“Did you earn that?” asked the woman behind me in the checkout line asked. I was wearing one of my all-time favorite T-shirts. On the front are the words “Iowa: A Place to Row” and an image of a pair of canoe paddles crossed like swords before battle. On the back is a list of stops along the “1993 Sandbagger Tour,” 30 Iowa cities along the Mississippi, Des Moines and Raccoon rivers that were bailing water, hating water and, in Des Moines’ case, craving (potable) water a decade ago this month.

The now-tattered T-shirt wasn’t a prize for filling the most bags with sand in a seemingly futile effort to hold the roiling and churning rivers at bay, if that’s what she meant. During the flood, I mainly interviewed and took pictures of the people filling sandbags or in other ways coping with what would be one of the most powerful displays of nature’s fury many of them had ever witnessed.

There was one little thing, I told the woman. I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to justify my wearing the T-shirt. I wanted to prove a point, that however significant the contributions of those who manned the sandbagging lines, altruism is in the eyes of the beholder.

I told her I made duplicates of the key to my house in Adel, where the water ran, the toilets flushed and people didn’t walk around in dazed exhaustion brought on by the inconvenience of having to stand in line to do anything related to personal hygiene or normal bodily functions. I distributed the spare keys among my Des Moines friends and told them to stop by any time they needed to use my water.

The woman sneered a little as she looked away, apparently unimpressed with the magnanimity of my gesture.

It was, however, no small thing for a friend who called and, between tearful silences, asked if she and her mother could drive out and use my shower. Their brother and son had ended his life during the flood, apparently unable to cope as he had before the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers teamed to shut down the Des Moines water plant and throw the city into chaos. They wanted little more than to be clean when they buried him. I was overwhelmed by how grateful and appreciative they were. It was nothing, I insisted. It was everything, they corrected.

I rarely think of the floods without thinking of my friend and her mother, whom I met for the first time the day she used my shower. I’m sure their memories of the floods are inextricably tied to their grief in ways that even the families who lost lost loved ones in the flood can’t completely comprehend.

That’s the story of the Floods of ’93: Helpful gestures, big and small. Physical and emotional losses. Enormous pain, but tremendous gain from the camaraderie that developed as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, literally and figuratively, against the ravages of the river. Perhaps that spirit of pulling together is residual. As we reflect on how we were changed by that powerful display of nature’s wrath, let’s revive that spirit that helped us recover and become stronger than we were before. Let’s make that, not the multimillion-dollar damage figures, the legacy of the Floods of ’93.

Beth Dalbey is editorial director for Business Publications Corp. E-mail her at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.