Finding the Good From the Bad

Lousy stuff happens to everybody in life. Karen and I did our best to size up lousy situations and try to look for something good in them. This helped us in the darkest of days. Sometimes the good was really small in relation to the bad, and sometimes there was good, but we just couldn’t find it right away.

As I write this post, there is an ice storm passing through our area, and it brought back some memories.

There was a huge ice storm that swept through the Columbus area 16 or 17 years ago. I think there were about a million people without power at the time. I was a volunteer for the Red Cross during the storm, and during that storm I helped set up emergency shelters and coordinated with emergency services. One of the shelters I helped setup and maintain was just a few miles from where Karen lived.

I met Karen a few years later when we were both part of the Franklin County Community Emergency Response Team, a volunteer agency operating out of the Franklin County Emergency Management Agency. Among other things, our organization taught people how to provide for themselves during natural disasters.

I learned later that it was that ice storm that prompted Karen to become involved in emergency preparedness training. She was without power during that storm, and she didn’t feel that she had been ready for it. It’s strange looking back, because I helped set up a shelter just a few miles from her.

There are many things that change a person’s path in life. The ice storm influenced Karen to become active with emergency preparedness, leading her to volunteer for CERT, where she ultimately headed up the organization’s training program. I was the Director of CERT at the time, so we worked side by side, and I think most people reading this know how the story progressed.

That ice storm changed the course of my life, so looking back, it wasn’t so bad.