stony outcroppings, but under the bridge it ran deep and clear.  Reggie leaned over the wooden railing and stared down into those amber-green depths, willing herself to see only the great speckled trout balanced in perfect stillness against the current. An ordinary Midlands English stream, all green shadow and shimmering sunlight and blue reflected sky. Just a big fish. Yet she could not block out visions of bodies submerged in other streams flowing ever redder with blood through the ravaged countryside of France, until they reached the Somme. Even the songs of birds in flight, spilling over with rapture, warped in her mind into cries for help, help that could never be enough.

"Shell-shock," the doctors might say, but it scarcely mattered what one called it. Pure, searing grief, not war itself—though war would have been enough—had breached her defenses. Grief for Vic. For herself without Vic.
             
Reggie's hands tightened to the point of pain on the railing. By what right did England bask in such a May morning, calm and lovely, while over there artillery’s thunder still shook the fields, and men rotted in muddy trenches? How could she bear to stand idle in the midst of such peace when her place was over there, even…even with Vic gone? All the more with Vic gone.
 
But she must adjust, must let the peace of home heal her—not that anywhere felt like home now. Or ever could again, without Vic. If Reggie could prove herself recovered, not just from her physical injuries but those of the spirit--capable once more, normal, clear-minded--they just might send her back to the war.  An experienced ambulance driver, strong as most men, skilled at repairing motorcars and field-dressing wounded men; here in pastoral England she was of no use, but over there she was desperately needed.

Reggie straightened abruptly, trying to focus on the tender green of new leaves, the glint of sunlight on the flitting gold and peacock blue of dragonflies. She shook herself like a retriever emerging from deep water.

“Don’t move!”

The low, terse command froze her in mid shake.

“There’s a nest…” The voice came from below, less peremptory now, but Reggie’s mind raced. A machine gun nest? She fought the impulse to drop to the wooden planks of the bridge. Surely not gunners, not here. A nest of wasps?
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” The speaker was almost whispering. “It’s just that swallows are nesting below you on the supports of the bridge, and I’ve been sketching them, but they get uneasy when you move so suddenly and might leave the eggs.”

A flush of fury heated Reggie’s face. Forced to the verge of panic by some silly schoolgirl! She bent over the wooden railing, an angry shout surging into her throat, and saw, first, a head of tousled light brown hair cut short about the ears. A schoolboy, then! All the worse! “WHAT do you bloody mean—“

The artist looked up. The remainder of Reggie’s words halted, burning like mustard gas in her mouth.

Not a boy. Not a child at all, though she might have been taken for one if it weren’t for tiny lines at the corners of mouth and eyes, and a certain look in those eyes that spoke of a share of pain in her life; rather like what Reggie saw in her own when she was careless enough to look in a mirror. Her hair was really no shorter than Vic’s pale curls had been in France, and Reggie’s own dark thatch had been cropped a good deal shorter then, a necessity in the filth and chaos of battlefields. She realized uneasily that it was about time she cut it again. Five months in hospital had left it just long enough to tie back in a straggly knot, which she would have hated if she had cared in the least about appearance these days.

“I really am terribly sorry,” the woman said. “I shouldn’t have startled you like that. I get too engrossed in what I’m working on; it’s my besetting sin. One of them, at any rate.” A flashing smile turned her rather ordinary face into something quite different, almost enchanting, in the elven manner of an illustration from a fairy tale. “You must be Lady Margaret’s cousin, and this is her bridge, so really you’ve much more right here than I. We’d heard you were spending the summer with her. I’m Emma Greening from downstream at Foxbanks.” She stood from her perch on a mossy rock and made as if to extend a hand, then realized that she couldn’t possibly reach up to where Reggie stood and withdrew it in some confusion. “Just a second and I’ll climb out of here with my gear.“

Reggie found her voice, or at least a version of it just barely suitable for the occasion. The hoarseness couldn’t be helped. Vic had claimed to quite like what being a little too slow to get her gas mask on had done to her tone.

“No, you can go on sketching. I was about to move along at any rate.” Emma Greening…what had Margaret said about her? Something, in all that chatter about the local population, something about being an artist, but Reggie had paid no attention to any of it. No one in this dull, placid, countryside mattered to her.

Now she wondered just how much Margaret had told the local population about her. Or how much Margaret herself understood.

“I should be going myself,” Emma said. “I can sketch swallows in my sleep—it was the bridge itself I wanted to catch in a certain light, and I think I have enough now to be going on with.” She packed her sketchbook and paint box into a satchel slung over her shoulder, and stepped from the rock onto the steep riverbank.

“Here, I’ll give you a hand with that.” Reggie heard the brusqueness in her own voice, and couldn’t quite erase the remnants of her angry frown, but found herself reaching down from the top of the riverbank without remembering how she’d got there. Emma’s sun-browned hand met hers in a firm grip, and she was up the slope so quickly and easily that it was clear she hadn’t needed any help at all.

“Thanks. I’ll be getting along now, and I do apologize for disturbing you.” Her smile now was merely polite.

