Raise High the Floor Beam, Islanders….

The very definition of ”heart-tugging”  is a toddler or young child standing in front of an adult, arms outstretched, begging to be picked up.  Confused, frightened or hungry for attention, they’ve already learned a key to unlocking the resistant adult heart: the single word, ”Up!?”   Spoken with authority or pathos, it’s a word that brings big, strong arms down to a child’s level, enfolding the needy little bundle of humanity into a blanket of security, raising it in a flash and ensuring its safety “up there”.

The urge to flee upward seems as instinctive as our impulse to run from danger.  On my third birthday, our neighbors decided I should have a pet.  Invited to share cake and ice cream, they appeared at the back door with a tiny black puppy in a box.  It may have been a cocker spaniel ~ I remember black, glistening curls of fur and long, floppy ears.  The pup wriggled in paroxysms of pleasure as Mr. Ramey rubbed its belly and scratched its ears.  I was entranced, until they put the puppy on the floor.  Turning a few quick circles, the creature produced a cascade of wild yips and headed straight for me.     

I don’t know what I was thinking, but what I did became the stuff of family legend.  In two bounds I was onto a dining room chair and up on top of my mother’s prized mahogany dining table, shoes and all.    Down below, the puppy tumbled and jumped, trying to follow.  I screamed in terror, refusing a chorus of entreaties to “be quiet”, ”come down” or “pat the nice puppy”.  Eventually, the well-meaning neighbors collected the pup and made their way home.  I came down from the tabletop after being promised more ice cream, and eventually received a turtle for my birthday.

Labor Day ~ Working (with) Class

 

All of them were immigrants, of course.

A Celtic knot of humanity, my mother’s people arrived from England and Ireland, torn from the County called Down and the Staffordshire hills by their longing for a better life.  Working their way from Virginia to Kentucky and Tennessee, they camped on the Texas prairies and followed the rivers back to Iowa.  They told stories of their patriarch, David, who panned for gold in Colorado and fought in the Civil War from Vicksburg to the Rio Grande.  They clucked over Ina,  David and Annie’s red-haired, purple-clad daughter who carried hand-written manuscripts of novels in her suitcase, married her stepson and disappeared into the depths of a Hawaiian pineapple plantation. 

Later, there was Mabel, heart-breakingly beautiful and my mother’s mother, who fell in love with Ed from Nebraska but never consented to live on that prairie, nor in the efficient if inelegant soddies built from its soil.  A wonderful combination of grit, romanticism and stolidity, they could be any American family, laboring to bring their long-held dreams to fruition.

 Maternal Grandparents and Great-Grandparents

My father’s parents came from Sweden.  Slightly more stolid and far less romantic than the crew pictured above, Ella and Alf didn’t meet until both had moved to Minneapolis in the early 1900s.  After their marriage they continued on to Iowa, where the coal mines offered steady work. They raised a large family, including my Aunt T, adored the few grandchildren who came along, and lived a quiet, predictable Midwestern life. 

An Almost Silent Spring

Every gardener in Houston knows the significance of February 14th.   Never mind Valentine’s Day,  it’s the traditional time to trim back rose bushes.  The actual pruning may take place on the 18th, or the 26th, or even March 1st for the lazy or preoccupied, but the ritual pruning of the roses means only one thing.  Spring is on the way.

I don’t have roses, but I have three large pots filled with  Cape Honeysuckle.  A beautiful shrub native to South Africa, its  red-orange blossoms resemble tiny versions of the trumpet vine flower and attract butterflies and hummingbirds galore.  Shortly after the 14th, I gave all three a serious pruning, and settled back to watch them fill out.  As February gave way to March and March  began to draw ever more closely toward April,  the plants sprouted new growth with a vengeance while I vacillated between restlessness and a strange lethargy.  Even as the honeysuckle climbed toward the sun,  I declined into a sense of anxiety and unease.   The days grew longer and the temperatures  warmed,  but the world seemed monochromatic and dull.  Looking around, I experienced no seasonal anticipation, no delight in the world’s renewal.  It hardly felt like Spring.

In the midst of my decline, friends in Dallas and Oklahoma began to post photos of their own harbingers of Spring. I grew curious and more than a little confused. Why were pear and plum trees blooming  in Dallas, two hundred miles to the north, when my neighborhood redbuds hadn’t begun to flower?  When folks in Kansas and the Carolinas began to brag on their  narcissus, crocus and daffodils, I still hadn’t seen a dandelion. 

