What will happen to my homeland this year?

I found this post in the archives from 2006. This was what I was thinking and feeling after Katrina came and took out the Gulf Coast the year before and I was waiting to see what the current year would bring.

Over the last two hurricane seasons I have listened and watched as my friends have rebuilt their lives and/or decided to move on to new lives, somewhere that doesn't have the risk of going away every year.

This year friends again lost a fight against nature in places and several of them swear they'll be out of the "line of fire" by the next hurricane season. This year again I watched my favorite vacation spot lose half of itself out to sea.

I believe that from now on, my thoughts below, that I originally wrote in March of 2006, will come back each year. I just hope that some years I will be able to do nothing more than breath a sigh of relief after another season goes by without catastrophe.

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I sit and stare at the headlines of the Sunday paper. I haven't read the article itself, but the words leaping out at me put a little spark of fear in my heart.

The South and East Coasts are gearing up for Hurricane Season again.

I'm still swamped with memories from last year.

In my youth I moved around a lot and quite a few of my residences were in lower Mississippi and Alabama. I intimately know some of the locations that were destroyed by the hurricanes of last year. I still to this day vacation at some of the other locations.

Some of these places are still struggling to come back from the hurrricanes. I see the town where I went to high school is having financial issues from losing homes and roads and public property to the storms. The town where I lived for 3 years earlier in life is not there anymore. The town next to it where I boarded my horse has reduced it's population by more than half. Some friends I've had my entire life that still live down near the coastlines continue to describe issues they have, shortages they're dealing with.

My favorite vacation spot has no beach. The restaurant the kids adore is gone, somewhere out to sea. They ask will we ever go down there again? Will we find another beach?

To a lot of people the storms of last year were merely that. Storms that destroyed property and left people in a bind. To me, it was little bits of my history being taken away from me. Parts of my memories destroyed. My life was affected by these storms even though I was in my safe, dry home many miles away. I was affected more than I thought I would be.

So I sit and look at the paper's headlines.

And I worry.