St Thomas After the Irma and before Maria*

On October 24, 2005, a few weeks after Katrina, Fort Lauderdale was hit by a Cat 1 Hurricane, Wilma. Tucked into our house with a friend, Sherod, Maria, our pets and I hunkered down to wait it out. After a couple of hours of incessant, howling and wailing wind like everyone talks about, things had gotten fairly rough. We’d already heard the screeching of metal as the screened in the area around our pool fell apart and went crashing into the pool and deck.  There were all kinds of thumps, some of them obviously involving large objects hitting walls or the ground, but we couldn’t see them because we were shuttered in. We knew these thumps were about flying debris, for sure, but how bad was it? The scariest moment for our household came as the wind shifted direction after the eye went over the house.  We had a wall of sliding glass doors running along our living room/dining room area where we were riding out the storm. They, and all our doors and windows, had been properly shuttered and until then, we had felt relatively safe.  But all of a sudden, our ears started popping and simultaneously, we looked at the glass doors and saw they were bulging in so much that we expected them to shatter at any minute.  And then, it would be time to run–though where we would run, was not clear.

The doors held and by late afternoon, we began the ‘post-hurricane’ time of digging out and starting over. It’s as if simultaneously the world had ended and begun anew, with all its weirdness and disruption.  In our neighborhood, we were without power for pretty close to a month.  Sherod had bought a generator and we learned to rotate washing machine, refrigerator, and freezer on and off the generator and we put up a makeshift clothesline to keep clean clothes.  We got a glimpse of a tougher life that requires more effort to accomplish small things and more resilience and strength and grit.

In the hours before we safely leave the house, it was hard not to wonder how the church we were both serving had had fared and how our parishioners were doing as well..  This was right as off-site data storage was becoming available and we had backups of the database of church records with the software company the church used. That meant we had some sense that if there had been any significant damage to the church, we’d be able to reconstruct our parish membership roles pretty quickly.  In those hours, and during the next days, Sherod and I had long conversations about how a church can–and also might not be able to–be church after bad hurricanes.

Looking back on the days and weeks of getting things working again, I remember we had emotionally exhausting work to do. But all this had been was a Cat 1 storm–as easy as you could get in the hurricane department.

For the US Virgin Islands, the recovery continues as it will for years to come, after back to back Cat 5 hurricanes–Irma and Maria.  Like first responders, clergy live with the tension between caring for themselves and their families and tending to their faith communities. I suspect for the clergy of the USVI, life is lived in a crucible of need far exceeding resources. All these months later, my fellow clergy colleagues must be exhausted.

The Episcopal Diocese of the USVI and the Diocese of Alabama, where I am canonically resident, have a companion diocese relationship. The Bishop’s office in Birmingham has been hard at work coordinating a variety of relief efforts, trying to ease the hardship in many different ways.  Today, I got an invitation from the relief effort coordinator for our diocese.

The Bishop of USVI must make a trip in the latter part of February.  He needs clergy coverage for the services at the Cathedral Church of All Saints in St Thomas in his absence.  That community also needs a facilitator to ead their vestry retreat.  I am headed down to provide that help on the 17th of February.

I know a little better than others what I’m heading into, but probably far less than I think.  I hope what little I learned during Wilma will help me be better able to work and serve with these brothers and sisters I’ve never met. Sherod and I have given to emergency funds set up for both Puerto Rico and USVI. But I am so uncomfortable about helping exclusively from a safe distance.  Now, I take myself, body, mind and spirit, hoping to do some little bit of service.

There’s one small twist of fate in this trip. For years, Sherod and I dreamed of going sailing in the USVI.  A former boss of mine had spoken endlessly about the magic of the Bitter End Yacht Club on Virgin Gorda. With the sailing experience we were getting in South Florida on our sweet, good sailing vessel Promise, we imagined going down to this yacht club/resort in Virgin Gorda, chartering a sailboat and heading out for a sailing vacation. As things would have it, we ended up going to Mexico instead, and brought home a little girl to call our own.  Now, settled in this farm of ours, coming more and more to terms with the kind of simplicity we both are reaching for in our life, Sherod and I don’t harbor those kinds of dreams any longer.  It’s plenty exciting to get the Seed Saver Exchange catalog on one of those dark, cold days in January.  Yet here I am, getting to go to the USVI.  That’s how life turns out: things happen. Just not how you’d imagined or hoped they would. Sometimes they turn out so much better.

*http://www.kwqc.com/content/news/St-Thomas-heavily-damaged-by-Hurricane-Irma-443032983.html

It’s fifteen degrees outside and with windchill, it feels like -1. About 3 inches of snow fell during the night and even the interstates were shut down in this part of the world.

