2024, mine anyway

Frost is on the pumpkin; leaves are falling; I'm in a home.

Happy New Year!

Could hardly be worse than the past.

*

I wasn't thrilled about going to church again, on Old Year's Night. Wasn't thrilled, wasn't pleased, but wasn't ornery about it because I honestly had no idea what we'd be doing, hadn't been to any such service for a couple of years at least. Most churches, even here in sacred Sioux County didn't gather. We passed more than a few, all shut down. Last night, we were the outlier. 

But this year, I was interested. This year, I had a stake in things.

I thought a lot about Old Years during the day, wondered what would happen. After all, 2024 wasn't a bright and shiny blessing. I'm sitting above a floor of our house I haven't visited since late June, when a ton of Schaap "stuff" floated away in a honest-to-goodness flash flood, an unwelcome guest downstairs. Ever since, I'll suddenly remember something that is no longer ours--the bio of Gall, a Lakota chief--I loved it; a whole collection of prairie works (Rolvaag to Sietze Buning), long gone down river; precious Navajo jewelry; canvas prints (my own photographs); a thousand artifacts from forty years of teaching--all of it, gone. 

No one was hurt, but my own children and grands could have been when four feet of Floyd River burst through the door in our walk-out basement and cleaned house. Surf was up; my grandson-in-law actually went under water while scrambling to save "stuff" in the rush.

The flood was huge--five feet higher than the all-time record for the Floyd River at Alton, right here in our own back yard--shoot, in our basement, lapping at our walls.

But that's not all. From before the NYC ball descended last January, I was gimpy. A few months later I started walking with a walker. By summer, I was useless when the waters came up, a sideliner when my kids and my wife struggled to save what they could from the deluge. I couldn't move. Couldn't help.

By fall, I'd spent some time in two hospitals, trying to learn some things about life in a wheelchair. I watched the trees change color, saw the leaves fall, and even noted snow beginning to swirl from the windows of a rehab center in Marcus, Iowa. I walked out of that place a few weeks short of three months after walking in, ready for life as a handicapped old man. 

During the summer of 2024, a flash flood took out half of our house; by Tuesday night--last hour of the last day of the year, I was a cripple.

So we're driving to church last night, and I'm on the passenger side (can't drive!) telling myself for the first time in my life that I should have called up the worship committee to tell them they ought to get me to hold forth, to preach, because like no one else in the congregation, I caught a backhand sent my way by the Lord almighty. Want a 2024 story, worship committee?--well, I got one: in 2024, the Lord God almighty took me out at the knees--literally.

"I got a sermon," I told myself. "Lord 'a'mighty, do I have a sermon!"

That's what I was thinking. 

(More tomorrow.)