How I started the Year of the Rabbit.

[Chig]

It's 19 degrees outside.  I am standing in the shadow of this building.  I knelt to extinguish candle after candle in this place where 5 people's lives where extinguished less than a month ago.   It was not exactly what I had signed up for, but I guess it brought me to this place I had avoided now for weeks despite its close proximity to home.   We discussed how things were to be separated, cleaned, dried, and placed in boxes.   Like some sort of dreadful assembly line we each took to a task or two and did it over and over and over again... hoping there was purpose to it.   The people looking onto this surreal scene from inside the building would occasionally come out and offer up "You are doing good work", or upon seeing we were working away in the cold without gloves came out to offer us some off the shelf.  Even if the work had not demanded we long abandon wearing gloves, it seemed fitting that this whole process should feel as real as the bitter cold dry air stinging our fingers, then hands.   At the hospital they started with a prayer before they set to their task of separating and packing.   Here at ground zero, it simply started with the lights going out, and no one uttered a word.   Perhaps all that could be said in this place has been said.  Perhaps nothing we could say would be any more poignant than those thoughts and prayers gathered and boxed and loaded onto the trucks.   Time to move forward.

Time to make something, anything good come from this.  

 

[JustAnotherUserName]

Bless you :-)

[BlancheNoE]

Amen.

[NatureJunkie]

I hope we all can.

[SydTheSkeptic]

Much good already- a testament, perhaps, or hope-in-action. 

 

[photo2010]

Chig, you did something that not everyone is capable of. You should be proud!