This would be as good a time as ever to practice behaving normally, Reggie thought. Best to scotch any gossip about her being a bit odd. “Don’t leave on my account, Miss…Greening, is it? I’m Regina Lennox. Make that Reggie. Sketch here all you like. I’m the one who should apologize for being such a troll when you startled me.”

Emma’s smile flashed brilliantly again. “A troll? How funny that you’d say that! This is indeed a perfect troll bridge, which is why I was sketching it, for a book I’m illustrating. A children’s story, the one with the three goats.”

“Trip, trap, trip, trap over the bridge?”

“That’s the one,” Emma confirmed. “For now I wanted to get the bridge itself, rustic and charming, with the swallows, and that wren darting in and out of the bittersweet vines on the other side—she must have a nest there—and the clump of purple orchis just where the bridge meets the bank. All lovely and peaceful before the goats or troll appear. A lull before the storm sort of thing.”

“So the troll got here prematurely.” There was something comfortably familiar about the conversation.

Emma tilted her head, surveying Reggie with mock seriousness. “No, I wouldn’t cast you as the troll, exactly. In any case, I was the one below the bridge, or nearly so, so I’m a better candidate for trolldom.” She leaned her head the other way with a frown of concentration belied by a twitching at the corners of her mouth. “I see you more as the biggest Billy Goat Gruff, stern, shaggy, putting up with no nonsense from any troll.”

“Certainly shaggy…” Reggie stopped short. Memory hit her like an icy blast. Vic used to tease her, rumpling her hair when it got shaggy and needed cutting, calling her a troll—often followed by, ‘Well, get on with it, you slouch, kiss me if you’re going to!’ She felt her face freeze into grim stillness, bracing against the familiar onslaught of grief.

Emma stepped back. “Sorry again,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “I have such a bad habit of blurting outrageous things without thinking.”

“It’s not you,” Reggie got out, but no more words would come.

 “I really should be going now, anyhow.” Emma said quickly. “I’ll just leave you in peace.  I expect we’ll run across each other in the village from time to time.”

Reggie watched in silence as Emma picked up the bicycle lying beside the lane, settled her art supplies in the canvas panniers at the back, mounted it, and rode away. Her divided skirt revealed a brief glimpse of quite nice lisle-stockinged calves above sturdy boots—and a smudge of moss stain where she’d been sitting on the rock.

So much for behaving normally! Reggie’s spasm of grief was subsiding, and she wished she could call Emma back, but the bicycle had disappeared around a bend edged with dense shrubbery. And what could she have said? “I froze up because you reminded me of someone.” Which wasn’t even true. Emma didn’t particularly resemble Vic. It was more the light, pleasant conversation, the brief exchange of banter…

Ah. That was it. Just as the rehabilitation counselor had said, but Reggie had resisted. Guilt. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Why should she be the one to survive? How could she deserve, or accept, even the least bit of pleasure?

Well, she had enjoyed herself, if only for a few minutes. Maybe that was a sign of healing. She rubbed her hands across her eyes, then turned back to the bridge. A swallow darted under the arch, and a second bird took flight from the nest on the wooden underpinnings while the first took over hatching duty. On the far side a wren darted in and out between clusters of tiny white flowers on a trailing tangle of vines—bittersweet, Emma had called it. A small butterfly speckled like polished tortoiseshell flitted between masses of ferns on the upper bank. Emma would probably know what it was called.

It occurred to Reggie that this side of the bridge was the farthest she’d been from Margaret’s house since she’d come here, and also that it must be close to time for lunch. A quick sound in the water and a spreading ring of ripples showed that the trout concurred, and had snatched a mayfly from the surface.

She went back across the bridge, pausing to look down into the water. Only when she was well along the lane did she realize that her mind had played no tricks this time, and she’d seen only the river, and the fish, and reflections of a swallow in flight.
__________




     

A Home Is…Where the Heart Is? Where You Hang Your Hat? Or What You’ve Lost.

Sacchi Green

Home can be where you live, or where you came from; a roof over your head, or, most important in the legal sense, a mailing address. Home can be the land that refugees leave behind, or the refuge, if any, they find in a new land. Home can be where you want to be, or a place you can’t stand to go back to. Home can be where you feel you fit in best, like a career soldier who thinks of his army as home, or an ex-soldier who has been through so much that he can’t handle being anywhere but a self-built camp in the woods. In the seventies there were Vietnam veterans camping in the wilderness around the Quabbin Reservoir near where I live, and even now, at least in summer, there are woodlots around the edges of towns and along rivers where some ex-soldiers hang out, on the indistinct border between homelessness and choice. The presence of a large VA hospital nearby may or may not be a draw to this area.

Homelessness has been a human problem for what seems like forever, or at least since our ancestors had any firm concept of “home.” Since the earliest recorded times families and by extension communities were traditionally assumed to be responsible for all their members, and to be cast out required a major breach of law or tradition. Sometimes, even then, there must have been individuals who would rather risk death alone than stay with families who grudged them the support society expected.

