“This is all that’s left.”
Marshall nodded and surveyed the area, hands clasped behind his back in a show of control that did not quite hide his devastation.
Danielle caught Sandy’s eye and the latter blinked acknowledgement. Marshall’s white-knuckled grip and the way he rocked ever so slightly on the balls of his feet communicated volumes. Danielle didn’t think he trusted his voice.
The moment stretched.
“We did find some items scattered farther on,” Danielle pressed, distressed by his unnamed grief.
“Mostly parts of items,” Sandy clarified. Won’t do to raise hopes when they already knew nothing was salvageable.
Marshall lifted his head and gazed at the path of destruction the freak storm had left on the barrier island. A quietude spread inside him. An ebb and flow of sorrow and release.
“Thank you ladies,” he told the county’s disaster inspectors. “Mother Nature had spoken. I will not rebuild.”
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge
Na'ama Yehuda 
That’s very sad. And it’s very much how things happen. As you know, I live on a coast that’s subject to bother erosion (the cliffs) and flood (the lowlands). Thankfully we don’t have the storms that America gets.
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Yes, it is a sad reality, and for some people it becomes an understanding that what worked in decades past may not work now, or that they can no longer handle the realities of a fickle coast.
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Our coastlands are ever-changing. Nothing new. Just we prefer to forget. But it’s not easy to forget here… not when there’s a land beneath the North Sea where our ancestors lived until ca.6500 ya
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Yes. I know. I have a friend who has family in Alaska (Inuit) who’ve been seeing their villages and ancestral places slip into the sea. I know others whose island homes are disappearing under rising seas. Some of it may be the flux of the Earth but much of it has been accelerates and made worse by human’s exploitation. Sigh.
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We live and we learn. Just… do we learn fast enough?
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(tying up my sneakers to try and go faster … ;))
Yeah, life’s picked up speed, didn’t it? Oy!
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And we must keep apace
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Yeah!
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🙂
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Oh, Na’ama.. This was beautifully done. A sad reality for far too many.
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Thank you, Dale! And for more of late, it seems, in combination of climate change ruining areas that were lived in by human for milennia and and the encroaching of human habitation into more and more areas that used to be wild and where storms changed the landscape without human structures to ruin…. Always sad to witness or have to endure.
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I know what you mean, my friend. We are not kind to our home. Mother Nature is already pretty rough sometimes but that’s the way of things. We humans come in and exacerbate things to a disastrous level. Sigh…
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Truth! xx
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xoxo
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