Our Experience with Hurricane Gustav

The week before Gustav's arrival, we as a community had remembrance services for the lost of the Katrina storm. That devastating system blew through only three years before, changing not only the geography of the landscape but our hearts as well.

With Katrina's destruction fresh in our memory due to the anniversary coverage, we wasted no time stocking up on the essentials. After a quick peek in the pantry, I loaded up and headed to the grocery store where I joined the concerned masses in scrounging for food and pretending to be patient in line. But many of us, as we visited in our lines, smiled nervously and encouraged each other with thoughts like, "We won't get the worst of it." There was a sense of camaraderie amongst us all, neighbors and out-of-towners alike.

One poor gal I met in the parking lot of the store was from Kansas. She and her children had just been down to visit our Dauphin Island. She laughed saying she was getting more than she paid for on this Labor Day vacation. I comforted her with the words I had heard in the store, "We won't get the worst of it."

Luckily for my family, we like so many others did not need to make a donation to Lowe's. We keep our plywood. As a matter of fact it's numbered and stays in our shed when not screwed to the windows of our four bedroom house. We have two Live Oaks in the front yard so we dutifully trimmed those back from the front of the house and picked up our yard toys. We crammed everything we could in the shed. (Dennis tore up a lot of our yard.) Tied down the trampoline and secured the pool. We pulled the generator up to the back porch and brought our gas cans up also.

We decided two days in advance to gas everything up. Gas cans, both vehicles and the generator. I don't know about the rest of the country but gas prices go up, up. up when storms are on the horizon. (Ivan's lesson.) So with that, our tubs were filled with water in case that was gone too. (Katrina and Ivan taught us that.)