Needing Hope, Finding Hope

Made my trash/recycling run today. 

My normal route was closed due to bridge repair. 

So I took the long way around, along a route that I hadn't traveled since ... you know. 

And I cried. You'd think I'd be used to seeing the effects of water violently reshaping our land, but I'm not. 

I'm not viewing pictures of some faraway war-torn land. I'm seeing, in real time, with my own two eyes, the evidence of Helene's war on the High Country of North Carolina. It's personal, and I'm gutted. 

I see dried mud along the crudely-carved riverbanks of a river that looks to be twice as wide as it used to be. I see the decaying trunks of uprooted trees. I see the flotsam and jetsam of people's lives: a car bumper here, some other object mangled beyond identification there. 

And I see where homes were, the evidence that they were ever there existing only in my memory. 

I dried my tears and went about the business of sorting my discards, then turned to retrace my route along the ravaged river's edge. 

I turned west to go back home, and as I drove higher, away from the valley, I saw golden clouds above a high ridge, the beginnings of a sunset. 

Was that color gold? Not really. I don't know what that color was. 

And then I came home, to see this color. Is it pink? Is it rose? I don't know what that color is. 

But as that pinkish hue is the most prominent color, even in a darkening sky dotted with darkish clouds, I have decided that it, and the earlier-seen goldish hue, are the colors of Hope.