Shelter from the Storm

It figures

Four days from the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, there's a tropical depression brewing in the Carribean Sea. It's the fifth storm of the hurricane season, and it's expected to strengthen and enter the Gulf of Mexico.

Ah, well... It's worrisome, but I can't live in fear. All I can do is make sure I'm prepared, along with my family, to evacuate, if it comes to that.

One thing I'm making sure to do is secure everything that pertains to my writing. When I let myself think about all the handwritten journals, writing reference books, books, in general, notes on stories and story ideas, floppy disks and CDs where I'd stored many, many stories and poems, that was lost as it all sat in about 7 feet of flood water, I get a heaviness in my chest and stomach that only goes away when I take deep breaths and stop thinking about what I'd lost.

I like to deny it, but I'm sure I suffer from some level of PTSD like almost everyone else who has survived Katrina.

But I thank God that I'm at least alive, and then I stop thinking of my material things because I could have lost more precious things like my family or my life. I can't even fathom being a mother that lost her grip on her young son as the water they were trying to escape swept him from her arms. Then being that same mother who dies in a house fire along with her other son while living displaced in Milwaukee, unable to attend her younger son's funeral when his remains are finally identified nearly a year after he died...

That was a true story that ran in our newspaper, The Times Picayune, last Tuesday (8/21/06). Me losing some material things simply does not compare. When I start feeling down, I always try to remember that life could be a lot worse.