Good night, Irene. I’ll see you in my dreams. Millions of people up and down the eastern seaboard breathed a sigh of relief when Hurricane Irene failed to live up to her threat of massive destruction. While she did cause her share of damage, major US cities were spared the doomsday scenario predicted by some, and the clean-up in the New York and Vermont towns and the Outer Banks was getting underway when tropical storm Lee tried to sneak under the radar into communities along the Susquehanna River in New York and Pennsylvania.

While the casual observer may watch the video footage and murmur, “oh, how awful, another disaster,” I can’t be a casual observer when it comes to tropical storm Lee. The devastation in his wake hit a community I once called home. I moved to Binghamton, New York in 1973 to attend college. It’s where I met my husband, where we had our first date at Mama Lena’s (yummy bread), where we purchased our wedding bands, and where we established our first home in that odd-shaped apartment above a television store on Clinton Ave.

When Lee came to town, he came with a vengeance. Twenty thousand people were evacuated from Binghamton alone. One photo shows a high school football scoreboard peeking out of a newly-formed lake. And Pat Mitchell’s Ice Cream was flooded. Oh, no.

Who will be next? Maria and Nate passed without too much fanfare, but Ophelia, Phillipe, Rena, Sean, Tammy and Vince stand ready in the wings. Will our disaster response teams catch their breath before another guest comes a calling? Is it me or are the natural disasters of the last few years growing in frequency and intensity?
As one television commentator informed his audience, this has been the driest (Texas) wettest (Northeast), hottest (many locations) summer on record. If global warming proponents are right, what can the average family do about it? I’ll recycle plastic bags and aluminum cans like a good citizen, but that isn’t going to stop the fires from spreading or the rain from falling. We’ll make sure we have homeowners insurance, drop a few bucks in the Red Cross or Salvation Army coffers for disaster relief, and breathe our own sigh of relief that our street has been spared from Irene and Lee. But is that enough?

We live in such a fast-paced, sound-bite culture that it is easy to forget that our brothers and sisters are suffering long after the rushing rivers return to their banks, the earth ceases to shake, and the television cameras return to their studios. Out of sight, out of mind, right? But mold and nightmares don’t go away when the water recedes – they tend to get worse.

I want to remember. We re-member when we put together the broken pieces, and there are certainly enough broken pieces scattered across our globe. It’s been three weeks since Irene, and six months since Japan. The earth shook mightily under Haiti’s island in January 2010, while Christchurch, New Zealand was torn apart in two separate blows as the earth bucked beneath its historic buildings. Will life ever return to normal for our brothers and sisters?

Amazingly, I actually know people in Christchurch, Haiti, and Japan, as well as in the communities along the Susquehanna River. But even if I didn’t know anyone there, I still want to care enough to remember them in the days ahead, as well as those disaster workers still serving in each of those places. To be in touch with them, to keep informed, to pray. To watch the documentaries or HBO’s Treme, New Orleans in its post-Katrina reincarnation. I don’t want to forget.

So here it is, long-distance caring at its best. Now to wrap up the column and send it off. But then my phone rang with a request for me to travel to Binghamton as a public information officer for the Salvation Army, telling the story of need and service, of post-Lee devastation and recovery. I’m trying to work out the details to go, complicated as lis is by responsibilities on the home-front. So for now I’ll say good night, Irene. It’s my turn to find out what trouble your kid brother Lee brought to the Susquehanna Valley.