Floodgate spills forth a love tide

Seems it’s raining all over the world …

Feels like it’s raining all over the world.

— from “Rainy Night

in Georgia.” Lately it seems and feels not only like it’s raining all over the world, but flooding it.

The Natural State is among a number that has had a turn in recent years, and months, with serious flooding. The northern portion of Arkansas sustained a deadly bout of it just this past spring.

Then there’s the city of Houston.

Texas’ largest metropolis had already had more than its share of floods, one of which we were nearly caught in at the end of a Memorial Day weekend visit in 2015.

Last weekend, Hurricane Harvey came calling, hitting and devastating Rockport along with nearby Port Aransas, Port Lavaca, Rosenberg, Victoria and Dickinson before turning its fury on the Bayou City.

My husband, Dre, and I spent the majority of the weekend glued to The Weather Channel. Houston — the city in which I have a host of in-laws, almost-cousins, friends and friends of friends — was not just taking it on the chin. Its whole body was being pummeled in a way many said they had not seen before.

Harvey. What a benign name for a nasty, nasty storm. Although the death toll will have been a microscopic fraction of that left by Hurricane Katrina, it felt like Katrina all over again.

We sought news of our loved ones, especially Bebe, my grandmother-in-law. In her mid-90s, Bebe lives with an aunt-in-law in an apartment complex in the Third Ward. An uncle-in-law lives in the same complex. They’d had no water invade their apartments, we were told, but they’d lost electricity.

My husband texted his brother Darren, who lives with his wife in Houston’s Jersey Village, for updates. “We’re fine, but Houston is [messed up],” Darren texted on Sunday.

Others we knew had marked themselves “Safe” on Facebook, but one friend lamented, via Facebook post, the water that stood in the home he and his wife shared.

Meanwhile, many of the images coming out of southeast Texas were studies in surrealism … the pictures of the nursing home residents sitting in water in Dickinson. Images of people wading through the streets, crying as they surveyed their ruined properties. Amazingly, there were a few images of people smiling, like the mom and her three young children as they trudged to safety.

It was the video of a hysterically crying little girl that finally had me reaching for the tissues. The Weather Channel kept looping the image of the terrified tot,

and her family, being helped from a small rescue boat onto a larger vehicle.

Speaking of rescues, it was the images showing them that did the heart good … the “citizen navy” of boat owners (and at least one paddle boarder)

who reached out to help their neighbors and others stranded in their homes by rising water. Those who volunteered their dry homes as shelters for those whose homes had been inundated. Those who got out and saved the children and the elderly and the pets and the cattle. One photo in particular will, I predict, be in the running for a Pulitzer: Houston Police

SWAT officer Daryl Hudeck carrying Catherine Pham and her 13-monthold son Aiden … fast asleep, safe in the arms of Pham, who was safe in the arms of Hudeck. The rescuers in these images were everyday heroes who themselves had doubtless suffered losses.

The most striking? These were images of people with white, black, brown and yellow

skin helping each other. Suddenly, white nationalism, illegal immigration and the pulling down of Confederate monuments had taken a backseat.

I had more grab-the-tissues moments. Moments of sadness, because it always seems to take a big dollop of adversity for us to come together and be kind to one another. Moments of joy to

see that people are helping each other. Moments of helplessness, because of the desire to do so much more than just write a check or send an electronic donation to a relief organization. Moments of determination to find out what that “more” could possibly be.

Notably, it was the people of the city of Houston who came to the rescue of the Katrina

evacuees. Now, Houston is in need. May we all counter the floods of destruction with a flood of our own … a flood of love, kindness and helpfulness that not only continues after the rains have stopped and the waters receded, but goes far beyond the scope of tragic occurrences.

Let that rain all over the world.