After the hurricane, he called, urging us to come home. Our generator is running fine, he said, the grocery stores are already opened back up, gas won’t be a problem because I could always get it for you at the refinery. Mostly he was worried about the expense of continuing to stay in a hotel, but I convinced myself too, that I heard loneliness in his voice. He wanted us home. In his job in refining, he is last-out-first-back. He evacuated just as the hurricane hit, and only went two hours away to ride it out where the company had set him up in a motel. We went further, all the way to Dallas, and talked to him every few hours as the storm was blasting along the coast.

But I wasn’t ready to go back. I didn’t understand why at the time, but I think now that I didn’t want to go back to life-as-usual because nothing was usual. Nothing had been for seven months. After the move (from Memphis to Beaumont), the baby (number six, a girl, a joyful event, but stressful nonetheless), the diabetes (my two year old daughter diagnosed all of two days after her sister was born), all striking in three weeks, I no longer believed in usual. Or, perhaps it is better to admit that I hated what my “usual” had become. I stalled for a day, but I did go, taking my six kids on the six hour drive back to the place that was still barely home, arriving in a ghost-town so empty even the kids noticed the eeriness.

After the hurricane, our town was so battered that for weeks I would be driving around and notice some new damage I hadn’t seen before. A stop sign bent backwards, billboards ripped in half, fences blown over, blue tarps on roofs up and down the streets, a tree across someone’s lawn. For months the Autoplex sign read “A to pley.”

What I couldn’t see, what I didn’t yet understand, what how battered I was inside. It took months of just surviving, one foot in front of the other, forcing myself out of bed each day to tend to the most basic needs of my family, before I would notice some new damage I hadn’t seen before. Constant tiredness no matter how much sleep I got. Not laughing at . . . . well, not laughing. Undeserved irritability toward my children. A growing gulf between myself and my husband. Small tasks seeming overwhelming. Things not as easily repaired as fences and roofs.

It is hurricane season here again. Instead of leaving broken pieces and debris, why can’t the storm come through in a cleansing blast of wind and pounding, purifying rain? For that, I would stay. I would stand out in the street and wait while it ripped through my heart, swirled ‘round every little crevice of my mind, til wet and tired I would see that it had stopped, that all was still, and clean, and whole. And I would smile . . . after the hurricane.

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