A fifth flood anniversary - counting years and blessings

Five years ago today, the Cedar River filled Sonjia Cornell's home of 27 years at 401 G Ave. NW with murky, putrid floodwater.

It was enough to make a person feel cursed. But since then, Sonjia has been counting blessings.

I met her in the fall of 2008 after a city open house. Instead of reciting a formidable list of woes she faced, Sonjia gratefully recounted all the small but remarkable godsends that helped her keep going.

There was her cat, Harley, who found his way to the top of a china hutch and miraculously rode out floodwaters that rose to 8 inches below the ceiling. There was a diamond ring, lost years before, that, somehow, turned up in a tote of belongings covered in flood muck. At a clothing drive, Sonjia happened upon a bag of donated clothes all in her husband's size. Some found pennies bought her a much-needed hot cup of Joe at a cold, dark moment.

As the 2009 anniversary approached, Sonjia's family grappled with a city buyout offer that wouldn't be enough to cover what they still owed on their flood home. The threat of bankruptcy loomed.

But big-hearted folks at her credit union heard about her plight and wrote off the unpaid portion of her loan.

“God was with me, like I told you, from the start,” Sonjia said this week, ahead of the fifth anniversary.

Sonjia, a home health care provider, lives in Shellsburg now. The trees she planted at her new home are now big enough to provide a home. “They're just finally getting big enough for birds to make nests in them,“ she said. “It makes my heart feel good because that's what we had at our other home.”

Sonjia occasionally goes back to her old neighborhood. The house is gone, but the vacant lot is now a community garden plot. “My yard is a garden! How wonderful,” Sonjia said. “It makes me feel good they're doing something positive with it.”

It seems like a lot of the focus ahead of this anniversary has been on big recovery projects. But as impressive as those are, the countless individual struggles waged by people working to restore lives washed away by the river comprise another sort of monument. And the fact that people could actually emerge from the darkness of an unprecedented natural disaster with their faith and hope firmly intact is a natural wonder.

For all the scars the flood left us, that capacity for tenacity is a blessing we can count today.