Stories of Kindness from Around the World

I'm in Boulder, Colorado, and am one of the fortunate ones without much flood impact on my home. Today, I went over to a friend's house to help with the cleanup there. The house is less than a block from one of the creeks, and the flash flood broke a basement window, filled the basement up to eight feet, rushed up the stairs to the ground floor, and flooded that floor as well. 

A crew of her friends had been pulling up carpet and moving furniture all morning when I arrived. She asked me to help move damaged items out of a back room where carpet was already pulled out, and start getting the layer of chocolaty mud out. With one other helper, I got busy shoveling and scraping; once we got the heavy layer off, I started running the wet vac.

There was a three-foot square of tiled floor in front of a door, and on it sat a tall cactus in a blue ceramic pot. Our friend had asked us to be careful with that plant, because it was the only one that meant a lot to her. It had been her mother's. 

The woman helping me had been there all morning, and since she was getting tired and I was fresh, at one point she asked me to just tell her what to do. I thought, if we could get the tiles on that little section under the cactus cleaned up, it would make our friend feel better.

So, together we moved the cactus enough to get the mud out from under it, and I scraped and vacuumed the tiles. Then I asked my helper to get some water and really get that little square of tile clean; not soap-and-water clean, but most-of-the-mud-off clean. It was a small job that I thought would be easy for her, since she'd worked so much already.

When our friend came back in to check on us, she was really affected by what we had accomplished, and I think our taking so much care with her mom's plant did what I hoped. She exclaimed, and smiled, and put her hand to her heart. I think it was a relief for her, just to see one little space so clear of mud.