A different kind of spring, a different kind of Columbia

Azaleas have bloomed. Birds are nesting. Butterflies float over early flowers. Baby rabbits emerge from under our hedges. Perfect spring, right?

Not quite. Despite all the usual joyful signs of the season, this spring is very different in my neighborhood. There are strange sounds reverberating through the air — heavy, thudding and metallic. Neighborhood normalcy is a bit off-kilter, and police cars make regular rounds on every street.

I live in a neighborhood through which the floods of October curved a wide swatch. For six months, I have watched my neighbors down the hill on Burwell Lane and Rickenbaker and Kilbourne roads struggle with incredibly hard decisions.

These days from my house up the street, I hear the clanging of the heavy equipment, the bulldozers and the wrecking balls, that have arrived to push down homes too damaged to save. I also hear the much more soothing sounds of hammers and drills that are beginning to rebuild those homes that can be restored.

There is another unusual presence in our neighborhood this spring. Along with all the vivid spring flowers that are beginning to bloom in many yards, another fresh spot of color is evident in front of almost every house. Those polygonal signs with acronyms such as ADT and CPI, or severe sounding words such as Vector or Intelligent Home, have sprung up everywhere, including my own yard.

My neighborhood has never had much crime, and I have never felt frightened in the house where I have lived for more than 25 years. However, crime has increased in the whole neighborhood since the flood, and after a scary middle-of-the-night attempted break-in at my house, I joined many of my neighbors in getting a home-security system and planting its warning sign prominently in my front yard.

A different atmosphere has infused the neighborhood, one in which there is a tentative belief that normalcy is returning, even if it is the new normal.

Repair work continues on the sunken and broken foundation to my own home, and my yard soon will have deep trenches cut all over it for the installation of drains to sustain the repair work and help with future heavy rains. I have nothing to complain about, because my damage was small compared to so many of my neighbors.

Yet the traditions of the spring are upended. I can’t plant my usual flower beds because of the coming maze of deep trenches, so I have become a container gardener for a season. I am arranging spring flowers in pots and pottery around my front yard, in lieu of my usual flower beds. This may sound like a trivial concern, but it mirrors much larger challenges that neighbors more severely affected by flood waters are handling with aplomb. Resiliency and adaptability are everywhere.

Although some things are very different, we have found the chance to know our neighbors better.

In October, of course, everyone was pitching in, helping in the storm’s direct aftermath. In the months that followed, we have gradually become a real neighborhood. When I walk my dog, folks not only know my name; they know my dog’s, too. For the first time, I feel a real sense of neighborhood cohesion and community.

South Carolina has had its share of challenges in recent months — challenges that have given us opportunities to become better humans. Senseless, tragic violence in Charleston last summer offered us a chance to examine our values and act upon what we learned. October floods allowed us to plumb our humanity more deeply as we found abundant ways to help those who needed us.

Sustainability is a wonderful concept. As a year’s anniversary of the Charleston tragedy approaches, and as flood damage is gradually repaired, we can prove our mettle as citizens and neighbors by exhibiting daily that same compassion and concern for others that recent tragedies in our state helped us to find within ourselves. We can indeed sustain our best selves.

This story was originally published May 2, 2016 at 1:56 AM.