Sept 5

A week after the storm things were starting to look better each day. Although I still could not manage to complete a long distance call, friends and family from out of town were able to get one or two calls through to me. They said they got through by dialing over and over and over. I talked with my Mother In Law for a long time and it was so wonderful to hear her voice. She told me she had sent me two huge boxes of supplies. Unfortunaltely, we still were not getting any mail. Not only was our local post office completely flooded, but the mail center for the whole region was the PO in New Orleans. It did not matter, it was just good to talk with my Mother in law and catch up with a little news from Brad. He had called her as soon as he got to Chicago.

My sister, who lives in Ocean Springs, called me to say that her electricity was back on and there was a gas station and grocery store open in her town. I threw a bag of my wet dirty clothes into the car and raced over to her house. I was amazed to see the piles of debris all along the interstate and I wondered if people were dumping it there as they cleaned up. There is nothing except for woods along the road up there and the debis was full of refriderators, stoves, bricks and other house debris. It suddenly hit me that I was looking at the "tide line" from the storm surge. That debris was from houses that were washed all the way to the interstate along the river.

When I got to my sister's house, she came outside and told me the power had gone back off again. She thought I would be disappointed that I could not wash clothes and sit in the air conditioned house, but once again, it did me more good just to be able to hug her and to talk to her. Although her house, like mine, was OK, the storm surge had come up to within two houses of her, and it had destroyed many of her friends and neighbors homes. I do not think my sister could have been any more upset if it was her own home that was lost. She was in tears telling me about the many friends of hers that had to swim from there homes as the water rose up. She had been drying out a neighbors pictures on her front walkway when I drove up. She had been working every day to help clean up and salvage items for others. We went to the store that was open and I was able to get some juice and other canned goods. The only fresh fruit left in the store was a few wrinkled kiwi's but I was delighted to get them. The lines in the gas station were too long, so I decided to skip them and just conserve the gas I had left. My sister, her husband, Calvin and I, all walked down to the beach just a few blocks from my sisters house. There had been many gorgeous homes down there and they were all gone. One of my friends from highschool had a large house on the beach and I remember going to a party there when I was a teenager. The house had been filled with beautiful antiques and now it was washed away. From where we were on the beach, you could see the bridge that crossed the bay from Ocean Springs to Biloxi. The huge concrete structure was destroyed. It was hard to imagine the force it took to wash that bridge away.

After I drove home from my sister's house, I decided to open up my big freezer to let it air out a little. Well, when I opened it, the stench almost knocked me back. I had forgotten to go back and throw the food out and it was rancid. It was a chest type freezer and it had been completely full. All of the meat was rotten. The ice cream and the bags of ice had all melted so the rancid meat was floating in a sea of blood and brown water. I wanted to just close it up and walk away but I had to do something. I bailed out the water bucket by bucket, gagging the entire time. Then I carried all of the rotten packs of meat out to the trash. Of course we had no garbage pick up, so the meat would have to sit out there and stink up the neighborhood for days and days. It took the entire day and a half gallon of bleach to clean out the chest freezer. Then, although I had already cleaned the refridgerator/freezer, I decided to open them to air them out. The trapped moisture had allowed mold to grow and the fridge was covered in it. I had to start all over cleaning it again.

I was already feeling like a martyr so I took the bag of dirty clothes I was going to wash at my sisters house, and threw them in the bathtub to wash. We had water from the faucet back on by this time, but it was not drinkable. They were advising people to not even bathe in it, but most of us did it anyway. It was too nice to rinse off in the cold water, even if it did smell like sewage. I washed the clothes by hand and them hung them up on the rails of the front porch. It was hard work to wash clothes that way and I wondered how pioneer women used to do all of the work they had to do.

Sept 7- I finally got someone to come out and give me an estimate to repair my roof. The estimate for that alone was over $17,000. I could not believe it was so high. As the days went by, I called dozens and dozens of contractors and the price kept getting higher. Even if I would have been able to hire one of them right then, they all stated that they were booked up for months. One cleaning service that did mold removal wanted $14,000 to clean the house. At first I thought it was just price gouging (and some of it was) but then I started hearing how there was a nationwide shortage in building materials and the prices had skyrockted. Once again, it should not have surprised me how huge the scope of this storm was, and yet over and over, it did surprise me. Since we were still without power, we were just not getting all of the news coverage that the rest of the world was getting about the storm.

Sept 8- I finally broke down and decided to go get in the distribution line for food and water. It took over 2 hours to get through the line, but it was not that bad. The wonderful SeaBees and National Guardsmen who were in charge had a good system. After I had been in the line for about 30 minutes, I was just about to give up. I had no air conditioner in the car and it was sweltering. Right then, some of the guardsmen knocked on the window and offered me some ice cold water. I was so grateful to have it. Then, as I inched forward in the line, the young men would approach the car, ask me what I needed and chat with me a bit. I talked to some guys from Savannah, GA and from somewhere in Indiana. They were all so sweet and helpful that it made the wait go by fast. Then, all of a sudden, I was in the front of the line. A group of men swarmed my car, opening my doors and the trunk of my car. As one of them chatted with me, the others were piling stuff into the car. Then they slammed the doors and cheerfully sent me on my way. When I got home, I discovered I had 2 crates of water, a crate of MRE's, some paper towels and oddly enough, an entire case of fresh pineapple. I took one crate of water to some neighbors who needed one, and after keeping one pineapple for myself, I gave the rest to Tessi to distribute on her daily missions. This was fantastic, I felt like I could hold out for a while longer now.

Later on that night I was sitting in the house and I saw the lights in the house behind me come on. The power was back! I had turned off all of my circuit breakers because of the water in the light sockets, but I carefully took out all of the bulbs in the wet sockets. I then switched on a few of the circuit breakers in the less damaged areas of the house. The air conditioner kicked in and I felt exhilerated. There was no cable but Calvin and I put a video in and sat down in comfort to watch. As I watched "Brother Where Art Thou?" , I realized that there were thousands of people out there with no air conditioner, no video, no homes, and in some cases, still no food or fresh water. I felt so guilty I cried through the rest of the movie. Later on , the power went back off again, but I had been prepared because it had happened to my sister, so i had quickly washed two loads of clothes before it went back out again.