Flooding and Farewells

A flashback post I never finished plus some wandering reflections:

Near the end of August, we dropped our sixth child off at college. These move-in weekends are physically and emotionally draining, and having done it before doesn't make it any easier.  When you say goodbye after unpacking all their stuff and dropping another $$$ on cheap furnishings and toiletries from Target, it feels like saying goodbye to a childhood that really ended several years ago, but now is final. You know the fledgling adult isn't really ever coming back to stay, although she will return at holiday breaks and in the summer, and maybe a year or so after graduating . . . But she'll be on her own even then, though grateful for your caregiving and dinner making and laundry doing.  We've been through this now with her five siblings. They no longer need our help or oversight as they go about their business working summer jobs and hanging with friends and enjoying sleeping in comfortable beds before they go back to dorm mattresses or ratty apartment furniture. 

When we first dropped off the older kids, the goodbye didn't quite sink in. I thought we'd have holidays and summers; I didn't think about what happened after college. I had young children at home who still expected their siblings at the table.  But then the older kids stopped coming home - first they worked at camps, then they got internships and did service projects and worked. They went to visit new friends, or their friends came to see us (everyone wanted to come to San Diego), and they stayed out late so that we barely saw them when they were home. 

It's a slow process of detachment after all that attachment work when they were babies. 

Our daughter is going to school in Greenville, South Carolina.  As everyone knows, that area felt the effects of Hurricane Helene, although not so hard as the area a couple hours north where my husband's cousins have a place, which my husband designed. Just a month after we dropped our daughter off, campus closed for a week because the power was out and then it took time for the internet to return. Can't have school without internet!

The devastation from the flooding in the mountain towns north of Greenville is hard to picture to outsiders. The clean up is still going on. We almost flew out to help our cousins clean up their place. Their storage container washed away with some kayaks, a generator, tools, camping stuff, other flotsam and jetsam.  But there wasn't gas and supplies for the people there, so for us to come and use more would not have been helpful.  

Instead our school had a bake sale, and the students could make a donation in order to wear something other than their uniform. The donations went to a school near Asheville that was damaged. Over $5000 was raised. Another school family had a connection to a school damaged by Hurricane Milton in Florida, so our school split the funds to send to both schools. 

While $5000 is an incredible amount to raise in a bake sale, it only goes a little way in the clean up process. 

And it is like half a penny compared to what was spent on this past election. It hurts my head to think of the billions spent on advertising and marketing and all of the stuff thrown away after an election, and all the other ways money is spent on elections.  I saw somewhere an estimate of $11 billion dollars.  How many ways could that money have been spent to truly build community? 

In all these things, a long view is necessary- a long view of our lives with our children, a long view of recovery from natural disasters, a long view of politics and the lives of nations.  Knowing that life will bring both joys and sorrows over time doesn't minimize the feelings of sorrow and loss and frustration, but it reminds us that happiness will return, things will change, life will go on. The acorns will sprout and oak trees will grow. We might just have to wait a long time.