Eventually, I realized anew that more than homes, businesses and boats had fallen victim to Hurricane Ike.  The suffering and loss endured by the natural world had been hidden by the dormancy of Winter.  With the  passage of the Spring equinox and the turning of the season, the full extent of the damage was becoming clear.  Massive live oaks stripped of their leaves by wind and innundated by salt water showed no sign of new growth.  Cypress, always bare through the winter, were refusing to leaf out.   Stopping at a pretty, anonymous tree I pass every day, I bent the end of a twig. It snapped off cleanly with the sharp, easy crack that says “dead”.  Reaching farther up the limb, I bent a larger twig, and found more dead wood.  I stopped and turned away, unwilling to explore further.

In the neighborhoods, confusion clearly reigned in the plant world.  Many redbuds never bloomed, and pears were putting on leaves before blossoms appeared.  The Indian hawthorne was late, the azaleas hardly noticeable. Crepe myrtles and palms seemed fine, but many shrubs were brittle and yellow.

Even worse than the damage and confusion was the complete absence of so much we’d taken for granted.  Ditches always filled with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush were clogged with salted debris.  Once-rich beds of iris and amaryllis were reduced to a few sad blooms. Across whole neighborhoods, the little grace notes of life had fallen silent.  Gone were the brick walkways bordered with marigolds, the trellises, the tumbles of begonias and baskets of bougainvillea that could drench a day with showers of salmon and magenta reflections.   Where lantana and petunias once grew, chunks of concrete foundation piled higher as hibiscus, loquat and lilies struggled to survive.  Orange and lemon trees were bulldozed while planters once filled with geraniums and daisies were turned into ashtrays and trash bins.

In some neighborhoods,  garden after garden has been replaced by patches of empty, sand-covered dirt as homeowners wait for construction to begin.  The houses can be rebuilt in a year, but it will take more than a few years to replace the beauty and complexity of the gardens.  Whatever its style, a real garden requires time, commitment and care, and many of these gardeners never will live to see their dreams flower in quite the same way.  A garden is far more than a carload of plants from Home Depot or Lowes, and certainly more than the new flowers now planted at our intersections and in front of apartment complexes.  Those flower beds are neat and tidy, but they’re absolutely identical from one location to the next.  For all practical purposes they’re “rent-a-flowers”, and in three months they’ll be replaced by something else.  They add a bit of color to the landscape, but have nothing to do with gardens, or with all of the love, curiosity, surprise and delight that gardens bring.   

As one of my gardening friends put it after watching  a front-loader drive through her salvia and dusty miller beds, “This year we’re going to have to take what Mother Nature offers.”  Her off-handed remark was my salvation.  Instead of exhausting myself watching for signs of a normal spring, I began looking around to see what was happening despite the extraordinary circumstances.

This past, utterly gloomy and damp Tuesday, I was driving down a main street through town when I happened to glance across the esplanade and noticed a flash of gold in a vacant lot.  An impulsive u-turn later, I pulled into the lot and discovered a stand of gallardia-like flowers shining as though lit from within.  Looking around, I was astonished.  There were sunflowers  scattered here and there, and a bit of scraggly wisteria climbing the telephone pole. There was a mysterious white berry with flowers along a collapsed fence, and the tiniest but most vibrant little coral-colored  flowers I’d ever seen.  There were tall purple things and creeping purple things.  There was a remnant of a white geranium on what appeared to have been a trash heap, and yellow-green blossoms the size of a pinhead scattered throughout it all.  In that single vacant lot, I found at least a dozen varieties of wild flowers, all  passed by hundreds – if not thousands - of motorists a day, none of whom saw more than a glimpse of the taller flowers.

I was so astonished I made two more stops at vacant lots, one next to a boat chandlery and one in a neighborhood which itself had gone to seed since the storm.  There were fields of white and pink primroses, lantana of all sorts, more wisteria, and great sweeps of tall, graceful yellow and purple flowers I couldn’t identify.  It was truly astonishing.  In the midst of a world where human gardens had been swept away like so much scattered seed , Mother Nature had moved in and strewn her gifts with a generous hand.  It was not that the beauty of flowers was missing from the world.  They only had moved, taken on new forms, and were waiting to be discovered. They were, in fact, hiding in plain sight.

