#25

I struggle with being helpful during natural disasters. I could give money. and sometimes I do, but I know what I am able to give is scant compared to what is needed. What I like to do instead, and what I think is more helpful, is to study the pictures in the news. (If I can I freeze the pictures or zoom in, all the better.) I look for what others might not be able to see. Not the suffering faces or the cars up in flames. I look for the stuffed animal or the tablecloth handed down from someone’s great grandmother. I look for a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a banana someone got on a trip to Martinique. I look for a broken-in baseball glove and I look for the clock that chimes out each hour with a different bird song. I look for the fuzzy dice that hung in your ex-husband’s firebird. I look for them so that if I should read a story where someone says “We lost everything, including that silly refrigerator magnet we got in Martinique,” I can write to the newspaper and say all hope is not lost! I see it, there! Just under the rubble of plaster and twisted metal! A yellow sickle shape, slightly melted perhaps. If the banana can survive so can you.