One step ahead...I hope...

Well, we’re leaving. Not right now, but we are leaving. We just have to board up the house, pack up, and make sure everything on the paddies (from potted plants to actual cars) is stored and locked in Dad’s shed. When they started to compare the hurricane to Camiel, everyone went from nervous to really worried

I didn’t even see Camiel, but I did see Andrew. I was young, but I remember Andrew vividly. We had only just moved into my late grandmother’s house...we were sure we’d be ok. Dad had boarded everything up, and we were all in the living room huddled around the TV watching the news. The cable went out, and my dad looked at my brother – 13 years my senior, -- and asked him to help him reconnect the cable line. Thomas would not do it, and I was getting tired of having nothing to watch but them. So I volunteered to help Dad. So we went out with ropes attached to each other and reconnected the cable right in the middle of Andrew.

Then Mom convinced Dad to start stacking the furniture up on bricks; that way, if it did flood a bit, our furniture wouldn’t be damaged. They put one of the sofas up on two chairs...and, as it was late, I promptly climbed up and fell asleep on that sofa. When I woke up the next morning, we had 13 inches of water in our house. Thankfully the water didn’t reach the light sockets.

What had happened was, we were on one end of a bayou, and a neighborhood on the other end of the bayou had been flooding. The authorities, in their infinite wisdom, decided to block of the bayou on that end, thus flooding our neighborhood. So...there were 2 flooded neighborhoods instead of 1 -.-

So we’re leaving for this one. We think our house will survive because it did survive Andrew very well. But when weighing the options we decided to leave. Mom was like,

“I do want to stay...but I’m afraid I will regret it if I do...” so I said,

“Well, if we do leave, what regrets would you have?” and she thought for a moment and said,

“...Nothing. Except maybe not being able to get back when we want to.” The big decision now is where we’ll go. Dad wants to go visit relatives up in north LA near Monroe, but Mom thinks the hurricane will wander up there. Dad thinks the hurricane will turn more towards Mississippi. I think that it doesn’t matter. This is a huge storm, and it doesn’t matter where the eye of the storm is, because the storm is so big, it’ll reach everything around it for miles! But! The hurricane will weaken once it’s hit land, and as such, going north is good, because that means it’ll just be a bunch of rain and wind by the time it hits there.

But anyway..I still need to pack...I wanna stack all the stuff that’s on my floor on the bed and shelves I have. That way if it does flood, it won’t get wet. God, I hope we have a house to come back to.

Later...I hope.

MM