Heather
She has always been a person who fixes things (or fiddles with them in order to try to make them work better). It is what she does; it is what she knows. She does not remember a time in her childhood before that was her normal. It was what the adults in her life with whom she was close did when confronted with things, and she picked it up from them or they taught her to deal with things that way or something of that sort that occurred so early on that she has no recollection of ever wondering why it was that that was the way things were.
Emotions always had counterparts in actions. When you were angry, you channeled it into fixing something. When you were excited, you burned off the extra energy on projects. When you were scared or worried, you let the act of fixing soothe you. When you were full of joy, you let it bubble up in creative ways to tackle solutions that had previously eluded you. When you were sad, you let yourself get lost in the rhythm and the method of untangling a problem. It worked. It helped. It had never failed her.
Hers was a world where comfort was offered to others via casseroles delivered to their doorsteps and caring was displayed in oil changes and checking the pressure on their tires. You did things. She did things. She was comfortable in that world. She knew what to do in that world, and she knew how to cope with whatever life through at her in the context of those established routes and options.
It was sinking in (for everyone, not just for her) a little more each day how much the world had shifted beneath all of them when the bombs had gone off in cities around the country. What she was learning in the process was that the more things changed around her, the more she knew that those foundational aspects of how she dealt with things needed to remain the same. She needed to keep that level of control over how she handled the emotions that had the potential to sweep her up and away if left to their own devices.
Lack of activity had always been the enemy; that was doubly true now. She needed to be doing things; she needed to be fixing things. She needed to be busy, and that busyness needed to be focused and purposeful. So, she stuck with what she knew. She went from task to task. She went from goal to goal. She kept working. She kept looking at the next thing and the next, and it kept her going when everything around her felt like it was trying to spiral out of control. She still had little things that needed fixing that sometimes got overlooked. She still had people that needed to be taken care of in her circle (and outside of it). She still had larger, longer term things that caught her attention (and those were becoming more common from her perspective).
There were times that she slipped up; there were times that she let herself get caught in the thing that she could not fix or could not complete, and the results were anything but pretty. (A Heather that did not have something that she could be doing was a Heather who bordered on panic.) She dusted herself off and kept going. She got her head back on straight and got better at making sure that those moments did not recur as she went along.
She remembered instruction from her childhood and found it truer every day. Leaving something better than it was when you found it is its own sort of peace no matter what is going on around you at the time was something that someone very special to her had told her once upon a time. She had always remembered those words. There was a sense of calm that comes with looking at the world that way (at least there was for her). Happy memories of Mrs. Jenkins in her younger years talking about the calm brought on by busy hands and settled thoughts coming from knowing what was and was not within your power to control came to her at random moments as she went about her days. She needed that. She wanted that. She was finding her way to dealing and coping and being okay with all of the unexpected things that seemed to pop up daily (as if Jericho had become some sort of a lightning rod for Murphy's Law in practice).
She had always been a list maker, and she shifted that tendency into overdrive. She carried an ever evolving list around in her head that contained all of the problems that she noticed and ideas that occurred to her. The items rearranged themselves by priority as she found out new things or realized that someone else had taken something on or other variables made themselves apparent. Everything was sorted into one of three categories - things she could do, things she might be able to figure out, and things that she would come back to and reconsider later.
She worked her way through as much of the list as she could each day. The next day she picked up where she had left off and kept going. No matter what else was happening there was always the list. It was less of a plan and more of a life philosophy. She was flexible to the crisis and needs of the moment, but there was always the list. There was always something to do. There was always something to fix. There might not be casseroles (and oil changes might not be quite the easy expression of caring that they had once been), but there were other items that were within her purview that cropped up to take their place.
She kept going. She kept working. She kept fixing. It was what she knew how to do.
