Sometimes Coping Is The Name Of The Game

I suppose coping with all the rain from Storm Fay is the last thing people want to do, but it seems to be the name of the game
lately.
I looked up the word "cope" in the dictionary. It said "to struggle, especially on fairly even terms or with some degree of success; to face and deal with responsibilities or problems, especially calmly or adequately."
We do need the rain to keep the drought away, to keep Georgia and the farm fields green, but it does cause us some excitement occasionally here in the library. We have a few places where, like in your home, if the water gets too high and too plentiful, it comes right into your life big time. That's what happened to a few of us this weekend.
"Don't be surprised when you come to work tomorrow," my coworker said when she called me at home. "We've had the wet-vac in to suck up the water from the carpet, and they had to move our desks and the file cabinet, and I didn't know exactly where to put your papers...." I understood completely. This was not my first experience with an overabundance of rain.
The first experience I remember was when my oldest son was a babe-in-arms. I was nineteen years old. We lived in a little two-room house in the country, while his father worked in the oil fields for the Humble Oil Company. Since I didn't have the convenience of a washing machine or dryer, I washed his diapers by hand (before Pampers!) and hung them out to dry on the barbed-wire fence next to the house. We didn't even have a clothes line. One particular time, when we were down to the last nine diapers, it rained on the ones drying on the fence. And it rained for three days. It's amazing how you can dry diapers over the back of ladder-back chairs in front of a small fan in a tiny country kitchen. But coping was the name of the game even
then.
So, today several of us are coping with some areas of our library that are damp. And even though the wet-vac has come and gone, and the maintenance men are going about repairing the leaks, we are doing just fine.
Experience has taught us to cope rather well. There's work that still needs to be done, patrons to help, books to check in and out, blogs to write, emails to answer. Goodness knows, we should have no complaints considering what others have to go through with the loss of homes, cars, and even family members. We are doing just
fine.
We always seem to make it through. Coping is the name of the game and we're doing just fine.