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Community Corner

Spared

Our columnist reflects on what might have been and what is.

I wrote in my journal last Thursday: “We are spared, blessed.  The air is crisp and cool, sunlight imprinting the patterns of oak leaves on the roof.  The birds are raucous, cardinals and fat robins and chickadees going about their business as if nothing had happened last night.” 

I thought I didn’t live in fear, but I am terrified of tornadoes….after a swimming accident resulted in ten vertebral fractures, I got back in the ocean.  I got on a horse in Mexico not long after my back brace came off. I have never minded exploring a new city or country on foot  I’ve lived in the inner city of Boston, explored Ireland using a standard shift and driving on the wrong side of the road.  I’ve happily gotten lost in the hinterlands of Japan. But I am terrified of tornadoes.  They are often featured in my nightmares.

Last Wednesday night, I couldn’t sleep, the sirens and thunder and wind keeping me on edge.  I couldn’t seem to get my breath.  My husband Todd had signed up for cell phone alerts, and when we got the all clear, he turned over and was asleep in two minutes.  I, meanwhile, lay paralyzed, staring at the dark blur of the fan, sure I heard a freight train bearing down on us.  I calculated that my son Adam would be safe in his alcove, and wondered if we could make it to the no-windows bathroom in time to beat a tornado.  Somehow I finally slept.

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The next morning, I gingerly made my way to the paper and was pinioned by the photos of devastation in Alabama. Whole neighborhoods wiped out, the aerial views making it look as if a giant had wantonly stomped through—which it had.  On the radio a man spoke of how disoriented he was—not just that he had lost his home, but his whole neighborhood.  The landscape had changed so much he didn’t know where he was. It was as if a bomb had gone off, someone commented, the devastation was so total. 

I was doing errands somewhere Thursday, and there was a box collecting relief for Japan.  Still walking around with an unreal sense of having been spared and also mourning for the people whose lives had been taken, in many senses, I thought, we need collection boxes for Arkansas, Alabama.  How to take it all in, these disasters coming so fast and furious?

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Jane Hirshfield, in a recent article in The Writers’ Chronicles, talks about the “subtractive voice of news-reel knowledge, the journalist’s indecently abbreviated glance into the tragedies of strangers….the dehumanization of mass crises, individual fates surrendered to the language of “collateral damage” and recited numbers.”  How moving, then, to read in the New York Times the efforts of people to return the keepsakes and photos that fell out of the sky, to their owners. “Memories Lost to a Whirlwind Alight on Facebook to be Claimed,” by Amy Harmon,  describes how Patty Bullion of Lester, Alabama created a Facebook page to reunite people with their photos, letters and other keepsakes.  It is a wonderful story, and what struck me was how it made the impersonal, personal.   

“For those spared by the storms that killed hundreds in the South,” writes Amy Harmon,”  the page is a bridge to its victims, a way to offer solace and to share in their suffering. Is she okay? wrote one commenter on a snapshot of a red-haired child at a swimming pool. I see her face throughout the day, and wonder.

The people involved in this project are not turnng away from the pain of their neighbors. They are willing to be with them, to open themselves up to the pain they were physically spared. They could ahve gone about their business as if nothing had happened. But they chose not to. It is such a simple thing; it is such a hopeful thing.


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