Sixteen years ago today I was sitting on my couch in San Francisco, frantically calling my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, anyone I could think to reach out to. Both my parents worked in New York City and I could not reach either of them. That day they walked from their respective jobs (Canal Street, Midtown) all the way to Jamaica and were able there to get public transit back to Long Island. They didn’t get home until midnight.
It was a very long day.
The past four days were pretty long as well. In the midst of returning from the UK we got the word that Irma was definitely heading to Florida, and while it wasn’t aiming for the west coast yet, it didn’t really matter as the storm would cover the whole state. My parents have been in their new house for all of a month. It’s been 96 hours of storm tracking, evacuate/stay put debates, trying to figure out what exactly the house could withstand … including a heart-stopping couple of hours when the track placed Irma’s landfall on their town. “The fucking odds,” I kept railing at my poor spouse. “What are the fucking odds.”
I can’t look at pictures of Naples right now without feeling queasy. There but for the grace.
Everything is still swirling for me. Right now I should be working on Leviathan and posting more pictures from my research there, but I keep going back to their text this morning, which told me that the generator was running, they had made coffee and were debating the one leak in their ceiling and what it might portend. Bushes were decimated and the cats were still terrified. But the sun was out, the fan was on, and the coffee was hot. “Life is good,” my mother said.
I think that’s enough for today.