Last week I had a conversation with Margaret Barton of Albany Township. Everyone in the pool (water aerobics again) was talking about Katrina’s victims, but Margaret knew more about the Gulf Coast than most of us.

Her grandfather, Lester Jacobs, was a civil engineer (University of Maine at Orono). In 1929, he was hired to build a toll bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, that now-infamous lake on the northern boundary of New Orleans.

He settled his family in Bay St. Louis, and there Margaret’s mother, Bernice, lived from age 13 until she finished college and returned to Maine. Her father, Lester, died young: he was 47. His widow and her children returned to West Baldwin, her family’s home place.

In the mid-1920s, the widow Margaret Flint Jacobs wrote “The Old Ashburton Place” set in western Maine, the first of her eight novels.

After Hurricane Camille struck the Gulf Coast in 1969, Bernice Jacobs visited Bay St. Louis. The town had taken a beating. The high school, for example, was gone. Margaret Barton said she’s heard the town name mentioned in the catalog of Katrina’s destruction and figures it probably just doesn’t exist any more.

By 1969, Lester’s bridge had been replaced with the longest over-water bridge in the world. Internet reports of its condition today are confused.

Margaret’s Maine-Louisiana story makes an important point: we are all bound together, across space and time.

Here’s another example: Last week – and for the second week of the month for the next six, at least – contributions of personal care items are being collected at the Rumford Center Methodist Church for delivery to the United Methodist Economic Ministry in Salem. From there the goods ferry to another Methodist church, this one on high ground near Bayou La Batre, Alabama.

Of all places, why Salem, Maine, and Bayou La Batre, Louisiana? Because a friend in Jaffrey Center, N.H., has an aunt, Marjorie, who is a full-time volunteer there. Marjorie and others work around the clock distributing needed food and supplies to Katrina’s victims.

Conditions in Bayou La Batre, Aunt Marjorie keeps saying, are “just pitiful.” As for the Salem Methodist Church: Bayou La Batre is a target for its relief effort, happy coincidence.

Last week’s collection from Rumford Center, by the way, included nearly 800 items including 72 bars of soap, 86 razors, and 44 tubes of toothpaste. Virtually everyone is helping the victims of the Gulf Coast disaster.

The energy and imagination applied to relief efforts are impressive. Sue Dolloff teaches at Mountain Valley Middle School. Students there, she said, paid $1 each for the privilege of wearing pajamas to school. Julie McDonald and her Farmington-based quilting group are making blankets. Features in this and other newspapers detailing relief efforts are really all about love and compassion.

Virtually every one of us, however, would like to send our money and our goods on and be done with it. But the need won’t go away. Just the headlines about them.

Our friend in New Hampshire is sending information from Aunt Marjorie in the Bayou along to the River Valley. Aunt Marjorie will “…suggest names of families (and individuals) that need some extra support … to develop a kind of adopt-a-family plan …They will need help for a very long time to come.”

The Rumford Center congregation and its friends and neighbors hope to establish long-term relationships with Bayou La Batre people who need that extra help and hope and encouragement.

The relief effort spearheaded by the Rumford Center Methodist Church is ecumenical: contributors include some staunch members of St. A/St. John’s, the Unitarian Universalist group in Rumford, and many unaffiliated friends and neighbors.

If you’d like to join in the long haul effort to assist the people of Bayou La Batre, call Pastor David Kimball at 364-7097.

Please contact me if you know of other connections between and among the people of western Maine and of the Gulf Coast: [email protected]

Linda Farr Macgregor lives in Rumford with her husband, Jim. She is the author of “Rumford Stories,” which was published by the Rumford Public Library and the Rumford Historical Society for the Rumford Bicentennial celebration in 2000.