After finding the third flower-strewn lot, I called my friend and said, “Get your camera.  There’s something you need to see.”  For the next two hours, we stalked the urban wildflower, amazed at the variety and profusion we found.  Later, as I enjoyed and processed the photos, it was clear the temporary trowel-for-camera trade had been worthwhile. 

As with so many things in this post-hurricane world, things rarely are as they were.  But it surely is Spring, and  the grace notes are starting to sound ~ one  exquisite blossom at a time. 

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An Equality of Joy

Only hours after the passage of Hurricane Ike, every survivor left standing in the rubble understood that far more than houses had been leveled by the storm.  The body of belief about what Ike would or would not do had been dismembered.  Spirits scoured clean of emotion lay empty and desolate as Bolivar beaches.  With possessions ravaged and dreams laid waste, incomprehension was rampant.  Victims stared toward the horizon with thoughts as scattered and broken as the plywood debris fields that seemed to stretch into infinity.

Even at the time, there were victims willing to acknowledge that human factors played a role in the devastation.  Pride kept boats at unsound moorings and families in homes that were certain to be inundated.  Unfounded trust in a last-minute turn of the storm’s path led some to reject advice from wiser and more experienced folk to pack their cars and leave.  Occasionally, simple recklessness chose to gamble on the final outcome, continuing to count cards of wind and surge as though pushing back from the table would be an option if the game seemed to be getting out of hand.

But in the end, as entire communities stood looking out across the  stunning collage of broken boards,  shattered lives and shards of memory, I heard not a word of anger or recrimination directed toward another human being.   There was astonishment, stunned silence, wounded grief and despair at the depth and the breadth of  loss.  There was frustration and anxiety that could surge into panic at the slightest provocation.   From time to time there were flashes of rage against the unfairness of life, the arbitrary nature of institutional decisions and the glacial slowness of response.  But although it probably happened, I never saw one person rage directly against another.  Viewing the carnage, everyone appeared to be in agreement: there may have been wrong decisions, inadequate preparation and less than helpful responses, but in the end it was nature which had done the damage.  Before that overwhelming power, everyone was equal.

Persuaded to Poetry

 

Months ago,  I published “The Surprise of Tiny Purple Things“, an essay about Florida environmentalist Charles Torrey Simpson and a pair of shells I found tucked onto a Texas beach.   The shells, a deep, rich purple, are known in scientific circles as janthina janthina.  They are, in fact, elegant and tiny purple sea snails.  Simpson had found a literal raft of them in the Florida Keys, and his chronicle of his experience helped me identify my own tiny bits of purple. 

Almost immediately, one of my readers stopped by with a request.  Her love of all things purple had been stirred by the piece, and she wanted a “purple poem”.  I don’t think of myself as a poet, and I was reluctant to accede to her request.  As it turns out, she does think of me as a poet, and was convinced  I could produce the poem.

We went back and forth about it for a few days, teasing one another, until she finally became insistent.  “Please do give me that poem”, she said. “I know it’s in there, and can’t wait till you spit it out.” Wanting to be polite, but not having the vaguest idea what a purple poem might look like, I replied, “The poem, she is percolating. Or, should I say, “purple-ating”?

I didnt’ hear back from her, and assumed our discussion had ended, until this appeared just a few days later.

“Ahoy Shore,
Can you see my right foot a-tappin’?
Bet you know why.
I’ll give you a hint. It’s small and shiny and purple and yearns to be heard (or read). I cannot wait to hear its voice.”

Voices and Visions

 

Truly good advice rarely comes accompanied by trumpets and tympani. It doesn’t light up the sky with neon colors, or advertise itself like a hot new product with a crack marketing team.  Truly good advice – words of wisdom, if you will – is simply spoken.  It doesn’t need to be remembered because it’s never forgotten.  It applies in circumstances so far removed from its original context you can’t help but be amazed, and its ability to bear time’s testing is absolute.

One of the best bits of advice I ever received was so simple, and so simply put, I’ve never forgotten it, even when I’ve chosen to ignore it or attempted to reject it outright:

Be careful who you listen to, because their voices will influence your own.

The influence of the voices around us is utterly pervasive and often quite surprising.   When I first moved from Iowa to Texas, the Texans with whom I lived and worked asked “Where you from, girl?  You shore do talk funny!”  After three years,  I returned to Iowa from Texas only to have friends and relatives ask, “Why in the world are you talking that way?”   Phrases like “ya’ll”  (and its plural, “all y’all”) and “fixin’ to” had become a part of my speech simply because I heard them on a daily basis.  That’s the power of voice.

