I watched it from afar
I flew out for a long-anticipated trip Italy with three friends the first week of October. We took off on a Wednesday thankful to leave behind the impending hurricane warnings and paid little attention to the flash flood alerts for Columbia. Little did we know we would spend the better part of our trip watching international news reports showing deadly floods sweeping away friends' homes and devastating our hometown. We stayed glued to international news feeds. We watched our friends' usual social media posts about kids' activities become hourly missives of who needed help where. One friend showed up in a yellow raincoat on international CNN. Yet another was interviewed on the Weather Channel. National news correspondents broadcast from neighborhoods where just days earlier I'd been riding my bike. For several days, I struggled with finding right word to describe what I kept seeing and hearing from the people back home affected by the flooding. A recollection o...