My first memory of water. A memory of softness. A day of sun warming the coarse yellow sand. The water dark, yet welcoming. We emerged newly covered in a fine skin of decomposing tannins from the surrounding cedar trees. This place, named by the Lenape to reflect the influence that cedar had on the waters of this region. I am 4 or 5. I am still new to this earthly plane. I am fascinated by its gentle movements as ripples flow over my feet. I can fill my bucket with it. I can pour it out onto the sand or back to its source.

I am 7. We have moved to a place in Vermont alongside a brook in the woods. A place where the water rages in spring then mellows to a sweet spill down moss covered rocks for the rest of the summer. My first taste of freedom came beside this water. My sisters and I would hike alongside this brook, Middlebrook I would later learn. Our reward was a waterfall at the top of the mountain. We would cross above the falls, trek through the woods behind the golf course at the top of the road, then come home. For a young child the thrill of this adventure was palpable.

I am 14. We have moved again to a house that is maybe a dozen yards uphill from the Ottauquechee. A river whose song I would fill me through my bedroom window in the back of the house. A river that I would swim in underneath a black iron bridge in town down a steep bank. A river whose glacial erratics I would sun myself on like a grecian nymph, never in a bathing suit, always stripped down to our underwear, not caring if we were seen, basking in the virility of youth. In my adulthood I would watch in grief as this river swelled, breached, and unleashed a level of destruction I had not yet become familiar with. I am now however. The image of her distended body impregnated with swiftly moving propane tanks, tree trunks, and other debris stays with me. Her normal crystal clarity had turned a shade of mud. A few years later I would ease my aching hips into the cool shallows of her pebbled basin. My own belly swollen with life as my pelvis prepared itself for expansion.

Fifteen months after my daughter’s birth she would be blessed with water from the Ottauquechee along with glacial water from Saint Mary’s Lake in Colorado. In 2021 I would find myself standing on the edge of this lake giving into the fatigue of altitude sickness. Before leaving I cupped my hands, filled them from the melting glacial water, and drank. The Tibetans believe that glacial water is the most pure of all drinking water. They are correct. Fallen from the sky as snow, compacted by wind, melted by the sun, flowing over rock, glacial water is a perfect balance of all four elements. In a word it is simply exquisite.

I’m 21. I’m in college. I’m living in a house across from a pond filled with beavers, heron, and ducks, amongst a plethora of other wildlife. My time here is placid. I go for walks up the road to visit the falls that feed into this pond. I explore it with a kayak going as far as I can into its thicket of reeds until I am stopped by the shallows. There is a quiescence in living next to a pond that is bespoke to each one. Ponds have a way of stopping time. They speak to the power of pause & reflection.

At 25 I became a home owner with my first husband. On a plateau above the Black River in Springfield, VT. We would observe this river in her seasonal fluctuations never once worrying about her wellbeing until 2011 when tropical storm Irene came into our lives. It was my birthday weekend. I was supposed to go camping at a reservoir. It was a day of confusion as mist & fog filled our neighborhood but elsewhere the clouds dropped 11 inches of rain in the span of hours. We were unaware of the devastation until we went for a drive later in the day.

In 2013, two years post-Irene, we purchased an old farmhouse at the end of a dirt road on a large piece of property. On it were two ponds. The larger of the two was far out in one of the old fields & had been used to water cows when the property was an active dairy farm decades ago. Though not the source of the story I’m about to share with you this larger pond had a presence that always bothered me. One of the intrusive thoughts that I experienced in my postpartum depression was an image of myself with my baby strapped to my back just under the surface of this water, much like the fallen soldiers in the dead marshes. The smaller pond was closer to the house but tucked away and somewhat hidden. Neither welcoming for swimming, something we had hoped to change but never got around to doing.

This house was considered “active” by those in the paranormal community. There were two spirits on the property. The first was Ed. He was the father of the most recent family who had lived there since the 1940s and had done extensive work to the house & land. Ed was what I call a watcher. He just came by from time to time to check on the house and make sure everything was ok. I came to appreciate his presence. The second spirit did not show up until my daughter was about 2.

What I’m about to share with you is something that I wish I had not been told. A few months after purchasing the house I was at a yard sale with a friend. While chatting with the home owner I shared with her details of my new home. It was a house that many people in the community knew because the previous family had been there for so long. Ed & Harriet Merrick were well known and well liked in Springfield, so was their home on Baker Rd. In the 1950s they had had three boys. The two youngest were twins. On a cold day in the fall one of the twins wandered too close to the smaller of the two ponds and drowned. He was two at the time, his age is significant.

When my daughter was two I would see a flash of a black shadow out of the corner of my eye no taller than knee height, the same height as my tumbling toddler daughter at the time. Immediately following each sighting she would have a decent sized fall or bang her head hard on something. Though these occurrences also happened when there was no sighting, after a sighting there was always a minor injury on her part soon after. The feeling from this other spirit was somewhat mischievous, almost amoral in not yet knowing right from wrong.

Before you ask, yes two other people can confirm both of these spirits. When I described the activity to the youngest daughter of the family whom we had purchased the house from she shared with me the story one of her older twin brothers drowning in the pond. Before I shared with her my information she informed me that her older brothers described Robin as playful & mischievous and very much a trickster. When I asked my sister, a natural medium, to tune into his presence she suggested I make an offering of a toy up by the pond to satisfy his playful nature. For whatever reason my instinct said to wait.