To put it another way, what surrounds us, becomes us.  If we listen to hatred, we are more likely to speak in a hateful way.  If we continually hear cynicism and negativity from those around us, we are more like to become cynical and pessimistic ourselves.  If we listen only to Homer Simpson and Spongebob Squarepants, we’ll speak in one sort of voice.  If we listen only to Shakespeare, we’ll speak in another.  The point is not that we should choose one voice over another – Homer Simpson and Shakespeare both have a place in my world – but we need to be attentive to and aware of the quality of the voices around us.  We have the ability to choose which voices we attend to and cherish, and we need to make those choices in order to nurture and protect our own true voice.

Surviving the Guilt, Reclaiming the Gift

Sometimes, we don’t have a choice about whom we entertain.

I don’t remember making a call and I surely didn’t send out invitations, but suddenly a new problem has come to visit.    Sitting cross-legged at the corner of my mind, riffling through my thoughts like so much junk mail and looking for all the world like a bored ingénue who’s misplaced her nail file, my problem doesn’t seem inclined to leave.  So, it’s time to set aside the social niceties, and cope with this uninvited guest.

My problem is a sudden inability to write.  Since Hurricane Ike, I’ve produced a few blogs,  including one or two that pleased me very much. But the joy of writing, the sense of unfettered creativity, the easy flow of words simply has stopped. Ideas continue to pile up in my head, notes get jotted and beautiful, fragile phrases flit through my mind like clouds of rare verbal butterflies, but none of them lands on my paper.

The experience is passing strange.

For someone whose home experienced the eye of a hurricane, I’m unbelievably blessed.  My house is secure, and my business will survive.  While I’m getting things back on an even keel, my mother not only is being cared for, she’s rather enjoying herself on an extended midwestern “vacation”.   The stray kitty I worried over survived the storm perfectly well with some help from the neighbors, and the camphor tree I planted and love lost hardly a leaf.

My possessions are intact, including a little antique china collection I fuss over every hurricane season.  I experienced no financial losses because of the storm, apart from evacuation expense,  loss of income and the need to throw out a refrigerator-full of food.  My flowers are blooming and my bills are paid.  In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, I have no problems.

And that, it seems, is the problem. 

Start Where You Can Start, Do What You Can Do

 

Whether you’ve been day sailing in Galveston Bay or managed an offshore jaunt to another Texas port, everyone has to come home. Tacking or reaching through the Gulf, moored buoys mark the shipping lanes and jetties.  Chirping and moaning across the waves, their bells, whistles and horns speak an ageless sea-language, and patterned flashes of light make them easily recognizable even for the night watch.

Slipping through the bay, there are day markers to look for – numbered red triangles and green squares on posts – or smaller red and green buoys.  If you have a chart (you DO have a chart, don’t you?), you know what to look for. When you find it, you know where you are.

Probably the most well-known aid to navigation in Galveston Bay is Marker #2. Attached to a scarred post that’s been replaced a few times, the red triangle alerts boaters to the beginning of the Clear Creek channel. A traditional navigational mantra reminds boaters to keep “Red, Right, Returning”.  Coming in from sea, the prudent skipper keeps red markers on the right, green on left, and the vessel in between for safe pasage.

Because Galveston Bay is so shallow, it’s always safest to enter the channel where the markers begin.  Sometimes folks will cut into or out of the channel between markers 2 and 4, where the water still is deep enough to carry smaller boats. But generally speaking, boats line up and take their turn, counting down the markers through the Channel into Clear Lake.

At least they did before Hurricane Ike.  Now, an eye for debris, a compass course or great familiarity with the channels are the only sure guides to safe passage because many markers apparently are gone, washed away in the surge. I say “apparently” because channel markers have begun to pop up in odd places -  a green marker in a pile of debris at Lakewood Yacht Club, a red light on a pier in Seabrook shipyard.

Last week, I was startled to find Marker #4 propped up against a fence on Second Street in Seabrook, just across from the Post Office. Surrounded by piles of debris and household goods that had been brought out into the sunshine to dry. it seemed less a guide to navigation than a memento mori for a way of life.