When I think about what home means, and homelessness, I’m old- fashioned enough to think of Robert Frost’s poem,  “The Death of the Hired Man,” even though its most well-known line has become a bit of a cliché. An old farm worker returns to the place he’d worked longest and found the most kindness. He’d left that farm one haying time, when he was needed most, lured by an illusion of higher wages. Mary, the farm wife, takes him in when he returns, saying he’s come home to die, but her husband Warren is reluctant. The old man is no kin of theirs, and had abandoned them when they most needed him. He says,

“’Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’”

Mary counters,

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Homelessness has many facets, many layers, many causes. Having no place to go where they have to take you in is one cause, and so, sometimes, is feeling that being taken in only because they “have to” would be worse than being homeless. Silas, the hired hand, had family he wouldn’t go to. Mary says,

“’Silas is what he is—we wouldn’t mind him—
But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.
He never did a thing so very bad.
He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good
As anyone. Worthless though he is,
He won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.’”

It’s a stretch to make a comparison, I know, but these days kids kicked out of their homes for being gay, or running away because of abuse, are sometimes homeless because the price of staying home is too high. Denying who they are in order not to “shame” their families, or putting up with abuse, is more than they can bear. With older people who seem to have chosen homelessness even when families might take them in, the reasons are harder to generalize, and mental illness or addiction are often factors, but the line between mental illness and a drive to be independent of the restrictions of family and a settled home is a hard one to draw.

The clearest cause of homelessness is, of course, poverty, and the more economic inequality there is in a society the more poverty and homelessness we see—or try not to see. Now and then, in some places, constructive efforts are made to combat homelessness; Salt Lake City has built groups of very small houses for the homeless and finds that the expense is less than providing emergency services for those without homes. Too many cities, though, are concerned more with pushing the homeless out of sight than helping them. http://www.nationofchange.org/utah-ending-homelessness-giving-people-homes-1390056183

What can be done? More opportunities for employment would help many, but some would still be left behind, without marketable skills, or too old to be attractive to employers who could use their skills. (Warning: A bit of a riff here about age, homelessness, and women. Women, even those without children, are more likely than men to go to shelters, partly because they feel even less safe than men out on their own at night, for good reason. And women are more likely than men to turn to sex work for economic support—there’s certainly a larger market for them—but even that resource depends on youth and attractiveness. Older “bag ladies” might well be raped for entertainment, but they wouldn’t get paid for sex.)

Back to what to do about homelessness. From my perspective, electing politicians who favor job production and infrastructure repair and a “social contract” that includes responsibility for the poor and afflicted over ever-higher corporate profits would be a positive step. On a local level, possibly more successful in non-urban or merely semi-urban areas, towns can get together with groups of individuals to provide help and shelter. Where I live there are active groups in several towns called “survival centers” that offer food and clothing and other kinds of help funded by contributions, and almost but-not-quite-enough shelters run by church and non-church groups. There are also meal-providers like soup kitchens (a major one here is called Manna) and outfits like our local Food Bank that organizes contributions from local chain grocery stores and runs a farm operation as well, supplying food to the soup kitchens and survival centers. We as individuals can support these efforts, even if it doesn’t seem like enough. (Another aside about women; I’ve heard that the greatest lack in contributions of goods to these organizations is tampons and menstrual pads. Desperately poor women can’t afford them, they don’t like to talk about them, and it doesn’t occur to folks to donate them.)

We can give what we can afford to those who ask for help on the streets, even when we can’t be sure what they’ll use it for. (When I owned a store I used to give gloves and scarves in cold weather to those begging in front of my business, and money now and then, but, I admit, sometimes as a bribe to get them to move to another location for while. A couple of the guys really distressed some of my employees by commenting loudly on the girls’ admittedly quite noticeable physical attributes. I also admit with a certain feeling of guilt that I refused to give to a regular street person who smoked cigarettes continually. Who am I to judge what someone needs most? But in this case I did know that she wasn’t exactly homeless.)

I wish I had better answers. I wish someone had better answers.  Giving the homeless small, economical homes as Salt Lake City does seems like one good idea, if it could only catch on, but some would still be left behind. There would still be those, usually men, possibly addicts or PTSD victims, listed in police reports with addresses like “the streets of Northampton” or “the streets of Amherst.” Or like the lesbian couple I knew several years ago who lived through the summer in a tent and came to my store to charge their cell phones. One was clearly disabled and got disability checks, which, as far as I could tell, was what they both lived on, that and what the other, more dominant one, stole. They almost made it into the town’s limited public housing—I put in a good word for them with the chairman of the housing commission—but the deal was blown when the dominant one was caught stealing, and they lit out for Florida. I was glad to hear from the disabled one just this year on Facebook; she has good public housing now in Rhode island, while the other one will be in prison in Florida for a long, long time. I’m not judging the latter—I haven’t walked in her shoes, as they say, and as far as I know she only stole small items like incense sticks from me—but I’m glad to know that at least neither of them will be on the streets right now as a major blizzard bears down on New England.

Which brings me to the point where I don’t stop wondering what we can do about homelessness, but I do turn to battening down the home I’m so lucky to have in preparation for the possibility of being stuck without power or drivable roads for several days in very cold weather. And I count my blessings.