Normal

My umbrella is back up.

The chairs are back around the table. The plants are back where they belong and the noodles are in the pool, which is now free of sticks and leaves and unripened pecans and back to its perfect shade of turquoise.


The oversized clock is back on the back wall of my house. It keeps perfect time, much to my dismay  as it ticks down the final minutes of my weekend pool time.

And my giant fish is back on the wall -- albeit in a new spot.

I think I have found most of the little stuff -- the solar lights, the rusted metal suns, the wind chimes and the sign that declares my back yard a "Dragonfly Crossing." I think that's all of it. The Coach has a tendency to pack things away in our garage and I never see them again. Or, not until the next hurricane anyway.

I did have to throw a few things away, things I loved and hated to get rid of so I held on to them too long. The "Just Another Day in Paradise" sign, for one. 

The neighborhood is quiet once again. No more constant hum from the next door neighbor's generator as he awaited the arrival of the Entergy trucks to the street behind us where the pole went down. He apologized for the noise, as though we might be bothered by his attempts to stay cool and keep the entire contents of his refrigerator from spoiling.

And we no longer see the red and blue flashing lights from the police cruisers cruising up and down our street, keeping a watchful eye for trouble. And looters.

And, in my little corner of the world anyway, the lights are on.  My house is clean. My fridge is full. My air conditioning is cold. My legs are shaved. My teeth are brushed. All my storm debris is out on the curb awaiting the garbage men.

Both my mama and my mother-in-law have gone home.

And life -- ours anyway -- is back to normal.

Today is Saturday. It has been six days since I came home from work, settled in my mother-in-law and started to hunker down. Five days since we all woke up to calm but gray skies and began making jokes on Facebook.  "Anybody seen Isaac?" I wrote.

He arrived later that day (so did my mama). Slowly at first. Then surely. And like the unruly son-of-Katrina that he was, he kept us up all night, got kind of drunk and refused to leave.

Together, The Coach, The Daughter, Mama, Mother-in-Law and Leigheaux the neurotic poodle hunkered, and listened to every sound, every noise, every gust, waiting to see what it would bring. Listened as each one seemed to get stronger than the last. Listened to the constant sound of rain and weather men and women on cable TV.

We did lose our electricity for a while Tuesday night -- right after the second round of my virgin fantasy football draft. I got Drew Brees and Adrian Petersen, then had to let autodraft do the rest. In the meantime I learned that The Coach is the worst Pictionary partner in the world.

Sometime in the middle of the night I offered a tip of the hat to the men who built my little brick  cottage more than 80 years ago. They did it right, I must say. Even in 80 mile-per-hour winds, my little house didn't move, didn't sway, didn't shudder. Even upstairs, where my daughter and I collapsed, exhausted, sometime around 4 a.m. on Wednesday.


Sometime that day we realized that the winds weren't quite as strong. Or, if they were, they were getting farther apart. We rejoiced. And watched the raindrops fall... and fall... and fall....

And then the first reports came that the water was rising. Just like Katrina. Homes were being flooded. Just like Katrina. People were calling for help. Just like Katrina. And escaping to their attics.

Except it wasn't New Orleans this time. This time it was the suburbs, in places the guys from the Weather Channel don't do live shots.  Braithewaite. Lafitte. Slidell. Robert.

And the town of LaPlace, where have gone to work every day for the last 25 years. Where my many many friends are. More than 90 percent of St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana was flooded. The Interstate highway was flooded. The water system was shut down. More than 3,000 people had to be rescued from their homes. Kids I covered in high school. Teachers I know. Family members of friends. The local high school. The woman who grooms my poodle.

And, just like Katrina, I'm feeling the survivor's guilt. I suffered nothing but a full house with two 80-year old women, a crazy dog, a spoiled tween and an abundance of bread. I went without lights for for an hour. I lost nothing but my banana trees., two vacation days and a few hours of sleep.

And, unlike Katrina when my mother-in-law arrived on my doorstep after two days with everything she owned in one plastic grocery bag after the monster storm surge took her home in Waveland, Mississippi, this time I sent her home.

This is what it's like to ride out a hurricane. A Category 1 hurricane. A "minimal" storm that dumped 20 inches of rain in our area.That still leaves 40 percent of the area without power. That has closed schools for at least one week, some for two and maybe more. That reversed the flow of the Mississippi River.

That showed us all that Mother Nature is a bitch. Her son Hurricane Isaac was a bastard.

And sometimes normal is the most important thing we can have.

'Tis the season

I don't wish this on my worst enemy.

I've been there more times than I've cared to. And could joyfully live the rest of my life without ever having to do it again.

Because I know.

Jim Cantore is on The Weather Channel. Anderson Cooper is on CNN. And some poor sap is on some beach, trying to stand up in the wind and the rain.

And somewhere out there is a woman -- a mom -- standing in her living room. Going insane.

She's watching that big white blob on her TV screen and all she really wants to do is cry. Her phone is ringing every five minutes from family members telling her what to do, asking her what to do.  But she's standing there frozen, and she's asking herself: What do I do? Do I stay? Do I go? Where do we go? When do we leave?  How do we get there? Do we board up the house? What will we come home to? Will it be here when we get back?

And, the question that will haunt her forever: What do I take when we leave?

