HURRICANE DAMAGE

HURRICANE DAMAGE

When my sister emailed me that Mama and Daddy’s house was totally gone except for the concrete front steps and front porch floor, something ran through my body. A shudder, or maybe a tightening. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Theirs was an old double-wide manufactured home in a residential park full of similar homes. And they haven’t been alive to live in it in years—5 years for Daddy and 13 for Mama. So really, it was someone else’s home now, one that must have been damaged beyond repair by one of the two recent hurricanes that crossed directly over my hometown of Fort Pierce, Florida. And I had even wondered how much damage the house has sustained.

But gone. Probably carted off in pieces in giant dump trucks along with half of its neighbors on that block and every block in the immediate area. Mary said she was so glad Mama and Daddy aren’t here to see the devastation, and I’m glad, too. Daddy had been predicting just such a disaster all his life, having both seen and heard stories of killer hurricanes, and seen inlets through the barrier islands come and go as a consequence of hurricane action.

But gone. The only house Jonathan remembers them ever living in. The house where Mama died in her own bed. The house in which Daddy dropped dead, literally, during the night of the anniversary of his mother’s death. Where Jonathan crawled from the living room to the laundry room and took a bite out of the avocados Mama had ripening in a box on the floor, and which gave Daddy a story to repeat over and over at family gatherings.

“I can just see that boy now,” he’d say, “crawling with one knee and the other foot, the funny way he did. And I knew just where he was headed.” (Here he’d pause for a big laugh.) “He was leaded for those avocados Min-Lou had stored in the laundry room. No matter where you put him down, he’d head straight for those avocados.”

Now there’s no Daddy to repeat the story, and no laundry room to trigger memories. Only a photograph of a boy in a diaper, grinning to show his two front teeth, and holding a big avocado with teeth marks in it.

Gone. Along with so much else. It was just a house, and not a very fancy house at that. But for twenty years it was home, because it was where Mama and Daddy were, either in the flesh or in spirit. Now it’s gone.

Why does it seem like such a big deal?