This is from my new weekly column, called 'Mama Says.' Visit www.mentorpatch.com to read it every Sunday!!
Sleep was elusive at my house this past Sunday night due to the howling wind outside and the howling little girls inside.
My three daughters – ages 6, 5 and 2 – were terrified of the storm. (Their baby brother slept through the whole thing.) And they informed me that there was no way they could possibly return to their own beds until it was over.
Everyone in Mentor was probably as happy as we were to see the sun rise Monday morning. But that was before we all looked into our basements.
Our sump pump had fizzled in the wee hours of the morning. I couldn't help but be reminded of that old song, You Left Me Just When I Needed You Most.
Like you, I donned my boots (waders, since I married a fisherman) and steeled myself to throw away piles of painstakingly saved soggy preschool papers, ruined by 20 inches of murky water. I sorted through dripping mountains of my babies' clothes that I had planned to save for my grandchildren.
Since this was our first (and hopefully our last) experience with flooding, my heart felt a new kind of pain when I found a ruined pair of tiny pink shoes – the ones my 6-year-old wore when she was just learning to walk.
A bookshelf that my dad made for me when I was heading off to college, the velvet-robed angel that had always graced the top of our Christmas tree, the crib mobile that used to dangle over my baby girl's outstretched hands, the wooden chest that used to hold bathtub toys – all went out to the curb. Proof of our lives, of our histories, gone.
I wiped away my tears with rubber-gloved hands.
Then my 5-year-old met me at the top of the basement stairs, smiling a sweet smile and holding out a crayon drawing, "to make you feel better, Mommy."
As I taped it to the refrigerator, I was reminded that the most precious things we have are not really things. What matters most, make that who matters most, was not lost in the flood at all.
