IKE. I Hate That Guy. (Happy Anniversary, Meanie!)

Or that storm, as the case may be.

Three years ago today.

Was it really only three years???

After being decimated by a tree through our Beaumont roof during Hurricane Rita (yes, the one right after Katrina everyone forgot about), we fixed our house, put it on the market and high-tailed it to Sour Lake. 

We didn't move because of Rita, we moved because Curt, with autism, would have a much better chance of succeeding in Hardin-Jefferson schools than in Beaumont.

But I digress.

We moved to Sour Lake July 2007, into a farmhouse we lovingly restored and shaped into our own. Hurricane season that year was mild. Nothing like the following year.

We'd evacuated for Rita in 2005, the fourth most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. And sadly, although we have a lot of good stories and a lot of good friends, evacuating for Hurricane Rita taught us a lesson: that sometimes it's a half dozen of one, six of another.

However, when Southeast Texas was evacuated for Gustav, just before Labor Day weekend in 2008, the boys and I packed up and headed west to Houston. Don't even get me STARTED on the chain of events kicked off by that visit to  Mimi's house....

Anyway, Gustav ended up being a total and complete non-factor.

We drove home just in time to celebrate Luke's birthday.

But yet a week later, we were staring down the barrel of Ike. At that point, Mimi, aka, Brian's mother, who lived in Houston, was in the hospital. We really had no where to go. Brian had to work. He couldn't leave. And the boys and I had weathered Rita in DeRidder and *just been gone the week before for Gustav.

We decided to ride it out.

I took pictures of our house before:

Good thing too. For insurance purposes.

Because it started to rain. And blow.

And all night long, it sounded like our house was going to be sucked into the vortex of the storm and land the next morning in Oz.

The boys and I laid on a (rapidly deflating) air mattress on the bottom story of the house in the innermost corner we could wedge ourselves into. Luke slept through THE ENTIRE THING.

Around 1 a.m., our power went out (and would not be restored for over three weeks).

The storm was defined as much by the cacophony of sounds: the limbs breaking, the trees toppling, the rain pounding...as it was by the even more horrifying absence of all sound, when the wind and the storm sucked up all the energy in the atmosphere.

The hours ticked by. Raised Catholic, I recited the decades of the Rosary in my mind, clutching Curt in one crooked elbow and Luke in the other, the darkness and the blackness complete and encompassing.

When daylight broke, I pried a stiff, aching and totally sleepless body from the deflated air mattress and ventured to open the door to the Cat 1 winds.

The back yard. From the treehouse. We lost every single tree we had in the back.

View from the front porch. Approximately 8 a.m. Sept. 14, 2005.

Also from the front porch.

 

And one more from the front porch. The benefit of living in a rural community is that soon after this, a neighbor came by with a backhoe and cleared the road.

It rained awhile longer.

And then it stopped. The rebuilding began.

Brian went to work at the newspaper.

The boys and I went to work in the yard.

Silvia and I took the kids to a bar. Ha! Before you judge, know it was the only place in town serving hot food that day. Trust me, there were plenty of kids there.

Did you know that when a hurricane comes through, when trees are uprooted, it's because of the storm; when they snap, it's because of tornadoes?

We were lucky. The tree that fell on our house only clipped the corner of the laundry room. But took out our weatherhead. (OF COURSE) And totaled Brian's car.

Three days after Ike, Mimi was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She died eight days later. We didn't even have power back yet.

Brian, after the disaster dust had cleared at the newspaper, went to work on grief therapy, ie, clearing the backyard. By hand. And chainsaw.

By the end of it all, we had enough brush to probably supply the paper for a year's worth of Tyler Morning Telegraphs.

And another "if it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger" experience under our belts.

Curt and Luke stand in front of the pile of debris I collected on the first morning after the storm. The pile would grow to be 10 times that size.