Hello Folks:

Houston, Texas: 18 September 2008 -- I am a multiple hurricane survivor, a generational chronicler of Gulf Coast storms dating back over a century that my family can remember. As an indigenous native of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast, a Creole, I can vouch for the fact that in this part of the world we often define certain rites of passage on the basis of hurricanes. For example, when I was three years old, I struggled to hold on to my older brother Benjamin's head as he, at 6'2" made his way through flood waters on the Sabine Pass to help my father rescue my mother's mother, Mildred Roxey, a tall black Indian woman, who insisted on staying in her rough-shod house on stilts near the mouth of the Gulf at the divide that separates Texas from Louisiana. She had no doubt she would live through Hurricane Audrey. After all, she had survived the strom of 1900 that wiped out Galveston, which from the Sabine, is right across the bay. The year was 1957.

In 1961 when Hurricane Carla came though, I would turn seven years old by the end of the year. I was a kindergartener, who went to school on the day of the storm. My mother let me go. The station wagon driver was hesitant to cross over the bayou bridge to bring me home that day, with good reason. When Carla blew in the winds would break the fragile wood pinings that held it and that bridge would float away. By this time my parents, who were itinerent school teachers, would be settling in a home my father and grandfather built on Houston's near Northside. Falls Street. I watched those waters rise with my sister Dee. The house held. It was built on blocks and was 4.5 feet off the ground -- the front porch was five feet high, the height of the flood water. We watched intrepidly as the waters sloshed back and forth across our red brick porch.

In the aftermath of Carla, Dee and I would move in with my Cajun grandpere Louis Sidney Delahoussaye, Mildred's husband, who had flown the rising waters of the Atchafalaya basin in the first decade of the 20th century. We survived well. My family lore has always included storm stories and how to prepare for survival, without resources, especially since there was no government in place to provide any. Because this began long before the news could predict directions of storms, we relied on Nature's way. My grandmother's rheumatism, the tides, the movements of seabirds. Experiences of hardship and deaths in the Gulf dating back more than a century, included warnings about sea levels and tides, as well as how to watch for signs in the clouds about the direction of the winds.

I know these things instinctly too. I have reasonable proof. When Hurricane Rita stormed through Texas in 2005, I was hospitalized awaiting gall bladder surgery and from my hospital room, I watched the news and the evacuations, and was appalled at the insanity of it all. My husband Rene and my son Jared stayed home, cut back trees, boarded the house and ensured we had proper drainage. As I predicted from my bed, even when newscasters insisted otherwise, Houston missed this one.

When hurricane Alicia hit Houston in 1983, I was 27 years old and a mother for the first time. My son was a year old. Houston, in most places, was dark for three weeks or longer. It would be two years before all the debris was removed from the streets. At that time, I was still young enough to appreciate the adventure of el' hurrican. A graduate student then, I was amused by the chaos and the sheer amazement of my friends from the East coast who had never been in a storm. Before it came ,they believed I had exaggerated about the danger, and had insisted that my fear of death was too dramatic. But they had not seen what I had seen; nor did they understand my inbred sense of the weather in these parts. If there is genetic memory about storms, I am sure that my instincts evolved from some kind of ancient Darwinian sensitivity to lived events.

My husband and I weathered Alicia at my mother's house, a new one, in North Houston. Alicia came in farther south of the Galveston coastline and moved into Houston at an angle. The wind and tree damage were worst than the flooding. My sisters and their husbands and children were there as well. We survived again. No one lost a home and both my sisters lived in Lake Jackson and Angleton, Texas then, as they do now. No one lost anything, not even our peace of mind. At Mama's house we lost a shutter from the two-story brownstone. Our neighbors lost patio covers, carports, cars, and parts of their roofs, much of which I could see flying through the air from second floor bedroom. Lost mostly because they had not prepared their homes for a tornado; nor had they secured the aluminum posts with concrete.

No. A hurricane is more than one tornado; it can spawn many tornadoes in its wake. Just ask a native Texan or Louisianan about how to build a home in these parts. Even if you by a builder's home, one lesson is to add extra concrete, buy a 40 year roof, keep your trees cut back, board your windows, and yes, pray.

Now for this year. His name was IKE and he was a very angry man.  Today, I'm 53 years old and this will be the fourth hurricane I have weathered well.  I say this with a certain wariness and pride, with full knowledge that I have lost kith and kin to storms. So as I sit and record this for history, I write from a local coffee shop -- Coffee Contigo. I've been without power for six days. My Woodforest neighborhood in East Houston did not flood, but there are five and six foot wide oak trees overturned on my neighbors' homes  just across the street.  Trees pulled up from the roots with green grass all around their trunks. Commonplace here right now.

But I'm not in Galveston, or on Bolivar peninsula. Not on Tiki Island or Crystal Beach or in Baytown or far East Texas.  These were girlhood haunts, places in time and in my memory, pictures of my youthful grace and vivacity.  Places where I have family. Land that is home to me. Galveston will take a decade to rebuild. Some communities are gone for good. Today these towns are scenes of massive destruction and chaos. But this presentient instinct I have, that perhaps I was born with, gives me peace, a still, silent knowing that even with the newcasts informing us of ever-present despair, we are still here where we have always been. It's the knowledge that what has always been, will be. That Mother Nature's balancing act is beyond our power to change. It's the resilience of my people who have recorded their losses in every generation and still have the fortitude to come back for more.

Coffee Contigo is crowded now. There are people and children all around. It is noisy. As Gulf Coast Southerners though, we share our tables with strangers. Discuss our losses. Smile. Keep going. We are nice to each other. A people and a culture of trust surrounds us in constrast to the news in the outside world. Some of my counterparts have appointments with FEMA today. Others discuss the fact that gasoline and ice are  getting scarce. Most of us agree we have no plans to travel very far from home. At every other table there is a laptop taking advantage of the free WiFi.

We are East Houstonians. Diverse. Middle class. Ethnics of every variety. This is not unusual but it is rarely reported, this truth about how well we get along. Most of us have many storm stories to tell. Like mine, most of them are about triumph even in adversity, about the character inherent in our certain knowledge about what it takes to endure.

At 53, I'm not agile anymore though. A diabetic with rheumatoid arthritis, which is also a part of my family heritage, I find it hard to climb stairs or to walk very far, but those things are minor. I have my life to live. Still. And so I'm "onery" about leaving my house even though I am powerless. Yes powerless, as in without electricity or gas and maybe not even a nest egg, especially with our nation in economic decline.

But those things are ephemeral anyway. Like my fellow storm warriors, I am aware that I'm most powerless before God, before Nature, and in the face of the myriad exigencies of life and time. But within myself, there is a power in knowing and trusting the heritage of my parents and forebears, in knowing the nature of the wind and these Gulf waters, in the faith that I have endured before and with divine grace, I (we in Houston-Galveston) will prevail. Perhaps in the face of all the fighting around the world, the fighting about the presidency, the issues about trust, about money, about whatever the top stories are for the day, a hurricane may be a reminder of what our limitations really are.

In America, we control reality by managing knowlegde. We manipulate and still teach certain fallacies as truth. Just like we try to predict, and therefore, control,  the weather. In the end, however, we have to take what we get and build again if necessary. In the end, the ability to get up and struggle for another day is the measure of a life.

So how can I complain today? The sky is clear. My children are safe. My husband and son have gone back to work at ExxonMobil in Baytown. And yet, Today I know that my life is not about fossil fuels, or money, or cold water. I have food and shelter. I have my family. Again, I have survived a storm and lived to tell the tale. Yes, today I'm sailing...Yes, I'm willing to take what I get.