Left Behind

I live in Flat Rock and walk at The Park at Flat Rock almost daily - just as I have done since it first opened. Before that, I would play the golf course previously located on the same property with my pull cart in tow while wearing my sneakers and cut-off shorts.

I loved the golf course. And now I love The Park.

These days I hike the park trails with my extremely energetic little dog Garçon. We don’t walk fast and usually we don’t walk far because he is constantly exploring the universe with his nose. I once watched another dog-walker pulling his dog along the path in another park, allowing only quick “bathroom breaks,” and thought that such an experience for Garçon would be the same as someone walking me quickly through an art gallery, but not letting me stop to look at the paintings.

I indulge Garçon. The walks are his time. I get the rest of the day. But I digress.

Almost every time I go to The Park, I stop by the visitor’s center to use the bathroom, or because Garçon likes to pass through the building to the balcony behind where he can survey the entire Park. Garçon loves The Park for its endless variety of scents to be detected and for the possibility of an urban safari spent hunting his Big Three - squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks.

Next to the ladies’ bathroom is a box for lost items that have been found in The Park and deposited there in the hope of a reunion with the owner. I always stop to examine the box, not because I think I’ve lost something, but because I am curious about the objects therein and their erstwhile owners. I have seen: shoes and sandals and socks of all sorts (always just one, and never a pair), sippy cups and water bottles, sweaters, jackets, scarves, mittens, gloves (same as shoes and sandals and socks - only one, never a pair), balls of all kind, frisbees, earphones, notebooks, sunglasses, eyeglasses, and, once, a brassiere.

I wonder about the owners of these objects. Will they miss these things? Will they remember where they were left? Will they come back to claim them? Who goes home with just one shoe? Some things are there for a long time; most are removed within a week or two, maybe by the owners, maybe by someone who needed a scarf. Perhaps by the Park staff.

The Lost and Found box itself was recently replaced. The former one was a sad looking affair - worn cardboard, fraying and torn on the edges. Perusing the contents never failed to arouse in me a melancholy sense of the impermanence of belongings. Yesterday someone owned a pair of sunglasses, now they are “lost.”

Last year, I left Flat Rock and returned to the state where my children were born and raised and where they still remain in their middle-aged lives. My husband had died, I was alone here without family, and it seemed the thing to do. But I left behind so very much - good friends, the mountains, Flat Rock Playhouse, the season-changing landscapes, the friendly faces that I knew personally in so many shops and restaurants, and even our delightful village Post Office. In other words, I left behind a life in a small town in a place so lovely that it is often likened to Paradise by residents and visitors alike. And so, after exactly one year, I returned. There were too many things left behind here that I could not replace as I would a lost pair of sunglasses.

Recently, this part of Appalachia experienced a devastating weather-related act of Nature named Hélène. Houses and other buildings were destroyed, their contents swept away in torrents of water. Roads were blocked by fallen trees. Electrical wires hung loosely, dangling over roads that were, in any event, impassable. Tree limbs and branches and leaves of all kinds littered the landscape.

Mud covered the entire area and, after it dried, left a sand-colored residue that looked dirty, unwashed, and out of place, especially after the sun returned and the leaves that had remained on the trees sported their bright yellow, orange and red Autumn colors in the same brilliance as in past years. The glorious colors of the maples and yellow birch and tulip poplars stood in stark contrast to the sand and mud and debris left behind by Hélène. The natural beauty seemed incongruous amidst the destruction and chaos visited upon the many lives that had been upended in a single day by Mother Nature.

Also left behind - on the curbs of neighborhoods fancy and not so fancy - were pieces of the lives that were being lived in the houses of our neighbors and in the shops of our local merchants. Mattresses, sofas, filing cabinets, carpeting, water heaters, insulation, wood furniture of all kinds, toys, clothing, tools, belongings of all sort that no longer belonged. Ruined items were piled high and spread out along entire streets, on sidewalks, next to tree trunks sawed into pieces, and intermingled with plastic bags full of who-knows-what.

Left behind, too, were the lives that will never be quite the same. Residents of the region have been forced to deal with the reality of what happened, contemplate the cause of it, and consider the disturbing prospect that it could happen again. Left behind was the sense of peace and serenity that we enjoyed here in these lovely foothills, or high up on the glorious mountains that were carved by the same force, albeit on a much grander scale, that brought us Hélène. Left behind was the security we had, a sort of wholeness in our being here, based on the belief that Mother Nature was perhaps fickle but never so unkind.

I had wanted to write about the box at The Park for some time - it intrigued me so - but it took Hélène to get me to do it. There had been so much left behind in my own life recently, and now in all of our lives. But there is a future, and last week I saw in the windows of many shops on Main Street in nearby Hendersonville a small poster that said simply, “It will all be OK.”

I went into one shop and asked about the poster, because I wanted to buy one, but was told that a very nice lady had made them and delivered them to the merchants on Main Street. I wonder who she is, just like I wonder about the owners of the things in the Lost and Found box at The Park. I am grateful to her, this unknown woman. Her posters brought to my mind the line, “It will be ok in the end. If it’s not ok, then this isn’t the end.”

Yes, there has been much left behind - in boxes, on the curbs of our hometowns, and in our lives. At the same time, I find comfort in the realization that there also remains much waiting to be found. It will all be OK.