blessings in disguise...

beginning with that little 3 month old puppy someone dumped in our neighborhood two years ago and who made her way into our yard and hearts. It's not that she has brought a lot of joy and laughter into our lives, which she has, but that without her I would never have met the neighbors on the street who I now stop and visit with while walking her in the evenings and most especially Rocky and Melissa. I would not even have known that Rocky was a contractor/carpenter and without Rocky, I would have been at a total loss as to how to find a good contractor or one that would jump on the work immediately and not take advantage of me. I trust Rocky to be fair and do good work and he did not hesitate one minute when I finally walked down to his house last Sunday and asked him to come assess the rotten wood I had uncovered.

And while it would appear that half the house flooding would be a disaster and the aftermath would entail long hours of hard work, which it has, it too is a blessing in disguise for several reasons. The first of which is that we would never have discovered the damage to the structure of the house if it had not flooded and we hadn't had to tear out the sheet rock in the back bedroom and little bathroom and two layers of siding on the outside of the upper house. The damage there was not caused by the flood but the flood caused it to be revealed.

The second reason is that, while we did lose the bed and a chair and the futon and bookcases and my art and design books and everything else that was within reach of nearly 18” of water, we really didn't lose anything that would have devastated us.

And third, while we talked a good talk about remodeling those two rooms, in truth, we probably never would have done it. Now we get to.

And last, ditto for the shop and the four built-in rooms in the big metal building. They were awful but in the going on four years we have had the shop we have done nothing. That part was unusable for many reasons and for the last two days, Rocky's crew have been engaged in not just tearing out the part of the walls that got wet, but demolishing that entire part of the shop. I'm thrilled! Once he has completed the work of rebuilding people's homes damaged in the flood, he will start on rebuilding the interior rooms of the shop and I will have work space over there that I can heat and air condition and be able to work in over the summer.

And finally, while we have been inconvenienced for a few weeks and now have a great story to tell about the great flood and suffered some loss, so many more lost everything. For all this I can be grateful.