Lists. I think maybe this weekend has been about lists.
Our church had six feet of water in the basement from Hurricane Lee. Since I had cleaned up a flood before, when our townhouse was inundated in '96, I figured I had best go down and help out, but it was a challenge. I knew it would be bad.
The church: The kitchen and its contents, all the Head Start materials and furniture, the Brownies' supply closet, the five or so antique sewing machines we used to make quilts for charity, the quilting supplies and fabric, the quilting tables, the Youth Room and its contents...all destroyed. My first list.
The recall that followed was not so bad, but here it is. Our home: Our wedding cards in an album, all the living room furniture, books, a bookshelf made by my grandfather, carpeting, a picnic basket, cross stitch projects, photographs, various wedding gifts never used ( an electric skillet, a crock pot, who knows what else), framed pictures. My second list.
There was likely more, but you forget. We moved some of it before the water came in.
I had forgotten the smell, but not the piles of debris, the overturned furniture, the endless chore of moving the sludge, yards of trash bags, the layers of gloves. I had also forgotten that flood mud does
not come out. I'm pretty sure my boots are done. My work clothes, I had planned to throw out anyway. My third list.
Enough about that. Do you remember what you were doing September 11th at 9:37 am?
I do, vividly. I was sitting across from one of my students in Autistic Support doing math with him.
Someone came into our room and whispered it to the teaching assistant. Her face went white.
She told us, not the kids. I kept on teaching, because I figured there was nothing else I could do. I prayed, too, without words.
Staff flocked to the library to watch the TV. I did not. I just wanted to focus on the kids. Soon enough parents came, and we shut down, and we went home. The import did not reach me until I saw the news that afternoon.
My co-worker had a neice who lived in Jersey. The neice lost her husband. She was five months pregnant with their second child.
We taught and cried in that classroom, over and over again, for about two months.
When I thought I was finished crying, I would cry again. And the tales of bravery and providence and grief just kept coming.
That was how it went.
I do not think our country will ever be finished with
that list...the list of the dead, the list of the martyrs, the list of the stories that just keep appearing. Rubble settles, dust dissipates, and stories come to the surface.
I cannot link floods and 9/11, except that we each have stories to tell.
We go back to the places of pain, to honor or to help, risking the fresh bruising, trusting in another moment of strength. The strength that makes heroes of ordinary, anonymous people...the strength which pulls beauty from ashes...new stories from debris...turns a cross into a crown.
Is there any other list? Any other story to tell?
