After Helene

I am sifting through thoughts and feelings like pulling fingers through cloudy water. There is no clarity, just glimpses of memories and ideas. The aftermath of hurricane Helene has muddled my thinking; making what I want to say a thick sludge, almost impossible to share. Water. It is drowning my lucidity.

My younger sister lives with her wife in Fairview, North Carolina. Together, they have built a beautiful life. A comfortable patinaed life rich with books and art and dogs, friends and a lake house, flowers and birds. These two are generous. They share their blessings thoughtfully, with grace and humility.

Earlier this past year, I stayed at their Lake Lure house with my husband and our dog; we visited the Fairview homestead. Meals were taken together. We used our time to wander through Chimney Rock and Asheville; nearby places that helped sculpt the eclectic ambiance in this very American place.

Hurricane Helene has forever changed this landscape. Chimney Rock is gone, washed away by flood waters as muddy as my thoughts. Asheville, that old and majestic city, I once thought invincible, is mortally wounded. Lake Lure’s aqueous expanse is almost solid, congested and clogged with the remnants of so much loss- docks and homes and boats, and trees, so many trees. What is salvageable amidst this devastation? Resilience is needed to rebuild; and rebuilding requires the resilient to remain in place, staking their claims again, looking past the destruction in order to create….what? What was there, what they had, or do they relinquish what was, choosing what can be? Those questions are too big for me to answer, burdened as I am with muddled thinking.

These catastrophic, uninvited tragedies would be inconceivable if they were not real. But they are real and they are very, very ugly. My emotions bobble all over the place but two surface again and again, sadness and thankfulness. I feel sad for all that was lost but more importantly I feel thankful for all that was not lost. My loved ones in North Carolina are alive. They survived. I will remind myself of that again and again because only those we love are irreplaceable treasures. Perhaps that is all the clarity I need. In any case it is all I have now.

(The companion painting to this written piece is an abstract mixed media acrylic that I painted in response to the condition of Lake Lure after the ferocity of hurricane Helene.)