A Silver Lining: One Family's Account of Hurricane Katrina

I still get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think about it. Sure, it wasn't a mansion, but it was home to us. We were renting to own from my youngest brother and his wife, and we had one payment left before it became ours. Of all the people in town, only our home sustained such damage. Why? What had we done to deserve that tornado twisting not only our home, but our lives as well? Why were we a target of Hurricane Katrina?

We had evacuated to Texarkana, Arkansas, and in the aftermath had spoken to my parents. "I'm sorry, but your trailer didn't make it," my mom said. After we talked for a while, we hung up and I grieved. I think crying then made it a little easier to look at it when we got back. The ride home seemed eternal, and while I wanted to know how much devastation we were going to find, I didn't want to see any of it. We had been watching the news, and seeing the horrific images shown on television... would our home look the same? Would our things be strewn all around the neighborhood?

Turning down the street, in all the darkness, there was a little light. It didn't look as bad as I had imagined. The shell was still standing...the roof had flown off and landed in the back yard, but the ceiling fell down inside, keeping all of our possessions inside the mobile home. A blessing, compared to all the others whose personal effects had been blown or washed away. Maybe some things could be salvaged?

It hurt to walk through. With a baby coming in less than three months, I was told not to go inside, for safety's sake. But I had to. I had to see what had happened to our home. I cried as I walked through each room. We joked about how it was for sale with a newly installed "sunroof." At that point, all we could do was laugh; we had cried so much and desperately needed a humor break.

Another blessing was in the fact that most of our clothes were salvageable. Only a few pieces needed to be thrown. Most of our dishes made it too. Luckily, our bed frames were all black iron and had weathered the storm, but the mattresses and all the other "soft" and wooden furniture was beyond cleaning and repair. I still miss that recliner, twenty months later.