Walls of rain and wind pounded south Texas, but a thousand miles away from Hurricane Ike, a couple hundred people gathered at a Lake-in-the-Hills park to walk for Alzheimer’s. Despite the distance from Hurricane Ike, its influence on the Midwest that morning brought steady heavy rain. You’d think Sunset Park, where I would emcee the Memory Walk in Lake-in-the-Hills, would sparkle and shine, but the only things dazzling that morning were the smiles of the people ready to walk the drenched course.
People seemed to welcome the rain or maybe they ignored the conditions. They had to feel relief since they weren’t in Galveston, Texas, where most everything was under water. The hooded jackets the Memory Walkers wore and the umbrellas they carried were not the only things they had in common. They each had gathered checks from friends and family that hoped the Alzheimer’s Association could continue research into ending a disease that robs people of their memory and then claims their lives. By the morning of the Alzheimer’s Memory Walk in McHenry County, at least five inches of rain had already fallen and the paths of one-and-a-half and three miles had similar water obstacles. Under the pavilion, a state senator, a state representative, a local trustee, volunteers, sponsors, and walkers listened to my words of encouragement as emcee of the Memory Walk. This for me had been a long wet weekend that paled in comparison to those enduring the horrendous floods, but for my family, we didn’t do anything that didn’t somehow relate to the weather. As I took hold of the microphone, directing Memory Walkers to the start of the event, I thought back to a day earlier, in a Chicago suburb, where my family bailed out my brother-in-law, for his basement was flooding, water dripping down walls from a crack in the foundation.
This was a weekend of helping people, whether walking for Alzheimer’s or removing water from the basements of neighbors….a weekend I’ll not forget for how Mother Nature drew the best out of us in the worst conditions possible.
Molly J
