Grappling

I'm so thankful I finished yesterday's snowflake pattern prior to New Year's Eve. I'm not sure I would have put any effort into it at all had I waited or not had time when I did.

I expected to get my life back last week once all my work deadlines were met on December 30. I planned to work on a quilt that night, hoping to accomplish a single finish for my seasonal WIP challenge. We'd had monsterous wind gusts throughout the night, and the gusts turned into relentless gale-force winds once the sun came up. As I finished up the last of my work assignments, there was a tiny lull in the wind, so I quickly went on a walk in the neighborhood with Lizard, the first daylight I'd been able to catch in about two weeks, although it may have been longer.

The wind began pulverizing us before we got back home, making balance so precarious for Lizard. We counted the shingles flapping in the wind on our home. Completely helpless to do anything about it, we scurried inside and planned to pray our roof would make it through the windstorm and hole up with the longarm for the evening. Lizard turned on the television to catch the weather, and instead, we were glued to the screen for the next six or seven hours, watching (via live news coverage) homes just 30 to 40 miles from us burn to the ground right before our very eyes.

Depression doesn't even begin to describe my feelings on New Year's Eve as we watched more live coverage. Our home was still intact; we lost shingles, but our roof survived. Yet at least 700 families have been displaced, many of them having lost everything but their lives.

I scrolled through the Marshall Fire in Boulder County page on Facebook for 20 minutes, overwhelmed by the number of people offering up their homes, their spare bedrooms, their clothing, their food, their water, offering to take in animals. In the middle of a pandemic, people were opening their homes to strangers. People by the hundreds were offering transportation and/or time. Businesses were collecting blankets and pillows, water, food and baby items such as diapers and formula.

One woman went to a grocery store near the fire and bought all the non-perishable food she could to help the store clear its shelves and then made the food available to the affected 30,000 people. People from all over the country were asking if they could donate toward this one woman's kindness.

One man spent New Year's Eve gathering RVs and setting them up on his land to temporarily house victims.

There is bad everywhere in the world. But there also is good. Everywhere. You just have to look. Or be the good.

Tweet

Pin It