I have so been there. Done that. More times than I ever cared to, thank you. I've stood there in the middle of my living room, my bedroom, my little girl's room, my front yard -- agonizing over such decisions.

Some are easy: Her baby book, the keepsake box from her adoption finalization day, her school keepsake books, our wedding album.

Some are hard: Which of the other photo albums? The silver? Cherished books? The china? My wedding dress? Great-grandmother's chair? The giant portrait hanging over my piano?

And some things you just forget.  Like underwear.

But I know that the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was lock my door and walk away from everything I own, not knowing if it would be there when -- if -- I got back.

Hurricane Katrina taught us all these lessons and so many more:
Water, batteries, gasoline, cash, important papers, medicines, glasses, radio, zip lock bags, baby wipes, toilet paper, paper towels, paper plates, garbage bags, peanut butter, canned goods, potted meat, tuna, a non-electric can opener, a land line, a cell phone charger, how to send a text message, a contact outside the storm zone, solar lights (!) and every photo you can grab.  And that the most valued commodity after a storm is ice.
 
You certainly learn what is important. What cannot be replaced. What you cannot live without. What you can live through.

I do not have one single baby picture of my husband. Not that there were many to begin with, he being the third of three boys born in the 1950's.  But the few were stashed in the attic of his parents' home in Waveland, Mississippi, six years ago when Katrina churned pretty much right up their street.  They were left with nothing but a slab. And two days' worth of clothes. And a few pieces of jewelry my mother-in-law thought to grab at the last minute.

For about four days, we actually thought they had died. They did evacuate their house a half a block off the beach, but only a few miles away to Kiln, the home of Brett Favre, who reported that his mother had to swim out of her home. We could not imagine two 80-year-olds doing so.  They chose wisely, however, and escaped unscathed in a house away from water. They moved in with us two weeks later and stayed a year and a week.

I have friends and co-workers who lost everything they owned, their houses destroyed by the putrid waters that deluged New Orleans when the levees broke.

I know some who were at the Superdome, trying to survive. I know some who worked to tell the story of what happened there.

I know some who left and never came back.  I know some who died.

And I have a daughter who was scarred for years by the entire experience of watching "The Big Red Storm" as she called it, for days on TV from our safe haven in Natchitoches, in northern Louisiana. And our mistake of staying home for Rita just a few weeks later.  She and her friends in pre-school used to play "Evacuation" from the pretend house in her classroom.

Riding out the storm is not an option.

I had a great-aunt who rode out Camille in Biloxi.

My mother rode out Betsy in Houma in 1965. She tells stories of the big picture window in the dining room bowing in the wind, of the floor boards rolling, of tying my brother to her with a belt and me to my grandmother. She also rode out Andrew.

I rode out Andrew at my sister's in Baton Rouge, terrified of every noise, every sound, every report on the radio, and the fact that my poodle was cowering in the bathtub.

We evacuated for George, taking six hours to drive to my sister's in Baton Rouge -- normally a one-hour drive. We spent 12 tortuous hours driving to Houston for Ivan, and another 11 back.  With a potty-training toddler.

We stayed for Rita and scared my daughter to death.

We learned other lessons as well. How a government can fail. How a community can come together in times of crisis. How a nation can.  How quickly people forget. How to appreciate the little things. How long it takes to rebuild.

How to prepare for it the next time.

And how to pray every day that we won't have to.

To all in Irene's path tonight, may God bless you.

Come hell and high water

Most of the time, it's just a hill.

From my driveway to the levee

A nice grass-covered hill barely 200 yards from my my little cottage with the white picket fence. It's on my right when I drive east, on my left when I'm heading west; green in the spring and summer, a strange shade of tan in the winter.

Lots of people use it for exercise, climbing up to the top to reach the path for walking and biking. I don't go up there much because the section near us hasn't been paved yet. The terrain is rough and the rocks hurt both my feet and my dogs'.

So most of the time I don't give much thought to what's lurking just on the other side of that hill. Not until lately.

The Mississippi River on the left, my town on the right.

The Mississippi River.
The MIGHTY Mississippi River.

The very, very dangerous Mississippi River, swollen with record rains and snow melt and bulging against its grassy seams. Bursting in some cases, taking away homes and livelihoods and dreams.

And sometimes, I admit, I forget that it's there, just a few hundred yards from where I live, where my family lives.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Oh we get a kick out of the fact that we can stand in our driveway and wave to the ship captains some days. Until we realize, that's because the river is actually higher than our house.

But now we are remembering what that hill really is and why it's there.

And that's why today I am loving that little green hill we call a levee and hoping and praying that it is a well-built and very strong hill.

If it were not there, my house and all that I own would be part of the Mississippi River. Driftwood.

Last week they opened the Bonnet Carre Spillway, which is located about a mile from my house, unleashing millions of gallons of Mississippi River water on an unimpeded path towards Lake Pontchartrain. I even got to cover it for the newspaper, interviewing a bunch of school kids who were playing hookey.

Today, further north, they opened the Morganza Spillway to unleash more river water, which will swamp thousands of acres of farmland and many homes -- some in my hometown. To save New Orleans.

Meanwhile, all that river water is climbing to the tops of the levees that surround our little town.

As we hope and pray that the hills will hold.

The Bonnet Carre Spillway in Norco.