There is a particular texture and smell familiar to those who have trekked through saltwater marshes. In ordinary times the moment when the greyish matter takes custody of your shoe, you quickly ponder whether to stick your hand into it or just buy another pair of sandals and move on… often it’s the latter.
The sand, sediment, dirt and decomposing nature -to include fish bits and wildlife food sources- creates a blended muck and grows slowly over years. The moist muck does not like to be disturbed. It has a very particular smell when it is disturbed, until it dries, almost like a natural defense mechanism. Hurricane Ian disturbed the backwater shoreline inland and introduced that sludge mix to places it was never before, like inside buildings. Thankfully it is drying out now.
The officials in charge of Fort Myers Beach have determined that almost every structure on the island is unsafe after the storm pushed a massive surge of water onto the island while the wind destroyed the buildings. Residents are being carefully managed and kept away from areas where search crews are still looking through rubble.
A plan for a limited number of residents to be bussed into one part of the area to look for belongings has been released [link]. Beach officials are calling it, “debris management and the effort to locate our friends and loved ones.” It is now a full ten days later, and no one wants to use the real words, ‘dead people.’ I think about Ms Veronica being so clear and true in her point a few days ago, “there are dead people and there are survivors.”
Further north and to the west on Pine Island there are lots of survivors. With the temporary road giving access, there are lots of people picking up bits, fragments, and other important stuff that holds their memories; each bit revisited in the handling of it, many bits thought about tenderly for the first time in decades. Fragmented bits hold memories, and those memories are exactly what make up the invisible links of our lives.
Sorting through some old papers I had stashed away, today I came upon this story I had printed out from an email I received on October 11, 2004. The original source for the story is the book Keep A Quiet Heart by Elisabeth Elliot, published in 1995. It became attributed to Josh and Karen Zarandona when they passed it on in an email.
“This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can’t be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won’t be done. The Founders’ Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.”
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. THY WILL BE DONE, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but DELIVER US FROM EVIL.
I have long felt that life is like a series of links in a chain. You might be driving down the road and you hear a song on the radio, or see a picture, and you feel a memory,…. something that reminds you of a different time and place than where you are right now. You reflect. The memories you consider remind you of a totally different place in your life. Perhaps you lived in a different place. Perhaps you were surrounded by different people. Perhaps a different job or completely different friends. You recognize those memories were constructed like frozen moments in time. They become individual links in the chain in your life.