I had a neighbor who went off on vacation a few years ago and didn’t come back and didn’t come back, and people along our block were beginning to ask, Have you heard from?… Her answering machine is full…
I stepped out to get the mail at the very moment a car dropped her off from the airport. She had survived the tsunami in Phuket–the big one–and had stayed for weeks to help.
She threw her arms around me and told me everything.
I just got the
Wait.
Change the sentence that that was going to be–I got interrupted by a follow-up email right as I was typing that. Rather than revise it, I’ll leave it right like that.
A friend’s friend was in American Samoa, and she emailed me earlier today to tell me he had not been heard from.
I got my kitchen mopped. I got the dishes done. I got the counters clean. I got some laundry done. I got the rugs vacuumed. I got short of breath. I kept going. Sometimes, some news, you cannot sit down and you cannot hold still but you’ve got to stay busy busy busy, (hoping my lupus won’t hold it over my head tomorrow) even if I didn’t know the young man myself, much less any of the Islanders. It all hit so close to home for me.
The waves, she just found out, had circled the island he was on but did no harm.
Dear God: thank You that those people on that one island, anyway, are all okay. I thought I’d mention, though, I know I needed to put down my needles and get that housework done. But there are gentler ways to talk me into it. Just sayin’.