Over the course of the past year, The Trophy Wife has become heavily involved in helping Alabama recover from damage suffered through both the tornadoes of last April, 2011, as well as more recent ones that hit in Center Point.
On weekends, I've gone with her to help with cleaning up neighborhoods, or trying to salvage damaged homes, or bringing relief supplies or, in December, delivering Christmas presents to families whose lives had been both literally and figuratively turned upside down.
Occasionally you run into a story that seems just too cruel to be true.
One recent Saturday we worked on helping salvage as much as we could from the home of a lady whose father's house had been hit in Center Point. The roof was completely gone; the stuff stored in the attic had, in many cases, fallen into the main part of the house; a side storage area had been blown completely off its foundation. Everything was soaked.
What made this really hard was that this woman's house had been completely destroyed in the tornados of last April. It's hard to believe one family could have been hit so hard, in such succession, although as I listened I learned that she was hardly alone in this. Other families had had the same thing happen; some had their homes destroyed, rebuilt, and then destroyed again almost as soon as they were finally moved back in.
But this woman's attitude was incredible. She was very clear about what she was really after: family pictures and documents and keepsakes. Some we found buried under debris in the house; some we found while cleaning up "trash" from around the neighborhood.
The other things from the house - furniture, clothes, pots and pans, books, household items - she said, "if it looks like it can be salvaged for a yard sale, salvage it to sell. Otherwise, it's trash."
Now, as a recovering pack rat who has trouble throwing out a wire or even a bent nail because "I just might find a use for it some day," I couldn't imagine how she so easily got to this point. In fact, The Trophy Wife knew I was looking at books that were being thrown in the dumpster, struggling with whether they could be salvaged.
And at times it got difficult for this lady, but each time she started to waiver, she resolutely returned to the instructions, "Clear it out."
"When you lose everything one time like we did last spring,'' she said, "you realize that as long as you got out alive, the rest of it doesn't matter."
This reminded me of a story I heard recently about an American who ministered mostly in China, and had been placed under house arrest. One day, the soldiers came and said, "You can leave for America."
Of course that started a celebration, and the soldiers added, "You can take 200 pounds with you."
They'd been there a number of years, so he and his wife and two children started culling through belongings: books, a typewriter, a vase, certain mementos they'd each collected and just couldn't bear to leave behind.
They started weighing things, taking this off and adding this one, going back and forth, debating this and that until, finally, they had 200 pounds right on the dot.
The soldier said, "Ready to go?"
"Yes."
"Did you weigh everything?"
"Yes."
"You weighed your children?"
"No, we didn't think..."
"Weigh the children,'' they were told.
And just like that, all the stuff - the books and keepsakes and mementos and such - just like that, it all became trash.
Amazing, isn't it?
It happens.
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