Eyes of the Storms

I remember standing out in the front yard in my nightgown with me on one end of the leash and Murphy on the other. The gusts of wind were so strong I half expected Murphy to turn into a canine kite with the leash becoming my kite string leading up to him. Mr. Pop was standing in the driveway to alert me when shingles began to leave our roof and were hurled through the air. The shingles were peeling off and flying with the wind at a good clip. It would surely injure my face or head to be hit by one of these projectiles. I couldn’t watch for flying shingles and attend to Murphy, so Mr. Pop was my alert system.

When the storm was almost over, that’s when the water began to drip from the ceiling and run down the inside and outside of almost all our walls. The house was pitch dark because of the metal hurricane shutters we’d put up on all the windows and the power had long been out. The carpet was squishy with all the water. One peek out the back door showed our screen on the pool enclosure to be literally in shreds. Other screen panels were totally gone. The yard looked as though all the trees and vegetation from the undeveloped lot next door had been placed in our backyard. Our wooden privacy fence lay on the ground as though it had been shot and killed.

These are some of my memories of Hurricane Frances. Everything was so wrong, so broken, so ruined. We were lost and confused. And yes, I did some crying. Where to begin to repair the damages and how? But we were fortunate to have the ways and means to put back together what we had had torn away and lost. We knew what we would do and we did it. A little over a year later, after Frances and Jeanne invaded our home, things were as good as, and in some ways, better than new.

I can’t imagine losing everything and then being plucked up, separated from my family, and moved hundreds or thousands of miles away with very little more than the clothes on my back. I have no concept of the fear, horror and devastation the people on the Gulf Coast experienced almost a year ago. I cannot fathom how the victims and survivors of Katrina have been able to keep their sanity. I admire them for that because I’m not sure I could have endured what they have.

Today my thoughts and my heart go out to each and every one of them. They deserve our love, admiration, respect and so very much more help. Please, today and this week and always, remember the eyes you saw in that storm a year ago this week. The closed eyes of the dead. The vacant eyes of the people wading in filthy water up to and above their waist. The frightened eyes of the people standing on their roof and begging for help. The desperate eyes of the people standing on the streets begging for food and water. Where are those eyes now and why has their country let them down for so long?

“A year after the storm, the reconstruction of New Orleans echoes our reconstruction of Baghdad. A “truth squad” of House Democrats has cataloged the “waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement” in $8.75 billion worth of contracts, most of which were awarded noncompetitively. Only 60 percent of the city has electricity. Half of the hospitals and three-quarters of the child-care centers remain closed. Violent crime is on the rise. Less than half of the population has returned.”
-Frank Rich