Invisible threads

Sometimes I write blog posts in my mind, while I wash dishes or when my head is on my pillow. They're perfect in every way. Then I tuck them into the deepest part of my brain and they're gone forever.

Sometimes when I feel inspired, I take on the challenge of expressing a word or phrase as a photograph or two. I find a way to wrap some interesting and appropriate (or not) text around them.

Sometimes in the days that I seem absent from this blog, I write with free and reckless abandon from the darkest depths of my soul. For me alone. These sit here silently, never to see the light of day. They hide between the posts that are public.

Sometimes I share pieces of the chaos that makes up my days.

Sometimes I write not knowing why. These are the posts that spew forth onto the page as they will, regardless of what I do to try to control them. They're disjointed. The photos land in odd places. They jump back and forth through time like a confusing movie. They never have a satisfying ending.

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It was May.

We had gone to the Big City to bury my husband's grandfather. I had finally connected with him in just the last few years. We would talk about gardening, canning, raising chickens, how to use what was harvested. He was an incredible man, a wealth of knowledge, and so much more.



Before saying goodbye to him, we took a few minutes to pay our respects to something else.

It's impossible to express the enormity of an impending event to your children, when you can't quite imagine the fullness of it yourself. The river looked peaceful but strong. The battle had already begun.



The green all around promised that Spring had finally been delivered to us, but water was promised too. And the numbers? They were just that. Completely mind boggling.

Despite the sandbagging fury that was building in town, here by the river I felt the calm before the storm.



There were invisible threads connecting my heart to everything around me. This had been my playground. The threads ran from my heart to the trees, to the meadows where I chased butterflies, to the paths you wouldn't find unless you knew where to look, to the dock where my husband asked me to marry him.

There was already water where it didn't belong.

In a few short weeks, another local blogger would find these few words appropriate: "My city looks like a war-zone right now".

But it wasn't just the big river causing trouble in our state.

Mid-June, a friend posted this on facebook: "As we watch round-the-clock coverage from the Minot tv station, we are thinking and praying for everyone there who is facing flood waters that are nearly unimaginable."

By that afternoon, she posted this: "When I evacuated from Fargo with a 5 wk. old and 2 yr old, I left (husband) there knowing he and others were staying with confidence of holding back the water. I can't imagine leaving knowing that there was no way to hold it back....we wish there was more to do to help in Minot right now."

I feel guilty. I complained when our roads weren't worthy to be called roads. I complained about our early Spring puddles and our mud.



I complained about our soggy basement.



Often the only way I manage to keep myself together is by repeating that things could always be worse. Always. We are blessed. Always. I tell myself this over and over.

Puddles. That's what we dealt with here at our place. Inconvenient. Laughable.

We stood at the edge of the river three weeks ago, again. Blinking in the harsh mid-day sun, it was hard to believe what my eyes told me was real. The water had been fast and powerful.

Compare with the third photo above:


The entire shore had been changed. Huge chunks of land had been eaten away.



Even more bizarre, the road and parking lot had been plowed of sand. At first glance the gigantic heaps looked like out of season snow piles. In the heat of the day, part of me couldn't help but wonder why they weren't melting.



But what we saw here was nothing.

Along the river elsewhere, homes were destroyed.

Roads disappeared.



No one alive can remember this amount of water across our state. But after two and a half years, too much water is starting to feel normal.

My children draw pictures of sump pumps. They decorate their lilac play-house with discarded (stolen) bits of plumbing from our attempts at moving too much water. They ride their bikes through a freshly dug drainage trench at the edge of their backyard. They wear rain boots that are nowhere near tall enough for the puddles they romp through in Spring.

I can't help but wonder about the invisible threads that will connect the children of these wet years to their own childhood. How will they see their world? What stories will they tell when they're old?