Thursday, July 25, 2013

The pull of the potato

We saw more of our neighbors yesterday than we've seen all year long: everyone was out clearing debris and searching for items washed away by the July 23 flash flood. Our horse-raising neighbor sought a feed trough while our dock-building neighbor chased after the fifty-gallon drums he uses as floats; however, our neighbor whose potato field was ripped apart by the flood never came around to collect the potato the flood deposited at the end of our driveway. Finders keepers?

Local media seem unaware that our part of the county was under water Tuesday night, and when I mention the flood to my friends in town, they say, "What flood?" When hurricane Ivan hit nine years ago, the flood disrupted traffic all over the county, inundated downtown areas, and even crept up onto campus; this week's floods, on the other hand, have been highly localized, briefly submerging country roads, washing out driveways, and sweeping away feed troughs and dock floats. My friends in town can shrug off a flood that destroys a potato field, but to those of us in the middle of it, the flood certainly felt catastrophic.

And that's why it was good to be out mingling with fellow sufferers yesterday and sharing our tales of woe. Last night my husband drove a mile upstream to return the well-traveled potato to our potato-farming neighbors. They didn't really want it back, but when a humble potato works to pull people together, it would be a shame to overlook the opportunity.

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