Creativity and Crisis

 

The first sentence of this week’s Write on Wednesday prompt stopped me as surely as an unexpected storm surge: “Earlier tonight I was tearing around the kitchen in my usual mad dash to get dinner – putting dishes away, feeding the dogs, preparing a marinade for the salmon, cleaning and chopping some carrots…” There was nothing extraordinary about Becca’s description of her evening routine, and that alone made it seem utterly extraordinary, a glimpse into a half-remembered world where the simple realities – dinner, dishes, dogs – could be counted on to sustain and enliven the routines of life. “Chopping some carrots…”

During the past weeks, there have been times I’d have found the thought of chopping carrots unimaginable, if not slightly bizarre. After a storm like Ike (or Katrina, or Rita, or any of the unnamed spinning whorls of water and wind yet to come), routine is an early victim. On the sailboat crazily surfing atop the storm surge, in the condo surrounded by moonlit water where no water ought to be, in the grinding screech of metal on metal and the plummeting and plunging of fiberglass and wood, there is no thought of routine. Survival is what counts. But storms end and water recedes. Emerging speechless from their shelter into the dawning of a fragmented, chaotic day, everyone discovers their world has been utterly changed, and beloved routines scoured away as surely as houses from a beach.

Like injured creatures warily testing first one limb and then another, people ask, “How’d you do?” “How’d the storm treat you?” What they’re asking, of course, is whether you have a house left, or a business, or even a dish to hold some carrots. It’s easy to assume those who emerged from the chaos with their home, family and possessions intact weren’t “affected” by the storm. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Everyone is affected, and the sense of dislocation, the communal feeling of helplessness, the suspicion that life itself continues to surge and to scour is a suspicion that can’t be avoided or dismissed.

Rich or poor, cursed or blessed, old or young, people begin to re-establish their routines in the same ways. They tell their stories, over and over. They stand and stare into space, as though listening for answers to unformed questions. They ask perfect strangers, ” How high’d the water get at your place?” and call people they haven’t spoken to in years, simply to ask, “Are you alive?”

If you catch them in an unguarded moment, their faces seem as placid and impenetrable as the glistening smoothness of the waters which destoyed their lives. If you look more closely, you can see the turbulence beneath the surface, as the mind races to catch up with life. Overwhelmed by events, stripped of routine, forced to absorb the realities of utterly changed lives and reduced to a search for the most basic necessities, it seems there is no time for thought and reflection, no time for creativity, no time for any spirit other than a spirit of gritty determination.

And yet, if there is no time to slow the pace of events or slow activity in the face of devastation, it hardly matters. For healing to take place, for creativity to re-emerge and the spirit to be restored, it is the mind that must be slowed, given rest and allowed to lie fallow as a winter field while time and patience do their work.

Returning home after Ike, I found the crepe myrtle beside my mother’s porch utterly stripped and bare – not a leaf remained on its branches. After a week, tiny bits of green appeared – new leaves defying the season, emerging in utter silence and oblivious to the destruction surrounding them. Today, two weeks later, the tree is fully leaved. Even though it isn’t time to prune, I’ve trimmed a bit, shaping the tree and cutting back enough to encourage even more growth.

Along the ditches and seawalls, where debris once covered the grasses and shrubs, there is a faint green haze of new growth. The water is settling, and returning heron and egret are reflected in the early morning stillness. In the nighttime silence, fish frolick and splash as though they, too, have come home, and a single, unapologetic bit of human laughter ripples into my window on the breeze.

Once again, creation and destruction have battled for supremacy, laying waste to the world and humbling humanity in the process. And once again, creation has the last word. What is true for nature is true for human nature, the nature of human spirit and mind. Time. Patience. Silence. Creation will come.

 

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A Restless Goose Chase

 

In Starting Over, Simply, I spoke of my evacuation for Hurricane Ike and my increasing eagerness to end that evacuation, returning home to confront the realities of a post-hurricane world. As I said,

“I’m even more anxious now to be home. As power is restored, communications become more reliable and people begin to make contact, the desire to SEE what has happened is almost overwhelming. Today I’ve talked with people in San Antonio, Phoenix, Dallas, Little Rock and Tulsa – all waiting to come back, preparing to come back, longing to come back…. to our home. With Mom safely tucked into the heart of the family, it’s time to turn around and head back, to find out what needs doing, and do it.”

Now, it’s time to begin the story of that coming home, and my first experience of “what needs doing”….

