That's the way the wind blows

I sat up late last night watching the news about Hurricane Ike. I’m in San Antonio, so we were never in any danger. In fact, we didn’t even get any rain. But I have friends and family in and around Houston, so I was concerned for them and concerned for the beautiful Galveston area and the city of Houston itself.
It looks like things were bad, but not a lot of casualties. Mostly just damage and damage can be cleaned up, fixed up, lived over. At least most of the time it can.
My family lived in Charleston, South Carolina when Hurricane Hugo went through there. Hugo made landfall as a category 4. The eye went right over the city of Charleston. Our neighborhood was a mess.
The aftermath of a disaster is an interesting time in retrospect. It really shakes things up, makes people look at their lives differently. Maybe this is sexist, but in someways it seemed to me that this was harder on the men than on us women. The guys who were always so in control of their world found their world completely out of control and it was tough. I talked to several of my men friends about it at the time.
One told me about going out to check the house during the calm as the eye passed over. He talked about the strangeness of the absolute darkness and how weird it was to try to walk around with hundreds of birds that were hunkered down on the grass of his lawn.
Another guy who owned one of the venerated old homes in downtown evacuated his family. He’d felt that the house had been left to him to protect for future generations. It was full of family antiques and a priceless collection of eighteenth century nautical maps. He told his experience to me this way. He said, "when the water started flooding the downstairs and the roof started blowing off the second floor, I was trapped on the steps between. I couldn’t go up or down. And I thought to myself, you know, I’ve always hated this house."
At our home the damage wasn’t so bad. We did without running water for three or four days and without electricity for about a week. The house needed only minimal repairs. The worse thing for me was the trees.
When we’d bought this place it was sitting in the middle of a half dozen hundred foot, long-leaf pine trees. The great thing about long-leaf pines, aside from the giant pine cones and the huge bales of pine straw, is that they are majestic trees that somehow shade the house without blocking the light.
A lot of people in my neighborhood hated the pines, but I loved them and I loved my house because of them.
Hugo took them all. The first half of the storm knocked down the ones in the front yard. The second half took the ones in the back.
Things happen. There is nothing to be done. We cleaned up our place and our neighborhood. We got the blown-out glass replaced in our cars and ultimately we went on with our lives. But experiences like that change us always. Not necessarily good or bad, but changed for sure.
We planted new trees. Sycamores. They are beautiful trees and much more suburban friendly than pines. We put in the biggest ones we could afford, still they were very small.
I had no regrets when we moved here to San Antonio about three years later. I have a cute little bungalow with oaks and crepe myrtles and japanese maples.
I often think about my old house. I remember a lot of good times there. But when I picture it in my mind, those pine trees are still standing tall.