Review - The Flood pt. 4: The End is Just the Beginning

And now for something completely dif- well, mostly the same.
Everyone loves before and after right?

You can sort of tell how far this goes down the ravine. The water had to rise up before flooding us. I couldn't get a good angle, but it goes down about thirty or forty feet.

See this field?

Another shot. Now take a look again at the picture I showed you last week below.

The field above is the giant lake I talked about.

Here's some more perspective. Off in the distance you can see the baseball diamond.

Closer up. Now see below again, what it looked like, the day after the storms, when the water had already receded some.

This should hopefully give you a better idea of what overtook my place, since this is just separated by the ravine.

So here I am. I'm alive and healthy (other than having a sudden bad reaction to a peanut. Weird since I've been eating them for years) and my brother is alive and healthy. This is what matters most.

I had some destroyed notebooks that contained thousands of ideas that I had no room for in my overcrowded head. I lost the first chapter of a book I had recently begun writing. Many pictures and personal files were destroyed. These things are mostly what I'm sad to lose. Everything else is just stuff. Well, I miss my pillow, but that's because I'm allergic to a lot of detergents. But the point is, it's not really that important.

I had more stuff in my apartment then I normally would. Two days before the storms, we had brought several boxes from storage, intent on finally clearing out a unit full of stuff that had been kicking around forever. My late grandfather's weird little trinkets he'd left behind. My two late sister's stuff that just laid around not being used. All kinds of various crap each of us has accrued over the years.  

Sure the floods took out stuff I intended on still using, and some of what it destroyed, I would have sold. But it served to emphasize the conclusion that I had reached long before; It's only stuff. And I know that's something that everyone says, after a disaster, but it's true. After being stuck in a rut for years, seemingly unable to break out,  maybe a clean slate is what I needed. Course now I still have a storage unit full of stuff, that I can't sort and sell yet, but that's just a temporary setback.

No matter what, life is funny. You can laugh and make jokes or you can sit around and cry. Between you and me, I've done a little of both this past week. Which is alright. I'm sure after awhile there will be things that I'll miss. I know for years I'll be pondering over what else was in the apartment that I missed. Right now my concern is finding a job and moving on. 

The past couple weeks has been somewhat unorthodox as far as how I usually like to blog, but if you'll indulge me just a few moments more, I'd like to post the fragment of a poem that I found on one of the few readable pages of a destroyed notebook. Normally I keep my poetry separate on my poetry blog, but this piece seems fitting to me:

Take the day

Frame it

In glass with a real wooden frame

And hang it on my wall

For all

To see

Everything, admired

Is starting to unfold

And the only things that matter

Can't be held within these walls

So take the day

A picture,

A placard,

Your name.