hurricane recovery

ike came in on a friday night and saturday morning.

on thursday afternoon my husband, child, SIL and neice headed to my brother's sturdy brick apartment building where we hibernated until sunday morning. the first side of the storm was not bad for us. the eye passed over us and i thought "well, the second half shouldn't be much worse than the first. it was. or at least it seemed to be.

thanks to my brother having a generator, we watched news coverage all night and all day on friday and saturday. the kids slept but none of adults got more than a couple of hours. it was exhausting and surreal.

when we came home we had trees uprooted everywhere. thank the universe that my home had no structural damage and the rest of my family here had only minimal house damage. we spent an entire week just cutting up trees that had fallen and cleaning the yards. there is still work to be done and work in progress.

the electricity was out for a week and a day. our water was off and on for the first several days. since my father in law has a camper with a generator and air condidtioning, the whole family piled up in there each night so that we could at least get some cool sleep.

it was a shitty week. things are still shitty but i have to be grateful that things weren't any worse than they were. so many people had so much more destruction and loss than we did. my family is fine and that matters most.

we were told our elctricity could take four to six weeks to be back on and i nearly cried and kissed the linemen on the mouth when they got us back up and running when they did.

it seems odd to me that it's now late september. during the last couple of weeks my entire world has been about hurricane preparation, survival, and recovery. that there was more going on in the world besides this is almost foreign. presidential campaign? middle east crisis? huh?

i have very mixed and scattered thoughts about this whole experience. this was only my second real hurricane. i know that as long as i live here there will be more, but i could really do without them. as more things come to mind about it all, i'm sure i will spew them out here. but life goes on, it has to.