Life Is In The Details

As I write this, on Saturday, Tropical Storm Lee is interfering with the holiday weekend for friends in LA (Louisiana) and LA (Lower Alabama), which makes me feel guilty for whining about my sinuses.  But it's natural to think of the big things in terms of how they affect the little things, the personal things. 

My family lived in Mobile in 1965, when Betsy came through. Mom was trapped on the other side of a flooded bridge.  Our babysitter took us to her cousin's brick house. Lots of noisy, unfamiliar people were there, and I was only waist-high to most of them.  Looking out a window, I saw a black and white dog tumbling end over end like in a cartoon.  A boy running after the dog tripped, and tumbled end over end too.  People told me to get away from the window.  I kept looking out, looking for my mom.  There was so much noise.  I pictured the noise as a storm itself, and I was lost in it.

Never mind the lunar landing; when I was nine, Camille and desegregation were what changed the world.  If someone wanted to get into it over The Coloreds, the surest way to avert a fight was to ask about something "before Camille" or "since Camille" or "if we have another Camille..."  Nobody said "Camille" in a normal tone of voice.

Hurricane Agnes was our welcome to Florida.  We were staying in a motel on Pensacola Beach, not yet having bought a house.  My mom didn’t want to leave my brother and me in a motel in a hurricane, so she put us in a day care center.  Packed in with little kids!  I was practically twelve, which was practically a teenager, and wholly indignant. I spent that hurricane reading picture books out loud. And fuming.

I'm pretty sure Eloise was the one where I was told to put on jeans, and the only jeans I could find were the outgrown red ones.  We cleared out a closet to huddle in if wind knocked the house down.  Those red jeans felt like they were chewing at me.  I couldn't sleep.  Nor could I read, once we lost power.  That storm also gave me my introduction to the hard labor of storm cleanup. 

In 1979, my brother moved to Gainesville.  My mother looked at the projections for Frederic, then expected to hook to the right and land at Cedar Key, and called him home to Gulf Breeze (Pensacola).  He protested that he was miles from the coast, that he was on high ground, and that the hurricane wasn't coming here anyway. "Come home." So he went. The storm didn't hook, so the projected track swung west.  Mom called me home.  I protested that no hurricanes ever hit Tallahassee, that my house was very old and solid, that the hurricane wasn't coming here anyway, and that my ROTC unit would probably be asked to clean up if there was any damage. She insisted.  I went. The projection swung west again.  My grandfather called us home. My mother protested: we were in a brick house, and the hurricane wasn't going to come here anyway.  "I saw those houses on stilts to let the water under them. Come home."  We did, and we caught the eye wall.  We all spent the night in my grandpa's hallway, watching the ceiling rise and fall like it was breathing.  My grandfather was in obvious distress, probably having another stroke.  Come daylight, the scene was apocalyptic.  Oaks that had been too big to cut in 1938 were laid out flat.  Some had twisted, so that the wood splintered in long rust-and-yellow strips.  The barn that had stood between the house and the wind was in scattered flinders.  Crumpled metal sheets from the barn's roof littered the yard, the highway, and the fields beyond.  Driving back to Pensacola took many hours. 

My mother hit the road to avoid Elena, but the storm repeatedly changed course right after she evacuated.  That was the fourth or fifth storm that had seemed to pursue her when she tried to evacuate.  She was growing a legend.

Kate was Tallahassee's Thanksgiving Hurricane.  I lived in a 1920s-era house and assured my mother it was safe--unless she tried to evacuate in this direction.  She didn't.  But when the fourth tornado roared by, I considered that my confidence had been perhaps a bit misplaced.  The old house's double-hung windows didn't close perfectly at the top, so my living room curtains streamed flat across the ceiling, as if gravity took a 90 degree shift just over my head.  The next morning, squabbling with frat boys over who owned fallen street lights, I marveled at how large the lights were, and how little they weighed.

Alberto flooded the area north of us; coffins floated down the Flint River.  I'd been given a kitten, and had selected another kitten--not yet weaned--to keep her company.  The owner of the younger kitten called me to say the Ochlockonee River was flooding into her yard and all these critters was going straight to the pound.  I went to pick up Pepperkitty, and was asked, "Here now! You want a puppy?"  My husband said no, but he and the dog, Jake, were inseparable for the next fifteen years.

During Erin, I heard Pepperkitty yowling to come in the front door.  I opened and shut the door quickly against the hard slanting rain. Pepperkitty skidded to a halt and turned and hissed at the door. I heard a shrill "Meee! Meee!"  I opened it again and saw a tiny gray-and-white kitten leaping into the air, splaying his little legs straight out in four directions and screaming, "Me-ee!" at the height of each leap.  Stormy died in my husband's arms several years ago, although Pepperkitty still slouches about and basks in the sun.

Opal flattened the huge Pensacola Beach sand dunes I remember from my teens.

Earl in 1998 flooded my street. Water didn't come into my house, but it was over the front step.  Jake splashed about, barking joyfully, as my young sons pretended to swim in the street.  They got filthy, but it takes a peck of dirt to grow a kid.

My mother evacuated to avoid Georges.  The storm's track followed hers, and the legend grew.  She hit the news during the aftermath, but the legend wasn't mentioned.

In the Year of Four Hurricanes, Ivan turned Pensacola into Blue Roof City.  My mother's friends put up a tarp (blue, of course) that perfectly bandaged the hole in her roof.  The insurance company had a fit about this unlicensed installation and sent a licensed contractor to replace it.  The replacement leaked.  For years afterward, rubble piled several stories high on the softball fields kept smoldering. I'd approach Pensacola on the detour because I-10 had washed out--remember the photo of the semi-truck dangling off the broken end of the I-10 bridge?  I'd see blue roofs, and more blue roofs, and then I'd turn in to reach town, and I'd see the piles of rubble.  That summer, my husband and I decided to get another kitten. Luckily, a friend's cat had spit out two large litters in very short order...in Jacksonville.  We arranged to pick a kitten while handling other business there.  Just as we hit the road, my friend called and asked could we wait a week?  I said okay, if she'd promise not to give away all the kittens before then. Amid choking noises, she assured me that she would not run out of kittens before next weekend.  The next week's trip was stymied by a hurricane warning.  The next chance was blocked by another hurricane warning.  So was the next.  Finally, we brought home two kittens, both calico.  They snore adorably.

Here are our two calico kittens, about four hours after birth.

The next year, Dennis put much of my street under water again.  My sons were rather older, but they were little-boy enough to get lots of splashing done.  Jake romped noisily with them.  I sat in the doorway, watching them, knowing that with the next storm they'd be too grown up to cut the fool like this.

Katrina ripped the coast apart. But just a little bit inland, Rita hit harder.  The United States Postal Service blocked out entire zip codes, refusing to accept any mail aimed for there.  UPS was delivering the day after the storm, though.  Things over there still aren't all right.  I'm looking for a small, personal detail, but even after these years have gone by, the big picture is too big, too busy, to let me find it.

We buried my stepfather in a petering-out storm's last gusts. He was a terribly sweet old man.  The storm might have been Fay.  I wasn't really in the mood to take note.

What about you?  What storms marked your life, and how?