Saturday morning, first thing, I walked out into the backyard as I usually do with no particular purpose in mind except to make sure the world was still tunning in the proper direction, and the creatures of the insect underworld were still going about their insidious, assigned duties. Something, however, was strikingly different. It was eerily quiet. A playful breeze was skipping across the yard. The kamikaze squads of mosquitos, gnats, and love bugs were all grounded. No insects! I pinched myself. This is very strange. It had to be some devious cyber plot or otherwise evil engineered criminality. I must have fallen into some Artificial Super Intelligence scheme gone rouge. Yep, this is obviously some supercomputer in Ching Ling China that has gone off its meds and already killed all the bugs in southeast Georgia and is now about to start making humans extinct. No problem, I immediately ran to my data center which is a 15-year-old farm truck to power up my super-voltage, air-cooled mega-mega Hasbro mainframe and do cyber battle. I turned the key and, uh oh…dead battery. But before she died, the 2012 Chevy Silverado electronic control module did give me some vital information.: your check engine light is on, your oxygen sensor is bad again and it's 58 degrees Fahrenheit in Swainsboro, Georgia. Aha ! So, there is no tragedy, the bugs are okay, it was just our first beautiful and slightly cool fallish day, and the bugs are just sleeping late.
Saturday was, of course, a picture-perfect poster day. The bugs did return later as things warmed up, but the sky was that perfect blue all day long that causes people of a certain age to harken back to the kindergarten days of blue tempura paint and puffy cotton ball clouds and dreams of the day they would enter first grade. It never got over 75 degrees all day long and the Chinese computers didn’t destroy the human race. Saturday and those days like it are the kind of days we all need every now and then to keep us going and looking ever-forward. We need them because there needs to be a balance in life. Good tries to balance the not-so-good, but it doesn't always happen like it should.
On this day two years ago, things were very far out of balance after Hurricane Helene had inflicted a catastrophic toll of loss on our homes and our lives and the “hopeful looking forward to” of life. In that sense of shock, desperation, and disaster, something had to happen to bring back the balance, to resolve the equation. Something had to step in and re-establish the sense of purpose. What did that was the bruised but rising resilience and faith of people that inevitably follows tragedy, and the overwhelming power of humans caring in a time of need for fellow humans. It was not some TV crew filming or reporting. It was real, and it was naturally occurring out of need and concern and the bond of community. In ways seen and in ways unseen, that spirit and devotion are still at work, healing and restoring more and more of what was lost two years ago. That knowledge should make the people of this area stronger of heart and spirit as the blue skies of the perfect days to come reveal a future that is more nearly restored to a place of balance.