Earlier this morning, I got to make another snow angel. When you are edging towards 60 and have had hip replacement surgery, you know better than to assume there are endless opportunities to do something that tickles you half to death. You make that snow angel now, the best you can.

I tromped through the snow in my flowered Tractor Supply wellies to check on my chicken girls and barn cats. Lifting the roof of the chicken coop, so heavy with snow, was scary—we’ve never had it so cold around here with chickens. Everyone is doing well.

I just stood out there, wanting to take it all in, to extract every ounce of wonder and joy from a dawn like this even if the wind felt like it was shredding my ears and my nose to pieces.

And I talked my sweet husband into doing what we weren’t supposed to do: we got in his 4WD pickup truck and went down to Lowndesboro so I could take some pictures and assess the likelihood of being able to go to work today (NOT).

The quiet of snow. The gentleness of a morning too complicated to allow me to go to work. The rock solid truth, however brief and dimly understood, of my husband, my sweet dog Daisy, and my silly one, Mo-licious, all of us jostling and crowded into the front seats of a pickup truck in January, in Lowndes County, on the back end of a snowstorm.

Tía Inga and I

I have a brother whom I’ve struggled to have a good, healthy, adult relationship with. The reasons are complicated but the kind of ordinary give and take of siblings has eluded us for most of our adult years. Every now and then though, a way has opened to cut through the disappointment, failed efforts and baggage that that have made it so much easier for each of us to take our own path and have little contact. At some of the bleakest, most difficult moments of my adult life, it is he who has given me new hope, a bit of sunshine in the dark.

A few weeks ago, the woman who helped raise me, Ligia, who was my nanny and who, night after night took turns with my mother, turning me over every three hours so I wouldn’t loose lung capacity in my full-length cast, this beautiful woman, Ligia, died. Today, I have received word that my Tía Inga, my mother’s sister, died last night. Her relationship with my mom was difficult as well. Especially since my dad moved up here, I have had very little contact. We weren’t close; nonetheless, I grieve her death. In a time when a great deal else is in flux, and disruption seems to be the only normal all around me, the loss of the mothers in my life is particularly desolating. Earlier, I sat in my small home office with the finality of Tía Inga’s death, the absolute horror of our President’s latest assault on basic human decency, and a bunch else at the end of a hard week, feeling like it all could drown me, when the insistent, persistent melody of a song began to play in my mind.

Sylvio Rodriguez’s music is described as “tender balladry” at the same time that he is a politically active Cuban who has always supported the Cuban Revolution. I’d never heard of him until soon after my mother’s death, another time of piercing grief, when my brother sent me a YouTube link to one of his pieces. The title of the piece is “Hope, please come”. The following are the lyrics in Spanish with a very rough translation. We are all certainly in need of hope these days, it seems to me. So I am beyond grateful for my brother’s love that finds a way to give me that gift of hope.

And I think again, how strange, and harsh, and beautiful life is.

Venga la esperanza

Dice que se empina y que no alcanza,
(She says she stands on her toes and still can’t reach)
que sólo ha llegado hasta el dolor. (That she’s only gotten as far as the pain)
Dice que ha perdido la buena esperanza (She says she’s lost all good hope)
y se refugia en la piedad de la ilusión. (and seeks refuge in the piety of illusions)

Sé de las entrañas de su queja (I know about the depths of her complaints)
porque padecí la decepción: (I too suffered deception)
fue una noche larga que el tiempo despeja,  (It was a long night that time has cleared away)
mientras suena en mi memoria esta canción: (while this song plays in my memory)

Venga la esperanza, (Hope, please come)
venga sola mí. (Come by yourself to me)
Lárguese la escarcha, (Let the frost be gone)
vuele el colibrí. (May the hummingbird fly)
Hínchese la vela, (Let the sail be filled)
ruja el motor, (Let the motor roar)
que sin esperanza (Because if we have no hope)
¿dónde va el amor? (Where is love to go?)

Cuando niño yo saque la cuenta  (When I was just a boy I figured out)
de mi edad por el año dos mil (How old I’d be around the year two thousand)
(el dos mil sonaba como puerta abierta (Two thousand sounded like a door flung open)
a maravillas que silbaba el porvenir). (To marvels whistled by the future)
Pero ahora que se acerca saco en cuenta (But now that it draws near, I figured out)
que de nuevo tengo que esperar, (That once again, I’ll have to wait)
que las maravillas vendrán algo lentas ( That marvels will arrive somewhat slow)
porque el mundo tiene aún muy corta edad. (Because the world is still so very young)

Venga la esperanza, (Hope, please come)
pase por aquí. (Come by here)
Venga de cuarenta, (Come if you are forty)
venga de dos mil. (Come if you are two thousand)
Venga la esperanza (Come hope)
de cualquier color: (Come in any color)
verde, roja o negra, (Green or red or black)
pero con amor. (But come with love)