Hello everyone. I promised witchy, dark, magical, and scary things for this upcoming month and we absolutely will still be doing that. However I want to touch on the events of hurricane Helene today. For those that don't know, I live in the mountains of upper South Carolina, which was recently hit by the hurricane. The damage is not even comparable to North Carolina, which is facing controversy, disaster, and an event unlike anything we here further in the coast have ever faced. I have, no words to describe how awful and horrific this event is for those in North Carolina.
I'm no stranger to power outages, cold weather, wet snow, and big trees make for quiet a lot of them in my home town. But I've never faced one like the outages I've seen in South Carolina and cannot imagine what North Carolina is going through. My husband and I went a week without power, barely keeping our phones charged, and some often failing electricity going to the essentials like our fridge and freezer with a generator (one that did not want to work more often than it did). We run off of well water, so no electricity means no running water, thus adding another challenge to this hopefully once in a lifetime event. We are incredibly blessed to have been somewhat prepared for this situation, and know now what we need to do to prepare more thoroughly. But no one in either parts of the Carolina's was actually prepared for this.
My parents were not home during the storm for fear of the woodlands around them, while others I knew were out in their cars returning from their third shift jobs, and huddled in their homes praying that no tree toppled onto them. The damage was, horrible. No less than three bridges on nearby rivers just on my regular drive to my parents were damaged beyond use or completely swept away. One even sat mangled in the trees, that was a truly humbling sight. One of my friends survived a tree falling on their house right above them, one of my neighbors survived the lucky interference of one tree into another thus taking their garage out rather than their house. In my neighboring communities cars, homes, entire landscapes I thought unmovable were mangles and crushed, and torn from the ground.
I count myself, and my family, and those around me to be among the lucky because it could have been so, so much worse. Many survived disaster by feet, inches even. I write this to sing the gratitude of this moment, and to ask for your thoughts and prayers for those who were not so lucky. My prayers go out to those still dealing with the damages of this event, to those in North Carolina, to those here whos businesses were flooded, whos homes were swept away, and whos lives are now forever changed. We are strong here in the south, and we will preserver.
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