I told my husband I wanted to evacuate.  After being together for several hurricanes, including Katrina, these were words that he never heard me utter before.  I don’t know what made me say them.  I wasn’t afraid of the storm.  I actually used to childishly look forward to hurricanes as I used to look forward to blizzards when I was a kid.  I saw it as sort of drama to fill my otherwise boring life.  I saw it as a way to bond with the kids as the early pioneers must have had to do with no electricity though I’m sure they didn’t have to share a camp stove with the neighbors to heat up their Dinty Moore stew and boil water for instant coffee.

 I had been watching Hurricane Gustav for days plotting the hurricane on my little black and white map every time I got an update from the weatherman on TV.  I felt like an old lady waiting for the winning Bingo number to be called.  In the days prior to Hurricane Katrina, I saw that the monster storm wasn’t going to affect my family in the drastic, tragic way that it did New Orleans.  Our house shook with the winds of Katrina, but even while the windows rattled and the chimney howled, I knew I was safe.  Gustav was different.  Was it women’s intuition?  I don’t think so.  I think that after being on the edge of so many hurricanes in the past I wondered one too many times what it would be like in the midst of the storm.  I felt that I had willed Gustav to come to my front door.  He gladly obliged.

 After about a day of dropping not-so-subtle hints about leaving, I called my husband from work and told him point blank what I wanted to do.  He tried reassuring me that we would be fine.  Though it looked like we were in the direct path of the storm, he was sure that nothing was going to happen to our home or us.  I pushed.  I whined.  I begged.  I demanded.  He gave in and booked one of the last hotel rooms in Huston that took pets.  I told my boss that I wouldn’t be working that Sunday because we were evacuating to Huston.  As I told him that I wouldn’t be at work, I saw why I really wanted to evacuate.  I wanted to get out of work and here I had a free excuse.  Graciously, my boss excused me and wished me the best.  None of the other people I work with were going to evacuate because they live an hour and a half east of me.  In real estate and hurricanes it’s all about location, location, location.

 Since I was working the weekend, my husband was in charge of packing up our cars with stuff that he thought we might need.  I trusted him to pack my clothes and makeup.  I didn’t care what he packed; I just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.  Since he was charged with the packing while I was at work, I thought I would supply the entertainment for the ride to Huston.  I made a hurricane play list for my daughter and me to listen to as we drove for hours.  The first song on the list was Rock You Like a Hurricane by the Scorpions.  My daughter rolled her eyes at my failed attempt to lighten up the situation that I had made chaotic by begging to leave home.

 We left later than the other people who were evacuating in our area so we missed the contra flow.  Contra flow is when the state police open both sides of the interstate going in one direction (I had never heard of contra flow until I moved to Louisiana so I thought that maybe other people from up north or other places in the country had never heard of it either).  The interstate was empty, almost eerily so.  I could have easily driven to Huston by doing doughnuts in the middle of the road the whole way there.  When we got to the hotel, we met up with hundreds of other people who were there for the same reason as us.  Instantly I felt guilty.  What was I thinking that we needed to evacuate?  The hurricane was going to affect all of these other people milling about the hotel lobby, not me.  I was merely taking up a room that maybe another family needed worse than me.  I was in too deep now.  There was no way that I could tell my husband that I made a mistake and maybe we should go back home.  I kept my mouth shut and let him take the lead.

 The first day we were in the hotel, we stayed pretty glued to the TV.  We watched as Gustav snaked his way through the Gulf getting closer to his final destination.  My daughter was bored so we hooked her up to one of the laptops we brought with us.  Every few hours my husband and I would go outside and watch our dogs sniff all the foreign pee smells of a public place.  We tried to put the cat on a leash so she could relieve herself too but she just ended up freaking out and trying to jump out of the collar/leash combo that we rigged up for her that she looked like a bad kite on too windy of a day.  We were afraid she was going to strangle herself so we let her “hold it” for the rest of our stay.