A few months went by and it was time to put my beloved 13 year old boxer, Charlie, to rest. She had been battling cancer for a while and it was time to end her suffering. Charlie was my soul dog. She loved people, being in my practice while I worked with clients, and moreover children & babies. When it was time to put her down my husband and I discussed what should be her final resting place. We settled on a spot just above the small pond where Robin had drowned. A spot where she could look out over the property as she had often done. She was put to sleep by our vet, on her bed, in our home, embraced by us. I knew that in offering Robin an eternal playmate in Charlie he would finally find rest on his side of the veil. He would have a permanent friend to spend his days with. After her burial we did not encounter Robin again.

A few years later I left that property and a marriage that had been slowly dying for years.

The year that we are about to close has been one of my most challenging. In many ways even more so than the year that I left my first marriage. In September of 2022 my second husband and I bought our current home in Chester. We love this house. It holds us in the ways we need it to. It provides us with the sanctuary that we had been seeking since we began to imagine our life together. What we did not know however is its relationship to water. The water table here is high. Days before our first Christmas in the house we had several inches of rain. We went downstairs one morning to the discovery that water was seeping up through the floor. I rushed off to the hardware store to buy a shop vac. We spent all day managing water that was coming up through the floor. Every rainstorm afterwards required spending time in the basement vacuuming up the water that would find its way in.

Halfway through 2023, on July 10th Vermont received 9 inches of rain in a matter of hours. We were managing the basement. We were on top of it with the necessary sump pumps and the shop vac. It started as a few inches of water. It was a full day of dealing with water and we were managing it OKAY, or so we thought. Sometime that afternoon we went for a drive to see the extent of the damage around Chester. In the 40 minutes that we were gone our neighbor’s pond breached and flooded our basement with 4 feet of water. We returned home to our own personal catastrophe. Everything that was down there was now floating in dirty water. Our heating systems were under water. The water line was about a foot from the electrical panels. One of the scariest moment of my life occurred in the next few moments of my husband descending into the water, turning the panels off, then having to go back down to turn the panels back on so we could run more pumps to drain the water. There is nothing compared to the minutes that follow a loved one saying the words, “just in case something happens I want you to know how much I love you.” This is when time stops. Minutes become hours. The unknown becomes a space of terror. In this moment you will either break or you will stand resolute in defiance of the unthinkable. I did not break that day. And in not breaking the consequence is a new edge to my daily existence. The name for this new space is PTSD.

In the months that followed I would become hyper aware of the weather, at times paralyzed with fear when the rain would start again. The rest of the warm months felt stolen. We would receive more rain on a weekly basis. We set up as many pumps in the basement as possible so that we could leave the house without fear of being taken by surprise again. The extra pumps have helped. And it’s still not enough. We have a case with FEMA. And unfortunately we have learned that FEMA is not in the business of helping home owners in any timely fashion. They are pressuring us to take out a loan that we can not afford to make the necessary repairs to our home.

We have done our best to return to a sense of normality while living in the constant threat that this could happen again. A week ago, on December 18th it did. We received 4 inches of rain and combined with snow melt the rivers swelled. The neighbor’s pond once again breached and flooded our basement with nearly two feet of water. In the months that followed the July flood we purchased a gas powered pump with a three inch intake to manage this situation should it happen again. In trying to get it up and running we spilled oil on top of the rising water. While this was occurring we had an active fire in our wood furnace in the now flooding basement. At that moment I called 911 for support. All I knew was oil plus rising water plus fire equaled serious danger. The fire department came thinking that our house was on fire. Once they arrived and assessed the situation they determined that it was a hazmat issue and reassured us that our house was not in danger of igniting. I had held myself together for as long as I could that day. Upon hearing this information I began to crack. The fire fighters spread oil absorbing pads on top of the water and helped us get the gas powered pump operating. About halfway through this ordeal the only female fire fighter took a moment to check in with me. I fell apart. She held me. I sobbed. She told me to let it out. I cried harder. She said the words I needed to hear, “I know you’re going through PTSD and it’s ok, it will be ok, you’ll be ok.” She held me for a few more minutes and then my husband was by my side. It was time to hold each other for the first time that day. I had woken him up that morning before I took my daughter to school to let him know that I had done all I could to get all the pumps going but it was coming in too fast. I continued to cry in his arms.

Once it was determined that our house was not in eminent danger the fire fighters left and we got out of the rain. We continued pumping water out of the basement for the remainder of the day. My step daughter sheltered us for the first few hours while we had to keep the power off for safety reasons. She made us eggs & toast. I cried some more. I took a nap on her couch. Then I went back over to our house to face the next phase of what needed to be done and try to help my husband who was now cleaning up the basement. I remember most of that day, however some of it is fuzzy. A very good friend is living in our apartment right now. He fed & supported us for the rest of the day.

Our heating system was one again impacted. Thankfully one of our systems still works and we are using that. We will examine our wood furnace when we have time. This week has felt like a month. We began it submerged in another disaster and ended it on Christmas in isolation with my daughter having Covid. People have been asking how they can help and if we have a go fund me. We do now. It is posted below. Our path forward involves excavation and as much prevention as we can manifest. FEMA is in the business of granting minimal funds to homeowners and strong arming them into taking loans to do the needed repairs. We can not afford the loan that they are encouraging us to apply for. In the meantime we start the journey of healing, of manifesting, of receiving the support that we need to stay in our home.

Since July I have been dreaming of water. Water that comes up from below me. Water the comes in through holes in the roof. Water that I am powerless against. Water that will harm me. We are conceived in water. Water is our first home inside our mother’s bellies. We are 60% water. Without water we perish. Too much of it and we drown. I am baptized in the profundity that water, for good or for ill, is a place of perpetual flow. We can sink or we can swim. Some days I swim. Others I tread water. I am tired.

Our Go Fund Me

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rock from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” ~ Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It