This is a hard day.  No, that’s not entirely accurate.  This is the END of some very hard days for everyone here in Mississippi.  For a solid week everyone has been bombarded with images of devastation.  [August to September is hard anyway.  I always think of Kimberly so much during these months.] And, some of us were forced to think about Aug 29, 2005 starting a few weeks ago.  So I’ll be glad when this day is over.  Truthfully, it’s like a break-up that keeps dragging out.  Katrina, let’s just go our separate ways, bitch.  (Yes, I dropped a B word and even that doesn’t paint a horrible enough picture of what I think about her.)

I posted my evacuation story and I didn’t really want to relive it.  And as I try and think of the days, weeks, months, and years afterward…well, I guess I am not a good enough writer to put the rainbow of emotions into words.  My story is one of hundreds of thousands.  I lost things, but in a different kind of way.  You see, Katrina forced me to look at my husband and the things we wanted and what we’d put each other through for seven years and a mere month or so after Katrina, we split.  I split, more accurately.  I took my truck, a suitcase, and left.  I came back a couple of weeks later for my Chloe dog.  Looking back on it, that’s a fucked up time to leave somebody…in the truck that I had to sleep a few nights in with him which eventually led to the breakdown/breakthrough that we were not meant to be.  Shortage of housing and I leave the a perfectly intact home to go share a bed with my best friend in the next town?  Damn right I did.

You see, that storm and being forced to sleep a in a truck together, brought up some very traumatic things between us.  And while I had been charading around and going with the flow for a long time, Katrina somehow was the biggest straw to ever break a camel’s back.  I don’t want to go into details–it’s sufficient to say that I sought a therapist who was practicing as soon as she opened and did give marriage counseling a try but ultimately, that marriage was over long before I left.  Someone had to say it and I was willing to have nothing if it meant I had peace.  

I got a raise after Katrina.  Well, I deserved it.  I left my husband and married my job.  [please note, I just realized how incredibly hard my teeth are gritted just recounting all this] But first, I had to find housing.  I found a duplex that had one hole in the roof (that was awesome, FYI).  They promised it would be fixed by my move-in day.  Move-in day came.  I loaded the truck and unlocked the door.  Surprise, the hole was still there.  I don’t recall how long–week or two or a month?–I slept with the closet door closed since it had a hole in it and listened to the critters coming and going as they pleased, what very, very few of them were left.  And then came a call from a friend who had gone to Florida and decided he was going to stay there.  Would I like to rent his house from his landlord?  Heck yes I would!  A lawyer friend got my money back for the duplex with a hole and me and the dog and the truck went to Ray Road. [insert Beverly Hillbillies theme song]

I guess I won’t hide the fact that after I left my husband up to the point of the move to Ray Road, I met a man and he ultimately caused me serious pain in a short amount of time.  Emotional and physical.  Being forced to recall this time in my life as I have been, I suppose looking back that it’s only because of the therapist and friends that I got through all of it.  But at the time, I just kept going without thinking about it.  Day after day.  You see, I was incredibly blessed through this time.  I didn’t lose my home, job, or loved ones.  And I don’t think that, despite the shitstorm my life was at the time, I ever lost sight of that.  In fact, at the new house on Ray Road I had extra bedrooms and a friend had lost everything.  I said, “you take the master, I like the other bathroom better” and we were a patchwork family at that point–my “brother”, my dog, and me.

He’d been in the attic with an ax in rising waters.  Already one not to sleep, my “brother” wasn’t sleeping well once he’d moved in.  With all the emotions running through me, neither was I.  One of my fondest memories is waking up and letting Chloe out in the middle of the night.  OMG, you never knew what I was going to see.  One night I smelled food, wandered into the kitchen, found my friend cooking lamb chops and singing to Bob Marley.  We ate and taught Chloe the song “Three Little Birds,”…every little thing is gonna be alright.  Another night he had found my unused yoga ball and was kicking it across the one-and-a-half acre yard in the middle of the night.  Seemed silly to let him kick that giant yoga ball around by himself so I joined him.  It was white and there weren’t any trees so the moonlight and security lights around the house provided plenty of light to make the game interesting.  One night we found my hackey sack from college.  The porch became a battlefield.  We also would randomly sneak up and throw it at one another the entire duration of our roommatery.  I think I hid it from him a couple of times, but I couldn’t resist not launching it at him and running down the hall with Chloe.  Once, he got me by propelling it at the shower curtain while I was soaking wet.  He one-upped me for sure.

We’d go back to sleep a couple of hours until the sun came up, I’d wake up and write for a while, and then we’d head off to work.  I’m minimizing the painful events and emotions, because the point is we just found a new normal.  Friends became my family.  There were bonfires every Friday night on Ray Road.  Hell, plenty of firewood fall/winter 2005!  And even if I was going to a bar that had (finally) reopened, I stopped by the bon fire first and visited with my neighbors/friends/family to catch up on the week’s events.  What I remember most about post-Katrina life is how so, so, so many people came together.  It wasn’t anything we talked about I don’t guess, but the community known as “the Coast” was one big family.  Quietly, without fanfare, we helped one another however we could and rebuilt our lives.  I can count at least 4 people who came to volunteer after the storm that I met and are still friends today.  One in particular; if I call Fred at any time and say, “Yo, I need help dawg,”  I know he’s on his way from Michigan.  He also ended up living at Ray Road for a time.  

After my “brother” left, my best friend and her father moved in.  It was some of the best times of my life.  We met a guy named Mike the Milkman.  That’s what we called him.  Before he’d left Minnesota to come rebuild the Coast he worked at a dairy.  Mike had a philosophy I quickly adopted after several of us loaded up in his Camaro and went to Florida one weekend to just get away from the mess and see something that WASN’T torn all to hell.  Mike would say to everything, “You’ll have that.”  Guy was a douchebag? “You’ll have that,” he’d say.  Work was a bitch all day? “You’ll have that,” Mike would tell you.  Brokeback Mountain came out on DVD?  Mike laughed and said, “I guess you’ll have that.”  I couldn’t have needed anything more at the time than Mike reiterating that with everything, it just happens.  Take it gracefully.  Katrina ripped the life we knew away?  You’ll have that.  He said it at least once an hour.  Soon, my little group of friends/family were all telling each other that.  I stayed on Ray Road until Aug 2008, when I bought my current house.

So, as I laid awake tonight thinking about everything Aug 29, 2005 meant for me and Mississippi, I heard Mike the Milkman’s voice.  God only knows where he is now, but that little saying must have crept into my subconscious and it became my mantra.  I used it for YEARS after he was gone.  But here in the last couple of years, I haven’t said it much, if at all.  It’s time to bring it back.  As I watch the sunrise Aug 29, 2015, I think about all the shit, the pain, the joy, the death, the love, the loss and I just think, “you’ll have that.”  For everything and everyone there is a season.  A time to remember Hurricane Katrina and a time to forget.  I don’t speak for everyone, but a lot of us have paused this week and saw things and thought of things we didn’t want to relive.  We’ve cried our eyes out.  Today, I want to just appreciate that mattresses aren’t in trees.  That new buildings and homes are around me.  That I see birds and squirrels again! That my friends/family are amazing.  And that this place I have chosen to be my home for 14 years (almost to the very day) is the most resilient place on planet Earth.  You’ll have that.