The Earth shakes so violently that it shifts on its axis. Once again people scramble into the streets, leaving behind the remnants of home.  The photographs and the family heirlooms buried deep beneath piles of rubble.  The crayon drawings, once presented so proudly, now blow down empty streets.  The special something that kept them safe at night, that they curled up against to shield themselves from whatever was lurking, offers no protection now. 

Image after image of people’s lives in chaos.  And there I sit again, wondering how I am supposed to respond.  I text my $10 to Haiti.  I  scrounge up another $25 for a local aid organization with ties to Chile.  I buy socks and underwear for my kids to bring to their school donation drives. I send my universal prayers up into the ether. But, in the end, I still crawl into my bed at night and I feel insignificant.  Powerless.  So far from being able to help. Looking for an answer.

When they see the pictures of the dust-drenched children on the cover of a magazine, my own kids are visibly disturbed.  They look at me for reassurance.  I have little to give except to tell them that we don’t live in an earthquake zone.  Somehow, that sounds so selfish.  But we keep talking, about the children in the magazine, about what my kids had overheard on the radio or at school, about what might happen to all of those homeless people.

Then, in the way that it often does when you’re listening to children, the conversation flows seamlessly and morphs into my answer.  Because there are homeless people in Haiti, but two kids at Clara’s school lost their homes and all their belongings in house fires this month.  And there are families in Chile living in fear of after shocks, but there are also women and their children in our community, who left their homes in the middle of night, living in fear of their own version of an after shock.  And there are families disappearing from our schools every day, moving to motels, or their cars, or a shelter, as they run out of options and there’s still no job on the horizon.

It dawns on us as we talk.

Every day is someone’s earthquake

It isn't about magnitude.  Or body counts.  Or number of buildings lost.  It's about how it feels in your gut in that moment when you know there's no going back.

And so, we hatch our plan together.  Because we can’t change the world for those families so far away, we will do what we can to comfort those who left their lives behind in our own neighborhood.  We throw our drawers wide open and begin filling up bags.  Not with our stained, and holey, and should-never-have-boughts.  But with our prettiest, our treasures, our favorites, our save-for-the grandchildrens.

With each thing I place in a bag, I make a little wish for the person who receives it.

The sweater I knit one cold New Hampshire winter to cover my pregnant belly that had burst out of everything warm I owned. 

"May you wrap your arms around a woman who is looking for strength and safety, bring her comfort, let her know she is on the right road."  

 The pillowcases that cradled my babies heads when they went off to nap at preschool, the pillowcases they picked so that they would have someone to talk to because they hated lying still when there was so much more to be done. 

The four bags full of over-priced dresses that only a grandparent would splurge on. 

The responsibility chart that we thought would bring order to the piles of dirty socks and constant arguments, until we realized that we weren’t a charty kind of family. 

"May you hang on the wall of a family’s home who knows what it’s like not to have one and is in love with the thought of having a place of their own to put in order."

The little boxes of learning-to-read books, the ones that helped all of our kids experience that magical moment when they realized they could open up a book and read it to themselves.

The fairy sewing cards that kept our youngest child calm when everything around her was over-sized and loud. 

And the plaque that was a gift when we moved from one home to another, a little bit of hope as we stepped into the unknown. 

Twelve bags are loaded in the back of the car.  Twelve bags that are on their way to a local women’s shelter.  They aren’t going to change what’s happening in Chile.  They aren’t going to fix the problems of Haiti’s future.  They aren’t even going to make much of a dent in the world of a mother and her children who hurriedly left an abusive home. 

Today might have been their earthquake and I am no Red Cross. But, if a purple velour princess dress can make a little girl smile while she waits to find out of she will get to return to her school and the teacher she loved.  Or if a bulky, over-sized sweater can make a harried, fearful woman feel even an ounce of the love that I put into knitting it.  Then, I know that I have done something that my $10 text couldn’t.