Wednesday, September 17

Even by Kansas and Missouri standards, it was nippy this morning. Still, I couldn’t help myself. With my first cup of coffee in hand and a liquid moon shimmering in the haze of first light, I kicked off my shoes and dug my toes down into the bluegrass that hadn’t been mowed in days. There’s nothing like it in Texas – long, luxurious grass with a fragrance that doesn’t even need cutting to fill the air. Bermuda and St. Augustine are fine grasses, but they’ll never compare to a silky midwestern lawn. Standing there, I suddenly heard a sound I hadn’t heard for a year or more – the cry of a goose. Looking around, I saw it immediately. Coming straight out of the north, it was quite solitary and honking with the enthusiasm of an out-of-control trucker. Flying low and straight over the rooftops, it headed due south, never varying its speed or direction. As far as I know, it’s still going, and probably will beat me to Houston.

I’ve always loved geese, and one of my favorite childhood songs was Frankie Laine’s Cry of the Wild Goose. It came to mind this morning, as did Gordon Lightfoot’s Restless, another paean to the wandering spirit so often portrayed by images of geese. Watching the goose this morning and hearing the music in my mind, I realized I was restless in a new and utterly unexpected way. It’s the restlessness of youth, of anticipation, of eagerness for a future that’s yet to be revealed. One of the basic choices rebuilders face is whether to attempt to re-create what was, or create something fresh and unexpected from the debris left scattered about.

In the most basic sense, the question is whether those pieces of debris belong to a jigsaw puzzle or a kaleidescope. Is the task to make everything fit together seamlessly, despite damage to the pieces? Or, might it be to twist and turn the lense, letting the pieces fall into a new and more beautiful pattern as they will? It’s a question I’ll be pondering tomorrow on those final miles home.

Thursday, September 18

When I left Tyler this morning, I had no idea what to expect of the day. After stopping in Nacogdoches for the little pile of “things” I’d left there, I headed off into an amazing tangle of wires, downed trees and scattered limbs that stretched alongside the road for miles and miles. It wasn’t constant, but it was clear that Ike’s winds had barely calmed as he worked his way through East Texas. The power crews and tree trimmers were doing their work, though, and here and there a stoplight worked, or people were pumping gas.

As bad as the wind damage was, the surge was worse. Coming across the Hartman Bridge from Baytown, I couldn’t see the location of a marina I’d always enjoyed, but I knew that it was gone. Closer to the bay, the debris still left beside the road was unbelievable.Before I reached my home, I made a swing through one of the closest marinas and was completely dumbstruck. In one pile of debris, the wheel of a Lexus pulled from the water was nearly covered by planks and sheared pieces of boat hull. Two huge fuel tanks floated in the water, and the metal gangways to the docks had been pulled off, twisted like gum wrappers and thrown up onto the grass. One boat had been dismasted, and then was pierced by its own mast. The stench of diesel, rotting garbage, sewage and decomposing plant life was overwhelming.

And then I came home. I’ve never won a lottery in my life – until today. The building was standing, and without damage. The electricity was on, and the water running. The palm leaves, occasional shingle and flotsam from the water rise had been cleaned up. Even the bottom apartments didn’t receive any water damage. Neither Mom’s apartment nor mine was damaged in the least – not even by wind-driven rain. The stray kitty I grieved over so came running to meet me, and my neighbors had kept her food and water bowls full. The plumeria and cape honeysuckle I’d finally just shoved into a corner of the breezeway and abandoned were perfectly fine, and every plant on my balcony looked precisely as it did when I left, if just a bit thirsty.

It’s the most unexpected and utterly unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen, and I am grateful beyond words. There will be work to do, for sure. The power has been off, and the refrigerators will have to be emptied, cleaned and restocked, and there is some work to be done with the plants, but after a good houseclean and unpacking, life at home will be just as it was – even better, with that good housecleaning finally done!

Work will be something else. There is unbelievable damage. I’ll be meeting tomorrow with several of my customers and surveying some of the marinas. Boatyards here will have limited capacity for repair work, at least for the time being, and I may be traveling for a while. In another week, I’ll know which customers I have left, and a schedule can be developed. It’s not going to be easy, but at least the first steps can be taken as early as tomorrow, and I’m eager to get on with it.

It’s time now for some supper, a hot shower, and another call to Mom. We’re working out some plans for her return, as well, but that will be a bit later, once I’ve done the out-of-town work that I’ll need to be doing.

I am blessed beyond belief, and after getting settled can begin to find ways to put all these blessings at the disposal of others who weren’t so lucky. I simply don’t have any better words than “astonished” and “grateful” to describe my feelings. It’s going to be an interesting few days!

To be continued…

 

 

 

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