There is a woman in Asheville North Carolina just like me, except now, well, as of Friday morning, she is no longer just like me. She is no longer even herself…

Just like me she probably got her first job at 14 and just like me she has worked ever since. Just like me she might have made some really awful choices as a teenager and by the time she was twenty, had been married, a mother, and divorced. Just like me her constant narrative in life, when life got hard, was that she was doing the best with the cards she was dealt, and just like me, she probably hated when she thought that way, self-defeating as it was, because just like me she knew it was her frequently wrong “well, I picked the wrong door” kinds of decisions that got her the life she was living.

Just like me through determination and strength of will, she put herself through college while working full time and raising her little girl, and just like me her little girl grew up and made her own choices and moved away. Just like me she floundered a bit those first couple of years, with no more role as mother to play and wondered what she might do with her life now, now that her “baby” was making a family of her own miles and miles away. Just like me she was elated when after her second grandbaby was born her daughter decided, just four years after leaving the area, she really wanted to be closer to family while she made her own family and wanted to “come home” and just like me she wondered where her daughter would live, as the rentals in the area were so expensive…here in a destination vacation area of the Jersey shore and hers a destination/vacation area in the lush mountains and rivers of Asheville.

Just like me this woman’s mom and aunt had a brilliant idea; some family land would be sold and two new houses would be built, and her daughter would have a place to live, right next door to the dream house she would build for herself. Just like me she started drawing her house on scrap pieces of paper, post-its, on graph paper and in notebooks and eventually even started learning how to use a CAD program. Just like me her mom & dad started building a house on the other piece of acreage for her daughter & just like me she planned every single inch and foot and detail of the house and maybe her dad told her too, “we’ll start her house next door so you can practice for yours.” Just like me she was positively giddy, every single day, as she watched her dream house become a reality. Just like me she worked at the house every day before work and every night after work and could not believe she was going to get to not only live in a house she created herself, it was going to be right next to her daughter and granddaughters.

Just like me, alongside her dad & mom & the subcontractors, one year and one day from the date she got her building permit, she got her certificate of occupancy. Just like me she didn’t splurge on granite countertops and chose instead formica to cover the plywood kitchen counters that she and her dad built together. Just like me she used a huge chunk of her budget to splurge on her silver metal roof and solid black walnut floor boards. Just like me, other than the first three rows her father started for her, she picked and placed and hammered in every single floor board in the whole house, EVERY SINGLE BOARD and she knows exactly where her errors are and where she missed and had to use her bee-keeping bar to pull out a bad hit and start over and she knew exactly where she was going to put a sofa in what would be the living room so she made sure the ugliest boards were in the middle of that place that nobody would really ever see. Just like me she wrote notes to herself with big fat sharpie markers on the sheathing the morning before the sheetrock installers came and laughed while she did it, thinking some day, when she was dead, that someone would want to remodel her perfect one-off-custom-creation-little house and would tear down the sheetrock and find these notes of hard work and determination and love for a home.

Just like me she found it the truest joy to help her daughter next door to raise her family and just like me she walked down the shared driveway every day for more than a decade getting her granddaughters onto the school bus every morning so her daughter did not have to rush getting ready for work. Just like me, as recently as last month, she realized that her time to be needed was coming to an end really, one of the granddaughters is in her second year of college and the other to get her driver’s license in just weeks, and so whenever they asked her to do anything, she jumped to do it, because she was well aware her Nana-ing time is coming to an ending chapter.

BUT…but…B U T… as of Friday she is nothing like me. As of Friday everything she worked so hard to created and build and maintain and love is gone. I hope and, non believer that I am, dare I write “pray,” that she is physically unharmed and that her daughter and granddaughters survived, but I believe her heart is broken into a thousand shards of pain and might never heal from this loss…Just like me she loved her house almost like it was a person and she cleaned it and cared for it with the loving care she once used to tend to her child and her granddaughters, and now it is gone, splinters of 2x4s and shards of standing seam metal roofing material, and chunks of soaking wet insulation…maybe her walnut floor boards are still nailed together in parts, she probably picked one up out of the mud over the weekend, and wondered which room it was from as there are no more rooms and no more house.

I guess what I am writing this morning is that my heart is broken these last days for a woman I don’t even know and a woman who I simply think must exist and I am feeling a depth of gratitude for my life and my home that I don’t have words to describe. When hurricane Sandy came here to the Jersey shore we had no power for nine days. I had filled all my gas cans and my generator worked well all nine days and while I am only one mile from the bay and only 200 feet from a flowing stream, my house is 17.3 feet above sea level and the surge came, but it did not come to me. I am so sad every time I watch one of these short videos on the internet of the devastation and destruction in an area that did not ever expect to have hurricane rain and wind destroy their lives. I have made some financial donations and today after work am going to buy supplies that are being collected locally to donate and while I don’t have an “extra” hundred or $200 in my budget this month, I do have my house, and she does not, and for that anguish that she surely feels, I can modify my spending a bit to see that a stranger in need gets something she needs. It could have been me. It could have been you.