Heartbreak and hope

Today we're thinking about all those impacted by the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The shooting will no doubt  make parents go home and hug their kids a little more tightly today. At a time of year fabled to be full of cheer and good will to men, it's all the more heartbreaking to think about the enormous void it will leave in these families' lives at the holidays and every other time of year.

Instances like this are becoming all the more frequent. But on a day with such tragedy, it was nice to hear about a landscaping company that's taken steps to help kids lately, Ruppert Landscape. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Brandon Simmons, an area manager in Ruppert’s Baltimore Landscape Management Branch, and his girlfriend, Teresa Hiebler, took a trip to Point Pleasant, N.J. to help with relief efforts. They returned a week later with 14 additional recruits, bringing food and monetary donations.

“Through our work with St. Mary’s By the Sea Parish and their food pantry in Point Pleasant, we learned of the additional need for toys for the upcoming holiday season,” said Simmons. “I enlisted the help of my company and we put the word out internally for toy donations at each of our branches and Teresa put the word out at her son’s school, St. Casimir’s in Canton. Before we knew it, this toy drive had grown exponentially."

Helping the effort was 5-year-old Sadie Mirjafary. In addition to donating her own birthday toys she’d received a few weeks earlier, Sadie and her mom posted her request for toy donations on Facebook. 

Together, all of those involved in the effort collected nearly 2,000 toys. Let's hope we continue a lot more efforts like this. Enough with the wrath that we saw today.