 The second day in Huston, my husband woke up and declared that we were going to do something fun.  He was tired of watching The Weather Channel and he knew my daughter was about to climb out of her skin.  We surfed the Internet for family-friendly things to do and settled on the aquarium that was letting evacuees in for free that day.  I felt wrong for walking through the doors that day.  First, I didn’t pay for my admission and that just felt wrong.  Second, I wasn’t wearing mascara because my husband didn’t pack mine.  At the time, not wearing mascara was such a big deal for me.  While we were touring the aquarium and riding the rides behind it, it started to rain.  That’s when everything happened at home.  That’s when Gustav made landfall.

 Again, we were glued to The Weather Channel.  We waited for the hurricane symbol to pass our area.  As soon as it did we were on the phone with our neighbors.  “How’s everything there?  Much wind?  110 miles per hours?  Wow.  How’d you guys make out?  Good, glad to hear it.  Um, how’d we make out?”  The first neighbor that we talked to told us that we were missing a few shingles off our roof.  He said it didn’t look bad.  A wave of relief washed through my body and reinforced the guilt that I’d been feeling for evacuating unnecessarily.  We thought we were in the clear.  We went to a nearby grocery store and bought beer as a sort of celebratory drink that we still had a house.  Then my husband’s phone rang.

 I looked over his shoulder at the caller ID.  It was his ex-wife.  I was sure that she was calling to tell my husband that his kids were okay since they had evacuated to Dallas.  She didn’t mention the kids once.  “Your house is fucked.”  That’s how she greeted him.  Her aunt and uncle lived down our street.  After the winds subsided they drove down the street to assess the damage of their neighbors.  Everyone’s house was fine except ours.  The report our neighbor gave us was only on the back of the house.  All the neighbor did was peek his head out of his carport and glanced in the direction of our property.  The back of the house did look good.  It’s just that the front of the house was smashed in like a bully-clobbered smile.

 We left the hotel room to pace in the parking lot and plan our next move.  Again, the parking lot was packed with people chatting happily amongst themselves.  “How’d you make out?  No damage?  Yeah, us too.  I sure thought I’d have to replace that roof when I got back.  All’s I need is a couple of tarps and I’ll be back in business.”  Everyone was asking everyone else how they fared.  My husband and I just stared at them still in shock from our news.  Finally someone came up to us and asked us how we made out.  The man was smiling at my husband who, in turn, forced a smile on his face and told the guy that we were great, nothing bad to report here.  I thought I was going to throw up.  I understood why my husband did what he did; he didn’t want the man’s pity.  I would have done about the same thing if the man had asked me instead.  Or I would have thrown up and just hours before I was upset that I was in public without mascara. 

 We lost everything.  We had to start over from scratch.  For a month after Gustav, we lived in a hotel room close to where our house used to be.  We applied for FEMA assistance because we were told that they would really help us out.  We were told they would help pay for our hotel and temporary living while we found a different place.  We got five hundred dollars.  With that we were supposed to pay for a two thousand dollar hotel bill.  Granted, we had house insurance but we used it to pay off the rest of our mortgage.  We were lucky in that aspect.  There’s nothing like bringing a huge check to the bank to pay off a pile of rubble.  We rented a big double wide trailer and bought used furniture.  We made it work.  After the initial shock of loss wore off (it is just stuff after all), my husband and I were surprised to see how much closer our family got.  After Gustav, life kept throwing us curve balls but soon we were good at hitting whatever was thrown our way.  We were the Babe Ruth of oh-crap-now-what.

 I’m proud to say that after two years of feeling a bit homeless despite having a rented roof over my head, we finally bought a house.  We finally have a permanent dwelling.  I know that I’m finally home for good and won’t be moving until I’m ready for the nursing home.  I say that with confidence because this house is made of brick.  If only we would have paid attention to the third little pig the last time we bought a house.  Oh well, it is just stuff.