This Past Week...

My home town specializes in being demolished. I remember when we flooded back in 1979. My dad loaded up the John Boat with me, my brothers, my mom and our two month old baby sister and pulled the boat down the street. My brother lost his shoe. We stayed at a neighbor's who had a two story house, and watched as the cat fretted at the guppies swimming across the kitchen floor. Eighteen inches of water in the house, we lived on cereal and for the AM radio news reports. It took days to return home, and the recovery included six months of repairs, carpet free concrete floors and the throwing out of most of our childhood toys.

The night we sat down to dinner, when everything that needed repairing or replacing had been fixed, we cooked a steak dinner. Right after grace, the dining room table, which had held up all throughout the flood and the repairs, collapsed, and we ate in the kitchen instead. A month later, we flooded again. Beaumont's been through Hurricane Carla, countless floods, took in refugees from Katrina, only to be chased out by Rita, and again with Harvey and Ike. My mother moved after Harvey, when Beaumont became an island in land.

So today I watch the news, knowing my high school will be digging out, and the dancing school, and the church where I got married. The town paper is showing picture after picture of people riding around in little John Boats, rescuing the elderly, rescuing kittens, fishing people out of cars before they drown. I watch them all, and I know the streets and the names, On Facebook, I've watched friends and neighbors check in, and with all this mess, this ongoing mess, this mess that is becoming a regular part of every decade, I wonder, why this town continues to exist. It's flooded so many times. 

Looking at the news, I see people boating around, rescuing people's pets. It's beautiful and heroic and seemingly minimal, but it so matters.  It's a reminder that all these little things matter, these little acts of kindness are bigger than any of the floods or hurricanes or messes that floods and hurricanes leave behind. 

That's why Beaumont continues on, because this sort of good is what the world needs.   It is a good often only noticed when people decide it would be reasonable to quit and go away, and to let things fade.  Beaumont floods, but it does not fade.  It's too Texas stubborn, too Texas Proud, and Too Texas Strong to let go.  

So I'm proud to be of Beaumont, and to know all the people and places that will still be there, even after all of this, because it proves something of who these people are.  They are the ones who stay.