Gone

Post-Katrina Golf Coast 3/19/06

It was all gone ~ every vestige of every memorable landmark was wiped off the face of the earth. I couldn’t even remember what it looked like before. The sky was dull and overcast, the wind was fierce ~ like it still had more to do ~ the water was dull and choppy: a chill was in the air. Trees stripped bare of leaves and bark, decorated by an odd type of cloth and plastic adornment left by the storm ~ sometimes sporting tarps, sometimes sporting baby seats. The only things that never changed were the water, the wind, and the sky ~ a sort of symbol of Spirit.

I will never truly understand why my brothers and sisters were taken, but I was left. There has to be some divine reason for all this chaos, all this loss, all this pain. Perhaps this is really hell. Perhaps I have all my life actually been living in hell from some past sin, and this is my “just desert.”

I question God often about the whys and wherefores of this life, but come away with the strangest answers, I could ever imagine ~ so strange, in fact, that I have to believe they are Truth:

This is, in fact, only hell if I believe in hell.
The real is not before my face, but beyond corporeal sense.
My sin, real or imagined, is punished moment by moment according to my belief in the sin.
If I stop believing I am a sinner, I will stop sinning, because there will be no reason to do anything but what God wants me to do.
My brothers and sisters are doing a far greater work now that they are gone from my life than they had ever done before.
My job is to tell everyone I know these truths while the telling can make a difference in their lives.

So this is what is meant by seeing “through a glass darkly.” I Corinthians 13:12

The Footlocker

Packed full of clothes and a few dishes, on route to the new world, the dull green trunk was carefully guarded by Colin Hampton. He had grown leery of anyone who showed half an interest in his stuff, since he’d lost his knapsack full of books prior to boarding the tall ship. Intent on making a new life for himself, the young sojourner was heading to “New Orleans, the place of opportunity!” as the ad read. Now he would have to sleep with one eye open to be sure his things arrived with him. His things weren’t necessarily of any real value, but if he was going to get work, he would need clothes to be presentable. And thus he journeyed in the ship’s hold, curled on top of his trunk.

When Darla Jean found the trunk in mamere’s attic, she was intrigued by its many stickers of all the places visited over the years. There were stickers from almost every state in the union, including Hawaii, pasted to almost every square inch of the outside, except where it was stamped with the name Colin W. Hampton. That was mamere’s papa’s name. Inside was a wooden tray for holding odds and ends that one wants to keep separate from the rest of the contents. Darla was always careful to place the wooden tray to one side while she played with the lovely gowns and satin nighties mamere kept in the trunk. The tray held mostly old photos of mamere and papere right after they met in New Orleans. She loved dressing up in the gowns whenever she visited mamere. Darla Jean especially loved imagining how quaint it must have been during mamere’s childhood walking in those gowns down the wooden bankettes while horses and mules rode past in the dirt streets lined with the many shops of the French Quarters, as it was called then.

Darla, and