Labor Day Pains . . .

I left the house a couple of times today. Both were mistakes. The highway resembled the old log flume ride at Six Flags, except the logs were automobiles.

Then I made a turn, or tried to make a turn. There was a large hickory tree lying across the street. I did not anticipate what the sight of a large hickory tree across a street would evoke in me. Dread. Sick. Fear. I was actually living in a house a few hundred feet from the downed tree a few years ago when a tornado threw trees around the neighborhood and left them stacked like pick up sticks. Then there is the fresh memory of too many similar trees to comprehend still vivid from last April. Some are still on the ground in remote areas of Alabama.

So, while I've enjoyed being ironically lazy on Labor Day, there has been a subtle disturbance in my soul.

Six years ago on Labor Day Benjamin, Charles, the bus driver, and I spent the day on a bridge to nowhere in New Orleans, made so by Katrina. A week had passed since the levees gave way, and there had been no way to reach the neighborhoods beyond the bridge. We watched and waited and handed out water and welcomed people into the airconditioned bus with a bathroom all day as hundreds of small boats, mostly fishing rigs, were brought in and launched from the edge of the bridge as it disappeared into the floodwaters to search house to house. We were to wait and take survivors to the hospital. We received no survivors from that rescue effort. I did find out, in response to my stupid question, that the refrigerated trailers up ahead were being used for morgues. We ended up bringing a bus load of Katrina victims north to Tuscaloosa and Oneonta, a story too long for tonight, but suffice it to say we were determined to help somebody after that miserable Labor Day of waiting.

I've had a lot of great Labor Days, before and after Katrina, and the memories of that Labor Day in 2005 do not dominate my thoughts on this holiday. I usually think about it for a few minutes as something reminds me. But today it was a little more than usual.

It has been a crazy six years since then. Hurricanes, sunamis, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes . . .
So many people are still hurting, from Katrina, from Haiti, from Mississippi flooding, certainly still from Alabama, now from fires in Texas, and so many other places.

It's no time to forget or let up in helping people who have been hurt or suffered loss from these natural disasters.

Cause outside my window it doesn't seem like nature is ready to let up.

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