Your dirty laundry, part 2

So, after a four day tour of the South, and just as we were making leisurely plans to hang around Central Texas for a while longer, we got the call from the military to be back in Pensacola in 24 hours.

After a caffeine-fueled 14 hour drive back east on I-10, we rolled into the parking lot of our apartment complex to find it littered with tree branches and pieces of signs. Sweaty drunk people lolled on the pavement trying to catch a breeze, but there was none. The darkness and the heat were smothering, and were it not for the jackhammer sound of someone's generator a block away, the silence would have made the suffocation complete. The wash of our headlights startled a few people into moving, and in the comaraderie of mutual discomfort, they offered us warm beers and stories, mostly about how this wasn't near as bad as Ivan.

And it wasn't-- Pensacola proper had sustained only moderate damage. The few signs that had been replaced since Ivan were shredded and crumpled again, some of the surviving trees were split down the middle or stripped of bark and leaves, and a car just up the block from us had a pine tree laying across its front seat. The major damage was about ten miles east in Milton where a few buildings had been stomped flat or had their roofs pealed off like sardine lids. In observance of hurricane etiquette (and also in acknowledgement of the gas shortage), we stayed away from Milton. The last thing anybody wants to see as they dig through the rubble of their home is someone else cruising by in an air-conditioned car going, "Holy shit! Look at that!" This is something the Weather Channel has not yet grasped.

For a week, we were without power. Something happens to you when you're that hot and eating only those weird orange peanut butter crackers all day. You can't sleep-- we laid naked in the dark living room with the patio door open, hoping for a breeze and getting none, and finally just soaking some towels in lukewarm water for the cooling effect you get when you lay them over your torso and then take them off. After the third day, I began to get angry. Not at anything in particular, just angry. My skin was like a clammy wet suit that everything stuck to-- clothes, crumbs, dog hair from the floor where I slept, the millions of pine needles outside that had been stripped by the storm-- anything I ate only added to the feeling of suffocating in mounds of my own flesh. Our apartment stank of the $200 worth of rotted food we had cleared out of the refrigerator. Soon even the presence of my husband, the kitten, and the dog began to grate on my nerves. Everyone panted. Everyone crawled from one lounging position to the next and radiated shimmering waves of heat. I began to think that if I were the only one in the apartment, it might be at least a degree cooler. And that would be a lot. As if sensing my increasingly hostile thoughts, the dog stared at me and let out a low growl.

But in the end, it was only a week, and then friends in other parts of town started letting us couch surf as their power stuttered back to life. We started eating foods that required refrigeration and I stopped making plans to kill my family and started to practice gratefulness.

After Dennis, it was only a couple of weeks until we were on the road again with all of our stuff, headed to the Texas coast and thanking God we were leaving hurricanes behind us.

Ha.